Ibn Orator.
A note bends down on a synth. There’s a harp flourish. A beat drops. And a clip from a lecture runs. “What do we see what we look at art?” a voice says. “Consider how something is made as well as what it is.” The voice shifts. Art is “not that different from having a conversation with someone.”
The music on gets a little more menacing, and that’s when Ibn Orator comes in, dropping lines that break across the beat in inventive inflections that range from funny to piercing. “I get muscle spasms every time you ask if I’m still doing music,” he raps. “Nobody asks if you still racked in the 9 to 5 / Nobody asks if a lion catches its food alive…. I want to say please wait and enjoy the ride.”
But then things take a darker turn. The beat gets more sparse, the music moodier, and we’re dropped into a conversation between Orator and a man with a gravelly voice. The man’s thoughts wander in a way that doesn’t seem entirely safe. You can hear Orator offering solace. “What is the beauty of the art that I wanted to beg you to help me with on something, three or four years ago, or five years ago. And then you got too busy with — ”
“Horse on a Trampoline,” from New Haven-based musician Ibn Orator’s latest EP, Fishbowl Syndrome, then cuts off with an unsettling gasp.
“The person that is in the song was a friend of mine about five or six years ago,” Orator — a.k.a. Rasheed Stewart, now 27 years old — revealed on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Northern Remedy” program. “He used to be a masseuse.” Orator had gotten into the habit of recording snippets of sound from his day-to-day life, and happened to run into his old acquaintance while he was doing it.
This acquaintance looked “drastically different,” Orator said. “I don’t know if it was drugs, I don’t know if it was an addiction to methadone or heroin … but he did a complete 180 from what I used to know him as…. And so everything he said in that sound bite was not scripted. I did not see that coming. He was just going on this tangent.” He included it in the song because he saw a parallel to his struggles in making music.
“It’s wrong to write someone off as crazy or write someone off as this or that when there’s a reason why they got there,” Orator said. “I felt that it was it was fitting to put in the song because I still feel estranged when people look at me a certain way when I’m pursuing my art diligently.”
The story behind “Horse on a Trampoline” speaks to the deeply personal way that Orator made all the tracks on Fishbowl Syndrome. “This wasn’t something that I just picked up and decided to write as some form of material to put out there,” he said. “This was very near and dear to my heart, in trying to understand what exactly was going on in New Haven with the people around me, and why there were so many addicts in downtown New Haven. Why is it that I had these experiences growing up in New Haven? Why is it that other people had these experiences? Why does New Haven feel like a fishbowl?”
“I feel like I’ve always been in a fishbowl in New Haven,” he added. “Sometimes I’ve felt stuck, and I felt like I couldn’t get out.”
But writing Fishbowl Syndrome also involved searching within the dark places within himself. It’s “something we all experience,” Orator said. “How we get into that sunken place is very simple. It’s always some, ‘oh, let me get this candy bar at the vending machine,’ and then the candy bar doesn’t come out, and you get frustrated so you start banging on the vending machine. And then, out of nowhere, you go back to a memory you had, 10 years ago, of a nephew of yours, or a sister of yours, that’s been raped, and you have no idea where the thought comes from. That’s the sunken place. The sunken place creeps up on you. And that’s what I’m tapping into throughout this entire project, is how many sunken places I’ve been in, experiencing New Haven and experiencing myself.”
That sharp mix of internal dispute and external tensions is a constant throughout the EP. Across Fishbowl Syndrome, Orator takes on political unrest and social distress, religious trauma and excoriating personal self-discovery. Ibn Orator’s gift as a musician and lyricist is to blend and intertwine it all until they are one and the same.
“People have no idea what goes on in New Haven, and specifically the outskirts of New Haven,” Orator said. “If Yale didn’t exist, and all this stuff was still going on, people would see the rawness, the true rawness…. Downtown New Haven is kind of like a fishbowl, a safe haven for people who don’t want to have those raw experiences. What I’m speaking is stuff that I’ve seen.”
Orator grew up in the Tre, on George Street close to the Boulevard. He went to Hill Central, to Troup, to Common Ground, to Gateway, “back when Gateway was on Long Wharf,” he said.
He started singing when he was three. As an early teen he was in an R&B group with his nephews called Nonfiction. “It was adorable,” he said, and got him into performing.
He started writing poetry at 13. He started making beats at 15. His second year of high school at Common Ground, he thought he might want to go to Co-Op High. But he ended up staying at Common Ground, “and I’m glad I stayed, because if I didn’t stay, the content you hear on my EP would not have existed,” he said, “because I would not have met the woman who, tooth and nail, sharpened my writing skills creatively.”
That was English teacher Joan Malerba-Foran, “the secret love of my life,” Orator said. “She saved my life and she has no idea.”
Foran “didn’t allow for any of her students to cut corners, and I think specifically with me — not that she had any favoritism of me — but she saw something special in me that she didn’t want to go to the wayside.” She “understood where my mind was, the potential I had.” She noted his gift for observation, sometimes to the detriment of his grades.
