Rupa
Rupa is a songwriter, singer, guitarist and leader of the band Rupa & the April Fishes. She grew up splitting time between the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern France and Northern India. Her compositions span four languages and countless musical idioms, from French chanson to Colombian cumbia, from American folk to Indian ghazal. With her band she has released three studio records of original music to worldwide acclaim, has toured extensively on three continents and recently released Oval, an album of intimate string quartets arranged in collaboration with composer Mark Orton. She has received a major grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission for the mixed-media performance piece ¡Catapulta! which recognizes and celebrates the struggles of migrants around the world. A master of intercultural musical exchange, Rupa is currently working with indigenous Pacific Northwest women in British Colombia on a musical dialogue about the forces of nature. Her music has been used by Giorgio Armani without her permission, has appeared in NBC’s Parenthood series and has been used with her enthusiastic support to further the work of performance artists, climate and food sovereignty activists around the world. The Los Angeles Times has called her sound “ecstatic and powerfully evocative.”
Berkeleyside Feature