You’d be hard-pressed to find an artist busier than Ziggy Ramo.
When I call him, it’s morning in Perth and he’s got a flight to Sydney booked later that day. His debut novel, Human?, was released at the end of April. He’s got an album of the same name scheduled to drop later this year. He’ll be celebrating the massive release with a talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival, where he also works as a program curator, in case you were wondering.
For some, this pace of life may seem unimaginable, but for Ziggy, it’s how he works best. “At the core of it, it’s just about having something to say,” he tells me. “For me, I kind of sit and stew on what I‘m thinking about until I feel like I can say it and then it’s just a big download and it all comes out pretty quick.”
Ziggy Ramo Melbourne Dates
- May 10 – Melbourne Writers Festival, Athenaeum Theatre
- May 17 – Resonate, Bowery Theatre
- Tickets are on sale now
Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
He started writing both the manuscript and the album at the same time in 2021. Over three years, Human? morphed into a multi-media megalodon – a memoir/historical non-fiction novel equipped with bespoke visual art pieces for each chapter and a full-length album that sees Ziggy pivot away from his hip-hop roots.
Through Ziggy’s lens as a Wik and South Sea Islander creative, the project centres around the history of Australia through colonisation, the narratives we choose to leave untold and the way we can move forward to a brighter and more unified future.
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“The whole idea is the different mediums allow you to absorb the message in a much more three-dimensional way,” he says. “I feel like everyone should be a part of this discourse because we’re talking about our collective humanity and our country’s history, so the hope is that by putting this message in the three mediums, it really widens the pull of who can engage with it.”
After gaining recognition for the release of his 2020 album Black Thoughts, Ziggy became known for his punchy, politically-driven bars and old-school beats. However, on the upcoming album, he’s taken a pretty significant turn. “The music is very different than anything I’ve done. It’s a lot more folk, singer-songwriter-inspired,” he says. This is, in part, due to the process of writing a book and an album at the same time.
“Black Thoughts as an album was like 7000 words, which is very lyrically dense. The manuscript is like 70,000. I knew the chapters were saying so much, so in the music, it was more about capturing the emotion of what that feels like and allowing it to wash over you versus kind of punching it into you.”
Never afraid to branch out, the album sees him play guitar for the first time and lean towards singing rather than spitting. The album’s first single, Banamba (meaning ‘change’ in the Birri Gubba language) gives fans a first glimpse of this new direction, with harmonies provided by singer and model Guyala Bayles and a simple beat driven by clapping and steel string guitar.
“I kind of feel like I’m muzzling my creative spirit by doing the same thing,” says Ziggy. “For me, going into different mediums and genres – what even are genres these days? I don’t know – but even going and exploring creatively is almost a necessity. By jumping into the deep end of writing a book or picking up a guitar and singing, taking those creative risks makes me really strip it back to ‘okay, what am I trying to say?’”
It’s quite fitting, then, that the theme for this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival is ‘Ghosts’. “For me, it was a metaphorical ‘ghost’ in the fact that we have these things in our closet, parts of our history that we’re ashamed about that we either ignore or actively don’t teach,” says Ziggy. In curating the program, he cast a wide net, reaching out to a diverse assortment of writers who inspired him.
The result was one of the festival’s richest programs yet, packed with Pulitzer and Booker prize winners and some of our generation’s most exciting voices, including Ann Patchett, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Paul Lynch, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Bryan Washington and Andrew O’Hagan.
“With my book and album Human? The whole exploration is ‘Well, what happens when we bring those ghosts to the front and centre and actually create a space to talk about them?’” he says.
“With generational trauma, the fact that we don’t talk about these lingering parts of our history, it compounds and then it’s felt today. These things that have haunted us from the past reverberate into the future and you can directly trace [that] it then comes into the present and is affecting our community and our country today.”
Find tickets to Ziggy Ramo’s Resonate showcase here and hear him discuss his debut novel at the Melbourne Writers Festival here.
