Ríomas ft. Samara Jade | Community Sing | Gather Your Resilience Album Release ASHEVILLE

More than a community song circle, this evening will be a blend of performance, ritual, singalong, and community power. With the support of a locally-sourced musicians, join us as we journey through songs from the newly-birthed album Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation by artist and songleader Ríomas (previous known as Shireen Amini).

With great intention and design, this album is meant to be taken in as medicine, then affirmed in community, rewiring our nervous systems and subsequently rewriting collective scripts. It is just one side of the vision that is incomplete without the live experience. So please, bring your voice in celebration of this music now being out in the world, summoning us to build resistance and life-serving culture from within and, bravely and joyfully, with each other.

In collaboration with special guest Samara Jade!

This gathering is offered as a part of the Gather Your Resilience Tour, a traveling series of locally-attuned song circle-ceremony-performance experiences inspired by the recent release by Ríomas.

SPECIAL INVITATION: 

If you are able, you are invited to listen and learn lines from the album in advance as study for this pop-up community choir experience. Teaching will be minimal. Though not at all required, (parts will be just as easy to pick up in-the-moment) this will add boost and magic to our gathering. 

LISTEN AND/OR PURCHASE THE ALBUM ON BANDCAMP 

DOWNLOAD THE BANDCAMP APP 

You are highly-encouraged to listen on Bandcamp, but the album is also available for listening on any streaming platforms. 

IN THIS CONTAINER: 

We believe singing is a birthright and welcome all levels of experience. 

No matter your race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, size, neurodivergence, abilities, immigration or housing status, you are welcome, wanted, and needed here. 

EVENT DETAILS:

Doors open: 6:30pm 

Singing: 7-9pm

$20-60 sliding scale 

Pay what you can / No one turned away Tickets Available:

 $0-$19 >> enter Access Code: CARETICKET

Limited *BIPOC comp tickets available >> enter Access Code: BIPOC

*Black, Indigenous, and People of Color

This is a no-alcohol event

All ages welcome

Kids 12 and under are free (must be accompanied by an adult)

ABOUT THE VENUE:

First Congretational UCC embodies a Forward-Thinking, Courageous, and Diverse Christian community. Practices Affirming and Radical Hospitality. Engages our Local and Global Community with acts of Love, Mercy, Peace, and Justice.

PARKING: 

Parking lot.

SITTING, STANDING, MOVING: 

We will have chairs setup, standing room and dancing zones as well as an altar area. We may have floor seating, with the invitation to bring floor cushions, if needed.

ACCESSIBILITY:

The building is ADA accessible. We will prioritize chair seating for folks who have that accessibility need.

COMMUNITY CARE:

If you are not feeling well, please stay home. Masking is not required for this event. We encourage you to mask and distance to your own comfort level and will hold a culture of respect for the choices everyone makes to take care of themselves. In the case of having to stay home because of feeling ill, contact host before the event starts to receive a full refund. No refunds will be offered if contact is made after the event. 

LAND & PEOPLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

We acknowledge that the land upon which we will sing is the traditional, unceded homelands of the Cherokee peoples.

WHAT WILL BE PROVIDED:
Water 

Chairs

Restroom facilities

WHAT TO BRING:

Any altar item that feels connected to the themes of this album (it will return home with you)

A water vessel

Any clothing layers and supports you need to to help your body feel comfortable

Possibly a floor cushion (you will be notified by email if we could use some folks willing to sit on the floor)

Your voice, your open heart, your whole truth

Ríomas (RiYo for short, they/them), previously known as Shireen Amini, is a queer, trans masculine, Puerto Rican-Iranian artist, facilitator, and culture builder based in Portland, Oregon. Creating at the intersection of music, healing, and activism, they are guided by a belief that music, especially voice and rhythm, can reawaken in us what modern culture has forgotten: how to grieve, grow, and feel our power together. Ríomas crafts artful, participatory songs that invite realness, tenderness, joy, and transformative energy, drawing from roots, pop and folk textures, respectfully from Black and Afro-Latin lineages. Through their song circles and educational offerings, Ríomas empowers people to trust their musicality and engage music as a living practice for cultural healing and social change. They are the founder of Sing People Sing!, a queer and BIPOC-led community song circle series in Portland, author of the course Drum Song Reclamation, and leader of an emerging band collective bridging high-level musicianship with community participation. Their first community song album Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation just released in March 2026.

"Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation" is the first community song album from Ríomas (formerly known as Shireen Amini), an artist whose work has been steadily evolving toward the transformative power of collective singing.

Over the last 7 years, Ríomas stepped into the growing stream of the community singing movement, a culture where songs are created not just to be listened to, but to be sung together. In this world of "layer songs," simple phrases unfold into powerful musical journeys designed to live in the body, ripple through communities, and travel far beyond their origin.

