FEATURE: Spotlight: Clara Kimera — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Clara Kimera

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PERHAPS not known…

by everyone, Clara Kimera is someone you will want to follow as we go through this year. The French musician is the co-founder of the duo, Agar Agar. As a solo artist, she is inspired by the chimera, reflecting the dreamlike nature of her music. At the start of last year, Kimera released her debut solo E.P., Dial 8. There have been a couple of collaborative E.P.s. Working with notinbed, unknown reasons came out in August. I Pray 42 with helen island arrived last month. I am going to start with an interview from Glamcult from early last year. They spoke with an artist making her first big move as a solo artist. Talking about Dial 8, Clara Kimera said “I refuse to be in the madhouse of the inhuman. I refuse to live with the wolves of the market place”. Even though she is a music veteran and has been around for a while, her solo work is a new venture and chapter. Glamcult was ready to introduce “her soul and subconscious to a synesthetic world”:

“Please tell us about Dial 8!

Dial 8 is my first solo EP. I spent a few years working on it, trying to be as sincere as possible and to find my true musical identity. It’s not like I found it, but it was my first try ! I love experimenting and I loved working on music on my own. The subject is therefore more personal, it deals with my most profound fears, OCD and gentle creepy pasta creatures.

“I can be whoever I want to be,” you powerfully enunciate in the album’s opening track. Is the jester, also seen on the cover art, an archetype you resonate with?

I love the history of the jester. I am intrigued by the paradoxical and ironic image of what he stands for. He’s fooling around and joking, but deep down, he is full of sin and sorrow. This cynical aspect of him is very modern in our society. It really talks to me. I also love the Middle Age imagery.

You commission a lot of your cover art from artists, tattoo artists, graphic designers, and digital artists – what is your vision for the visual representations of your music? Where and what mediums do you get inspired by?

I love collaborating with different artists because it brings a visual dimension to the table that is so attached to the music. I am very passionate about image and art, and that’s why I always want my musical projects to have a very strong identity. I love to control everything in terms of image because I usually know what I want pretty easily. I get inspired by old manuscripts from the Middle Ages (seeing one irl is so crazy), manga drawers such as Asumiko Nakamura and Kazuo Umezu, painters like James Ensor, and movies by Gus Van Sant.

Distortion and grain tint the album with an element of haunting, a hypnotic eeriness lingers in the hard-hitting bass line – even on the last track, “Drive Safe,” which is initially linguistically more about an element of care. How does the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar, creepy or eerie, inform this project or your music generally?

I love to have a tense instrumental with a very soft subject, or the contrary. I love how words can melt into something different than expected. To sing words that reassure with a distorted guitar

Turning back to the first track, who do you want to be? How have you constructed your identity as a musician and an individual?
I want to be as sincere as possible. I think that’s the main thing I want to convey. Sometimes musical projects are so built and flawless I can’t seem to relate with them. I like dusty shelves and imperfections. I like when it’s palpable. I want to be relatable.

I can’t not mention Agar Agar – I actually got to see you guys perform in Istanbul in 2023, and it was amazing – how do you sonically separate Agar Agar from your solo identity as Clara Kimera?

I think it’s pretty simple for me to separate both as Agar Agar’s set up is analogic and electronic and I come from a more acoustic background. Grew up with lots of shoegaze, cold wave, and folk artists like Slowdive, Joy Division, Sybille Baier… Going solo made me go back to a more organic approach, hugging the guitar and putting a lot more of my influences in it. It felt really natural”.

I am going to move to COEVAL and their interview with Clara Kimera and notinbed around their collaborative E.P., unknown reasons. It is amazing how Kimera can collaborate with others and produce this variety of music so seamlessly. However, I think her most important moments through this year will come when she is working solo. I just feel she is at her strongest when her voice and vision is at the front:

“How do you find the music scene in Paris?

Notinbed: Cool. The last few years it’s been growing. It’s the first time in a while that it’s been a cool scene in France.

Clara: I think there are some cool people to make music with, but not enough independent labels in my opinion! The scene is fun though.

What do you feel like caused the shift in the French music scene?

Notinbed: There’s a new rap scene that’s developed in France. In France, rap, two and a half years ago became way more open and open to new types of beats. It became more open with club and experimental stuff so that opened people up, like producers, to different types of music, and gave different people a place to shine. The club scene has gotten cooler; there are more cool events - the scene isn’t just rap anymore. It’s transitioned from rap to more of a club scene. Most people coming up have the same objectives and are a similar age, so it feels like a team. It didn’t feel like that before.

How do you find the French music scene compared to those other cities?

Notinbed: The French scene is very precise, kind of intellectual - it can be less fun than English music, and a bit more serious.

