2023-08-11 18:00:07
Kalika in Paris, July 4. EMMA PICQ FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
His clips, visuals and concerts explode into a baroque escalation of make-up, haircuts, footwear, headdresses and multicolored outfits, inventing characters that look like they have escaped from manga or video games. Queen of tricks, does Kalika thus preserve Mia Rosello, the real 25-year-old girl behind this creature whose extravagance shook up French pop with a mini-album, Latcho Drom (2022), and an album, Farewell monsters (2023), bursting with music and lyrics as cheeky as her looks? “These artifacts are not masks I hide behind, but clues to who I am and the story I want to tell,” insists the one who chose to adopt her middle name – homage to Kali, Hindu goddess, symbol of preservation, transformation and destruction – to launch her career as a singer.
While frantically mixing images and sounds, the songs reveal the nuances of a personality. That of an author-composer-performer claiming the outspokenness of a transgressive banter as much as a sensitivity marked by the wounds of childhood, a taste for digital fantasy as much as for raw realism. “Since I was very young, I have perceived life as a merry-go-round, a kind of funfair both magnificent and dangerous”, explains Kalika, appearing at some twenty festivals this summer, after giving a sold-out concert on June 16 at the Parisian venue La Cigale. “I wanted to transcribe this into my sound and visual universe”, adds the singer with blue and pink ribbons in her hair, the smile lit by small brilliants fixed on her teeth.
Few viewers could have predicted this extroverted ambition when they discovered in 2016, Mia Rosello as a candidate for the show “La Nouvelle Star”. Then a wise brunette of barely 18 years old, the singer from Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (Gard) finished second in the M6 competition, impressing jurors like Alain Manoukian or Joey Starr with her vocal technique and her power of incarnation, more than by his eccentricity. “However, I already had an extravagant side, Remarque Kalika. But the channel controlled our image. »
Trashy humor and cash sexuality
Aware, however, of still lacking an artistic identity, the young woman then preferred to ignore the first proposals from record companies in order to better find her way. Already passed through a classical training (violin, piano, choir), she returned to a jazz school and devoted herself above all to composing her own songs. “For a year, I forced myself to write one song a day and only do sounds and production, she assures. This urgency allowed me to find my style and discover the cathartic function of songs. » Refrains and verses settle their accounts with the scars of childhood that have never healed, with the depressions of adolescence, with toxic lovers, by affirming a raw sensitivity, but also a trashy humor, a cash sexuality, a “empowerment” resolutely feminist.
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