NUHA RUBY RA
The Crofters Rights, Bristol
Picture a miniature dolls house with each door leading you down though endless new and interesting stories, its inhabitants unaware of the alternative narratives unfolding beyond each wall, connected by the imagination of a single artist.
East London's Nuha Ruby Ra uses film to inspire and visualise her complex audio-visual soundscapes. She explains her varied style-experimentation grows from a range of feelings or memories, and marking them in time as different visceral scenes in life’s drama; as Nuha reflects, ‘the house is the film and then you have the different rooms in it; there’s different things happening in each room.’
After many years of being in bands and adapting her sound, Nuha Ruby Ra has supported the likes of Yard Act, Viagra Boys, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Warmduscher (including a feature on the anthem ‘Disco Peanuts’) and more with her trademark experimentally echoing swells, accented by fluorescent surges of light and haunting vocals. Her latest release Fetish 2 Forget takes us on a path of intensity with regular softer pit stops along the way – through a mesmerising, trance-like immersion into Nuha's vibrant world.
It's no wonder, then, that when we arrived to chat with Nuha we were greeted by the sonics of John Maus, Iggy Pop, The Magnetic Fields, and Sonic Youth in the background, setting the mood. We had met Nuha the year before and experienced her music first hand at Green Man festival, but were yet to be introduced the intimate, curated space of her latest tour; as we also came to discover, ‘space’ has become all the more important for Nuha. Remarking on her most recent release, ‘in Fetish 2 Forget the cinematic aspect still applies, but I’ve become more and more interested in space and sonic architecture.’
“The music drives the feeling and then the words drive the narrative; it’s music for films and different scenes in the same film.”
On the note of manipulating ‘space’, something that makes Nuha’s performance like no other is her collaboration with the incredible audio-visual mastery of Daisy Dickinson and Maxim Barron (together as MATEKOI) who use live footage from the performance to create fizzingly electric live visuals in real time. This allows Nuha to tailor and adapt her performance, with each occasion distinct in capturing different feelings and emotions at different times. Sunny Green Man last year was able to build a totally different sonic environment from what we saw at her recent UK tour stop in Bristol, as she adapted to the dark, intimate and sultry space of Crofter’s Rights.
Like when watching a film, the practice of immersing yourself in the story of another, suspending your disbelief in the world put forward and disconnecting from your own reality, Nuha takes you on a journey, expanding track by track. A dedicated experimentalist at heart, Nuha’s 2023 EP Machine Like Me, featuring soul-surging Self-Portraiture, teaches us to use our personas as a sounding board for creation towards better understanding ourselves: it’s starting again and rediscovering while still being playful. Fetish 2 Forget’s sonic-hypnotic industrial beat is a continuation of Nuha’s experimental journey, exploring the intimacies of ourselves and our curiosities.
“If you’ve collaborated with people for years and you feel like you want to see out something just on your own then you deserve it.”
TALK TO NOBODY - Nuha Ruby Ra
After years in bands performing as a piece in the musical puzzle of others, or to the rhythm of someone else’s narrative, there comes a time to make your own music and to tell your own stories. And while taking this leap can be scary, it can provide you with a completely different sense of freedom. In Nuha’s own words, ‘If I want to write a massive pop ballad tomorrow, I can; if I want to write a death metal song tomorrow, I can… and I would! I’m allowed to be as playful as I want to be because no one can tell me that I can’t be.’
While Nuha won’t be taking part in this year’s festival line-ups in order to dedicate time to recording her new album, we look forward to peeking through more doors hinged on the structure of her sonic soundscapes.
“It’s the practice of doing things where it would sound like me still… the people that have excited me and have inspired me the most have morphed from album to album – they’ve gone down different roads and discovered new things along the way. If I can have a hand in inspiring people like that then I’m very happy.”
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