A great piece from one of our favourite new discoveries here - Slovenian singer, producer and visual artist КУКЛА has shared a video for a new song 'Šibedah', taken from debut album Katarina that came out earlier this month. Watch it on Gigwise below.
Similar to many of the artists turning heads for all the right reasons presently, КУКЛА's sound (on the album Katarina, at least) is about exploration and not repeating old formulas. We could, whisper it, call it “post-genre.”
Dirgy bass wobbles that recall Thom Yorke's DJ days around the time he was collaborating with Zomby are on there. There's flecks of Japanese pop, American R&B, and - occasionally - the vocoder of your favourite Soundcloud rapper creeping in. Everything is strengthened by the layered, confident vocal that could easily end up smashing it on bigger stages. And given the singer's slaying the showcase circuit, we hope it's not long before we see her somewhere like Sónar festival with 5, 000 people packing in to a hall and getting down to this brilliantly challenging, and exciting new music. There's melancholy, too, it ought to be said. The stripped back vocal parts of 'Krav Sveta' for instance have a yearning and terror that's hard to ignore.
But let's turn our attention to the above streaming video for album track 'Šebadoh' - a track that sits somewhere in between the more lavish and melancholy aspects of the album. It has only today come into our hands and it showcases the artist’s extraordinary talent as a visual artist as well as a musician. Every frame of this tightly-executed video could make a stunning photograph. But that's been the case with every video the artist's released yet. Check her YouTube channel to see.
So what makes this new video unique? КУКЛА's press office have shared the following insight in order to make sense of the work:
"Set in the magical atmosphere of a scenic baroque hall, the video depicts КУКЛА lying on a pile of mattresses and living out her 'The Princess and the Pea' fantasy. She then proceeds to remove the horns, a symbol of romantic partner's infidelity in the Balkan region, escapes from shame and pain through a sunroof and heads for the Moon."
The end result is something encouraging for independent artists everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a more tightly executed vision on a major label - all this is self-directed from an artist who's just cutting through the ranks.
КУКЛА opened 5th edition of MENT Ljubljana festival yesterday.
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