RJ
// Singer-Songwriter > *Web-Only*RJ is an acoustic-folk singer-songwriter from Auckland, New Zealand and originally born and raised Borneo, Malaysia as well as South India. His songwriting and recording project White Rabbit Black Monkey is an open collaboration space for a range of creative musicians and performers with: “a blending pot of styles, currently presented in a smoky rootsy acoustic folk format as black downtempo folk!”. RJ’s music is an outlet primarily for visualising struggle, persistence in spite of perseverance, doubt, dark places, political protest, among other folk themes. His personal playlists usually include a range from Indian raags and Eastern Orthodox hymns to prog metal, folk, alternative, and gangsta hip hop. His influence is “the sound and resonance of the human effort”.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/WhiteRabbitBlackMonkey
Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/whiterabbitblackmonkey
Photo: Ryan Thorpe / TheZoo.co.nz
Interview:
In creative process and contemplation, art-forms and art-being-formed consumes that which would otherwise sabotage our development. If we interact with it as such, awakening us from “stuff-coma” and eventually leaving us with space to breathe. Art embraces and absorbs our struggles; as it were, a webbed fabric through which unwanted grains can sift through; giving voice to hurt and pain not limited to logic and sense. These “free-radicals” have a place to exist for their time and passing; a language to both conscious and subconscious utterings; becoming the feet by which we traverse through fields of our existence and context.
Traverse we must, so as to cultivate deep lasting embers of character or resolve into placid bodies incompetent in the face of any form of difficulty. As such, Art is a malleable organism useful for transcendence to love and forgiveness.
Being-in-art requires and produces qualities: integrity (telling it better vs. selling out, creative decisions), honesty (learning how and where to stretch the reality), humility (realizing limitations), wisdom (understanding perspectives), dedication, perseverance, and the list goes on to form a method for expansion.
The creative process is one of many interactions through which persona passes to loosen, acquire, and blend with aspects that can inform values. One of the ways I think that works is the development of qualities and choices. A lot of what happens in life can be beyond our freedom to choose what happens and how. The creative space provides opportunity to step outside and aside into a kind of parallel world; alongside experiences and where I can choose how stories are told.
When voiced in retrospect, introspect, and prospect, I acquire a lens that implicates imagination to infuse these life-happenings to affect perspectives on just about everything. Perception and understanding can expand, refine, as I step outside and look in. What appears then, is a sustaining multiplicity of layers and dimensions.
“Art embraces and absorbs our struggles.”
– RJ, Singer-Songwriter
