2024-07-23 20:29:31
They were like night and day. While the Swedish singer Zara Larsson performed on the main stage in the early evening with her cheerful show, the Iranian-Dutch musician Sevdaliza almost closed the Colors of Ostrava festival with her dark performance. The woman, who only decided on a musical career in her twenties, floated from soulful tones to booming electro to final rock at the concert.
With the thirty-six-year-old Sevdaliza, who was one of the most interesting announced stars of Colors of Ostrava, it looked lopsided on Friday. She was supposed to perform at eight in the evening on the main stage, but due to the collapse of IT systems, which affected, among others, some airlines, she did not make it from Rotterdam to the Czech Republic.
But the organizers finally managed to transport her to the final day of the festival. In the changed program, she played until just before midnight, which in the end turned out to be a stroke of luck – the late night atmosphere suited her performance much better than the setting sun that accompanied Zara Larsson. “We found a way to get here. We really wanted to play this show. Thank you for welcoming us with open arms,” the musician assured the audience.
Thanks to the change in the program, the end of the festival was extremely feminist. Both Zara Larsson and Sevdaliza strongly and openly subscribe to feminism, although each practices it in their own way. The Swede, for example, by casting exclusively women in the show called Venus, from bassists and drummers to vocalists to dancers. In contrast, Sevdaliza explicitly deals with feminism in her work. One of her signature gestures was the creation of her own AI alter ego named Dahlia to stand in for her when she fails to be as perfect as society expects her to be as a woman.
And while the long-haired blonde Zara Larsson sings completely carefree pop songs in a fluffy white corset top and silver shorts, Sevdaliza drags the audience into the darkness of experimental pop in a similarly skimpy black ensemble. “If you didn’t get the message, I’m showing you my ass because I want to,” she tells the audience about her costume.
Ancestral music from the future
The concert begins with deep beats interspersed with wailing violins. Their tones gradually turn into oriental-sounding twists. Sevdaliza’s soulful vocals are added to this already exotic sounding mix. The singer, whose real name is Sevda Alizadeh, comes from Tehran, Iran. Although she fled the country with her parents when she was four years old, she draws on both Western and Middle Eastern traditions in her music. She herself says that in her work, the wisdom of the ancestors is mixed with experimental futurism.
She also sees her music as an expression of single womanhood and motherhood, a concept that interested her deeply even before she became a mother herself. It fascinates her in the philosophical sense of the word as a process that gives and takes away power from a woman at the same time. For her, the moment when another being grows in a woman’s body and she has no control over it is inspiring. At the same time, to a certain extent, he cannot influence what kind of person he will grow up to be and whether he will like her.
Because of her music and the way she dresses, Sevdaliza will not return to Iran. | Photo: CTK
During her pregnancy, she also involved her alter ego Dahlia in music for the first time. She suffered from joint pain, which did not allow her to create. In general, the use of artificial intelligence in music is very open, and the fear of it taking control over humanity is mainly fueled by the film industry, according to her. She considers creating with AI another dimension of her artistic freedom.
At the same time, her work is strongly influenced by the ideas of feminism. Sevdaliza reads professional literature and thinks about gender stereotypes or inequalities that women face in society. “It’s great when women can express themselves however they want. I fled Iran with my family as a child, and because of my music, the way I dress and the fact that I like to go naked, I can never go back there,” she says.
Tiktok explosion
Sevdaliza opens the concert with slower and more dreamy songs, in which you can hear the influences of jazz or R&B, such as the song Human from 2017, where she sings “I am flesh, bones, skin, soul, human” in a minimalist text. For the more serious part of the repertoire, she does not immediately manage to excite the local audience as much as she would like, so she repeatedly tries to stir them up by shouting “Ostrava”, which after a while has a rather disturbing effect.
Visitors to Colors probably need more time to adjust to Sevdaliza. As her repertoire gradually transitions more into electro and plays newer songs, the audience indulges in a dance frenzy. The musician’s biggest success so far is the single Alibi, released only a few weeks ago, which uncompromisingly became her hit with the most plays on the Spotify platform in such a short time. And as the musician points out, she is significantly “trending” on the TikTok network. It is mainly appealing due to the combination of a distinctive dance bass line together with an oriental-sounding male chorus in the background. Sevdaliza herself sings part of this song in Persian, and her AI double also appears in the video clip.
AI or human? Artificial intelligence helps Sevdalize create. | Photo: CTK
It’s unbelievable that Sevda Alizadeh is self-taught and decided to pursue a career in music at the age of 24 after finishing as a basketball player for the Netherlands and graduating with a degree in communication studies. “I said to myself: why not. I’ll try it and see what happens,” she once recalled her decision.
He does not hide his joy from the success of the last weeks in front of the audience. He relaunches his next song, Samsara, saying that he “totally took off on TikTok”, as he says. “It still seems crazy to me, but I’m very grateful,” she admits. This piece is already purely dance and the second scene of Colors of Ostrava turns into a midnight party. Booming beats regularly punctuate the singer’s wistful vocals as she asks, “What’s it like to be young? What’s it like to breathe? What’s it like to be real?”
In addition to electronics, some songs feature distinctive guitar riffs, while others sound even orchestral. The concert gradually graduates with Nothing Lasts Forever, a composition with a distinctly pop sound. In the accompanying video, Sevdaliza poses in a swimsuit typical of a bikini fitness competitor and criticizes the obsession with beauty, youth and health, which paradoxically turns out to be harmful. In Ostrava, she is accompanied by a projection of her own portraits, the composition of which resembles the self-portraits of the painter Frida Kahlo.
At the end of the performance, Sevdaliza smoothly transitions to a rock position, the space is mainly given to the guitar, and the singer, following the example of rockers, kneels and throws her long chestnut mane. In the end, the forced postponement of the concert was not harmful at all. The eclectic show of the Iranian-Dutch musician was a very pleasant end to the festival.
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“Gentle girls with guitars have become a stereotype,” singer-songwriter Amelie Siba said on the Spotlight program last year. | Video: Jakub Zuzánek