Aortah

In merely one year since her first release and appearance on Season 6 of The Voice Australia, Sharin Attamimi, under the moniker Aortah, has recorded and released 6 singles, achieving recognition from Spotify editorial playlists such as ‘Global X’ and accumulating over 350,000 streams.

The Yemeni-Indonesian, Perth raised artist is a one-to- watch singer/songwriter with a spiritual and introspective take on R&B influenced by her heritage, early musical training and listening of artists such as Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill. Capturing R&B/Soul, Jazz and Western Art fans; her craft builds upon a solid foundation of early classical music (AMEB Piano and Theory) training that is further diversified by her later studies of Jazz at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts. Her predominately Yemeni roots colours her music and seeps into her voice, setting an exotic, moving and haunting mood. In tracks such as ‘OYA’ and ‘Ya Rouhi’, Aortah manages to translate a world of the human experience through her lyrical and melodic creativity that is not limited to a single language, culture or race.

Aortah is in the process of writing her EP that will have significant cultural value not only in WA but globally. The singer is increasingly exploring the use of Arabic and Indonesian elements in her music which will be a take on R&B unlike that ever heard before. As a Yemeni-Indonesian artist raised in the west, Aortah’s music is a melting pot of many influences that makes hers unique, offering diversity and inclusivity in the community.

Through her music, Aortah hopes to reduce the disparity between the eastern and the western worlds she simultaneously lives in and challenge the narrative that has surrounded Arab and Muslim women and men for centuries. With no need to sugarcoat, she expresses thoughts honestly and openly, some considered ‘taboo’, speaking for millions of culturally and linguistically diverse women and men living in the west such as herself who have had to too often gloss over their truth.Aortah’s music, videos and their production will create a cultural bridge between Perth and Australia’s large and growing Arab, Indonesian and Muslim community. This will have many long-term benefits, not only for the music community and migrant artists, but Australia’s large and growing multicultural community.

“My advice would be to write from the heart and not rush or force the creativity out of yourself but to just relax and let it come when the time is right. If you are feeling stuck it helps to try to write from not only your own experience but from the perspective of someone else or about an external event or issue. I also do daily songwriting exercises called ‘object writing’ from a book by Pat Pattinson called ‘Sonwriting Without Boundaries’ even if I don’t actually write a song that day it helps to keep my writing brain awake!”