“She was hard on me,” Orator said. She once called him out in front of his fellow students, and “I ran to the bathroom and cried,” he said, laughing about it now. “But I remember needing to hear it, because it changed me ever since.” Foran gave him the desire to improve his vocabulary, to stretch his mind, and to work hard at honing his ability to use language.
He started rapping at 19 when he was in a group called We Are, “which consisted of two singers, a drummer, and a rapper.” He was one of the singers. The rapper — Harvey Jones — sent him a track to work on. Orator didn’t think singing would work for it and wrote a rap instead. Jones was impressed and mentored him.
In 2013 his mother had a stroke, which demanded time and emotional energy. About that time, Orator met fellow rapper and singer Puma Simone through the People’s Art Collective, formerly on Crown Street. “She had this mystique about her,” he said. She was a “big part of his artistic development.” She encouraged him to get onstage and “lifted my spirits,” he said. “Kudos to Puma for that.” In 2014 he released his first album, Brand New Eyes [Vat in Perspective], and in 2015 appeared on WTNH.
In early 2016 he learned about Long Wharf’s event Sing Your Story, a Tiny Desk Concert-style competition done in conjunction with the theater’s production of The Lion, a one-man show by musician Benjamin Scheuer. A few dozen New Haven-based musicians submitted material to compete; the winner would get a free recording session and a spot on an A&I stage that summer. Selected as one of the finalists, Orator performed at that event, and “Benjamin Scheuer after the performance came to me in this very Lord Voldemort fashion,” he said, joking around. “I really like your work,” Scheuer told him. They kept in touch.
“He just likes helping people a lot, and he just saw something in me,” he said. It was also that “I worked up the chutzpah” to ask for help. “I had never asked someone to help in the way that I asked them.”
Around that time he had been writing the material for Fishbowl Syndrome for two years. He had put together the music using the recording and sequencing software package Logic, creating the beats using its drum machines and adding both clips from sound files he found online and clips he made himself — like his conversation with his old friend in “Horse on a Trampoline.” He made collages of sound, verses interspersed with instrumentals and sonic landscapes.
“I don’t believe songs should be structured all the time,” Orator said. “I don’t think life works that way. I think if we’re performing our art in a way where it’s replicating or conveying what we’re going through in life, life doesn’t tend to be structured all the time. Life tends to be very sporadic and all over the place and unpredictable.”
Scheuer pointed him toward his recorded his vocals at Grand Street Studios in Brooklyn with a “mad scientist engineer there named Jake Loomis,” Orator said. He also encouraged Orator to apply for the Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters Project, a week-long summer program at the Evanston, Ill. campus of Northwestern University in which 12 students per year take workshops with songwriting professionals who know “the ins and outs of the industry” as well as the craft of songwriting. Orator had applied before. This time, he got in, and attended this June.
“It was like an AA meeting for musicians expressing why they’re addicted to music,” he said. He also emerged a stronger songwriter. “It was a really great experience. I recommend it to any artist who’s looking for a retreat without even realizing that’s what they’re looking for,” he said. As his fellow workshop attendees shared their stories, he said, “it just made me feel not alone.” He felt a sense of belonging, as he had with some artists in New Haven. “We’re working together to make music. We’re butting heads. It was like family there.”
And with a bit more work, Orator released Fishbowl Syndrome, just last week. “It’s tough doing this art in the capacity that I choose to do it because I don’t do it just for the sake of putting out material. I do it because I truly care about seeing the different hues of our society. I truly care about studying humanity and understanding the conditions of such. I truly care about it to such a degree that it used to be unhealthy for me,” Orator said.
“I think we all have the capacity to take in everything — everything we see, smell, touch, feel — we take in everything. We don’t even realize how much we’re taking in,” he said. Sorting through it, for Orator, is a case of learning more about others, the world, and himself. “Artists have a tendency to pursue that journey diligently,” he added. “Not only we have to pierce our souls, but we have to pierce into the souls of others, to make these songs, make these experiences and share them with the world.”
Orator said writing the album took its toll on his close relationships. “They respected how diligent I was in my craft,” he said. But “being around me during those times where I was tapping into that visceral hole in the wall, to dive into that sunken place and come up with this content … it weighs heavy on the person that’s closest to you.”
It also weighed heavy on him personally, as he dug through a past he realized he hadn’t properly dealt with. “What I say to anyone, especially men, especially black men — cry,” he said. “Please. Do it for me. Do it for everybody. Cry. Bro, cry. If you don’t want to cry, at least talk to somebody, even if the thoughts don’t make sense. Cry, bro. Trust me. It’ll save you from having a tremendous breakdown later.”
That sense of soul-searching in the service of catharsis and self-knowledge is part of why Orator dives into the darkness.
“You do it so that you can function a certain way that’s beneficial to not only you but to the people around you. When you go back into these circles and environments with a brand new scope and a brand new mindset, you can maneuver this thing we call life.”
Click below to hear the full interview with Ibn Orator on “Northern Remedy.” To hear Fishbowl Syndrome in its entirety, visit Ibn Orator’s SoundCloud page.
This is great stuff. Ibn Orator seems to have established his own voice at a time when that's either hard to do, or people don't necessarily WANT to do it. Looking forward to hearing more. Peace.