HORIZON LINE SPECIAL EDITION: ANUPA MISTRY WRITES ABOUT ZAKI IBRAHIM
In this special edition of Horizon Line, writer/producer Anupa Mistry writes about the music of Zaki Ibrahim, who recently re-released two back catalog albums, Eclectica (Episodes in Purple) and Orbit: A Postcoital Prequel. Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.
"For most of the year and a half that I lived outside of Toronto I was homesick. I took every chance I could to leave the teeming American metropolis that was my temporary home, and the flight, especially on a clear day, was often the best part of returning. My eyes would follow the clouds making shadows on the grey-green waves of Lake Ontario below until the city’s perpetually-unfinished skyline emerged in the distance. It was there, heart hanging in the sky over the city, that entire neighbourhoods separated by winding avenues and highways compressed into a feeling that’s the closest I’ve come to a sense of belonging.
Shortly after touchdown, the holistic effect invariably dissolved when gentrification, poverty, and increased segregation — ongoing realities of contemporary life in Toronto — became visible.
To simulate that sky-high sense of connection, I listen to Zaki Ibrahim. Through her catalogue, which spans three EPs and two LPs, it’s possible to access the version of Toronto that, perhaps, only exists as a feeling. Zaki’s music is an atmosphere unto itself. Bass-powered and melodic, it is the sort of warm sound that fills up small bars and watering holes across the city, leaving the cold front windows with an offering of dew. Despite this potency, the music isn’t concerned with persuasion. Instead, like Zaki herself, it meanders across vast distances — from Cape Town to Vancouver — in search of resonances.
Toronto urbanist Jay Pitter writes about “forgotten densities.” It’s a term that accounts for the people, neighbourhoods, and housing situations that aren’t captured by demographic analysis that favours a more utopian, middle class, progressively planned kind of urban density. When I listen to Zaki’s music I can hear sounds of these forgotten densities; children’s chatter seeping into apartment corridors, tinny music blaring from headphones on the night bus, the din and methodical clank of the production floor. Through a shared sense of tenacity, of finding a way in Toronto, Zaki illuminates these ‘forgotten resonances.’ The only other time I can feel the city pulsing as a whole is from the sky above."
Join Zaki Tuesday, October 6 at 11 pm EST for a special Facebook Live Watch Party, where Zaki will be available to chat and answer questions during a special presentation of "The Inbetween Time", a "love letter to OTA Live", an iconic late night radio talk show that aired between 2005 - 2011 on Toronto's Flow 93.5 FM. Zaki spoke with its hosts about her own history in both the Vancouver and Toronto music scenes. Click here to join the party.
You can get your own copy of Zaki's music via our webstore.