Many of the songs on this album have already been carried in the voices of communities for years. At first, the idea was simply to record some of Ríomas' “greatest hits” from the community singing world, songs that alchemically came through for their own healing. But as the project deepened in intention, what it wanted to be more clearly emerged: a collection of songs specifically offering healing and reclaiming of power from generational, systemic harms on our bodies, souls, spirits.

This album is rooted in the belief that liberation must include tending within. The songs move through an emotional and spiritual progression calling in ancestral and communal support, untangling internalized oppression, grieving what has been lost, reclaiming dignity and self-trust, and ultimately turning outward toward shared power and collective action, centered in love. All songs emerged from a very personal place and yet have become so relevant to unwinding us all from webs of dysfunction.

These songs function as medicine: simple but potent affirmations meant to be sung repeatedly until they begin to rewire the nervous system and reshape belief. They are tools for trauma healing and recovery from patterns of abandonment and codependency. And then when sung with others, personal mantras become community declarations.

While the album is meant for anyone, it carries a particular intention to support the liberation of people who have been historically oppressed, especially due to race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexuality. The vision is one of "liberation from the inside out": undoing oppression within ourselves so that we can develop resilience, clarity, and psychological freedom that no system can easily take away.

Musically, the album bridges the worlds of communal healing and contemporary listening. Rooted in pop, soul, R&B, hip-hop, and Latin influences, the arrangements honor the deep lineages of African and Afro-Latin musical traditions acknowledging the resilience and creativity that emerged amidst the violent histories of slavery and colonization. The uplift of choir voices that emerges throughout also nods to the core context from which these songs first came alive and where they hope to continue on...in community. Across its eight songs, the music moves through tenderness, playfulness, reverence, groove, and power. Some songs hold grief with gentle care. Others pulse with rhythm and defiant joy.

Half the album was recorded live with a band in studio, while the other half was crafted in a home-studio production setting. Ríomas collaborated closely with arranger and vocalist Tracy LJ Robertson, whose visionary ear helped expand the songs from short, looping mantras into rich emotional arcs that build, unfold, and move the body. Together they shaped arrangements that preserve the simplicity of community songs while giving them the depth and momentum of modern production and powerful singer-songwriter journeys.

This project became a true coast-to-coast collaboration, bringing together artists and engineers from Ithaca and Brooklyn, NY to Portland, OR, and featuring a choir gathered through the Gaia Music Collective in NYC.

The album itself was brought to life through community support: more than 300 people contributed to a crowdfunding campaign that raised $25,000 to make the recording possible. Below find a list honoring every contributor with such immense gratitude.

Ultimately, "Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation" is more than a collection of recordings. It is a commitment to serving life through music, a reaffirmation that music can still serve its oldest purpose: helping people remember who they are, where they come from, to heal what has been broken, and gather the courage to transform the world together.

May these songs meet you in this moment, on your path, to serve your healing. And may that healing ripple.

Enjoy! 

Samara Jade is a forest‑frolicking folk troubadour, multi-instrumentalist, and musical seamstress who threads together earthy grooves, soul-soaked vocals, and thought-provoking lyrics into a genre affectionately dubbed “Philosopholk.” A natural-born songcrafter, Samara’s first instrument was a set of pots and pans as a toddler—and she’s been making joyful noise ever since. Drawing inspiration from jazz, blues, Appalachian roots, Broadway musicals, and the wild whispers of nature, her music dances between play and depth—offering listeners both heartfelt medicine and clever mischief.

Born in the Hudson Valley of New York state, and shaped by the mountains and rivers of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, Samara has been a grass-roots style touring folk musician for over a decade, spreading her songs all across this country and weaving and widening the webs of community, though she now mostly resides near Asheville, North Carolina. 

Even though she’s been a performer her whole life - by nature for her love of music and theater, Samara resists the audience/performer paradigm, and invites audiences into intimate, emotionally alive spaces through storytelling, singalongs, and interactive games that turn performances into connective, campfire-like experiences.

​A collaborator by nature, Samara performs in the Washington-based folk trio "Three Wheels Turning," in a duo with fiddler Megan Drollinger called "Balsam Fae," and with her husband, Mica Moon, in a collaborative mythobardic storytelling show called "The Floating Kingdom."

Offstage, she carries songs and stories into deeper communal spaces—leading community song circles, nature-based singing retreats, and rites of passage journeys that guide people back to their voices, their bodies, and the land. She identifies as a “Song Doula” as well, guiding others throughout soulful processes of creating their own heart’s song. 

 Whether singing about compost or transformation, grief or gratitude, frogs or fungi, Samara invites all into a shared experience that is both grounding and elevating. Her music isn’t just entertainment—it’s soul-fertilizing, heart-healing, culture-composting, and community-rooting work.