Clara: I feel like it’s still very traditional, meaning it’s still pretty hard to make it there if you don’t sing in French.
How did you initially meet and start to collaborate?

Notinbed: Clara contacted me because she liked one of my songs, so she wanted to work together. I knew her from her band and she messaged me about a new project and then it really just flowed from there. For example, normally with an artist you throw away most of what you do to keep the best tracks for release, but with Clara, they didn’t have to throw away anything.

What message do you want to relay with your sound?

Notinbed: For me, it’s just about trying to give emotion. Music is the best way to make anybody feel better, so the more people that my music touches, the more people that I hope to make feel better. It’s like a plaster for the brain.

Clara: I don’t think it’s a message that can be translated with words. I think it’s just sharing some things that we put all of our heart into with the hope that it can be understood”.

Prior to getting to an interview from November, I want to get to The Line of Best Fit and their spotlight of Clara Kimera’s eye 2 eye single. If anyone reading his has not heard the music of Kimera and what she has put out as part of a duo, solo, or with other artists, then do go and explore her work. She is this fantastic visionary and creative who we will hear a lot more from soon:

“Kimera draws on a constellation of influences, including Hans Bellmer’s uncanny doll photography. She’s also deeply shaped by manga and anime, particularly Soul Eater, Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!, and the dreamlike spirituality of Mamoru Oshii’s film Angel’s Egg, where emotion takes physical form. “I love how Atsushi Okubo illustrates emotional spaces [in Soul Eater] like fear, anxiety, pain in vivid landscapes,” she says.

“There’s invisible places in our heads that can make us evil: a long infinite hallway of stairs, two people slowly dancing to a weird jazz tune.” She likens the song’s themes to Twin Peaks’ extradimensional realm The Black Lodge, “it’s like the thin world between life and death…[in the Lodge] there is a person talking to you backwards and you’re just casually sitting on a chair. I like the fact that we can make images out of these spiritual projections.”

The song inhabits a liminal plane, while its video – directed entirely inside The Sims by Kimera – builds a world to match. Kimera has been modding the game since childhood, once running a Sims blog that recreated MTV shows like Room Raiders and Pimp My Ride. “The visual possibilities are endless, I’ve always felt like the director of my own film.” As she grew older, her builds became more elaborate; discovering the global modding community unlocked a new realm of collaboration. “It’s one of my favourite things about the internet. Meeting people that truly get your POV and artistic references,” she explains.

Kimera’s own universe continued to expand to the electronic community. Recently featured on Canadian trance auteur TDJ’s debut album, with single “On and On (You Lie)”, it placed her alongside genre heavyweights like Hannah Diamond, Danny L Harle, and 8485 – a significant arrival into the orbit of hyperpop and dance music.

For “eye 2 eye”, she stages scenes of horror, sorrow, and longing inside the simulation. The video oscillates between eerie and playful with uncanny digital choreography mirroring the track’s tension. Still, the single feels like a distillation of her own evolving identity that is darkly whimsical yet entirely her own. “I never really know where I’m headed,” she admits. “But this feels like the natural evolution of finding more and more of myself and what I want to share”.

I am going to end with Church Electronic and their interview from November. Talking about her upcoming projects, Clara Kimera did mention I Pray 42 with helen island and working with him. That has come out. She also said this: “And my next EP is almost ready. I just have to finish one song. It's like seven songs, and it's really inspired by Japanese Shoegaze, LA, and horror movies”:

“Some fruit trees take four years to bear their first fruit—whether it’s due to insufficient sunlight, incorrect watering, root constraint, a tree takes time to mature. One could liken Clara Kimera’s trajectory to a tree that has been steadily rooting. Earlier this year, the artist debuted her first project outside of the Parisian electronic duo Agar Agar. With a decade in the music industry under her belt, she’s exploded back on the scene with two EPs and a handful of singles in a new, raw direction. Drawing inspiration from early internet culture, tarot, creepypasta stories and the sincerity of the jester, enter Clara’s world of mischief where anything goes.

The first song, “King Jester,” off of Clara Kimera’s solo EP, Dial 8, closes with a sample from an early 1996 Youtube documentary Dirty Girls:

It’s a sample from a documentary that appears through Clara Kimera’s EP Dial 8, released earlier this year. This interpolated sampling lends a voice of sincerity that only adolescence can replicate: of blindly trying to find oneself in a world fraught with those who seem to already carry an opinion. The documentary, an early Youtube cult classic, centers on a group of 13-year-old Los Angeles-native riot grrrls—part of the 1990s underground feminist punk movement, inspired sonically by Joan Jett and Siouxsie Sioux and politically by anti-establishment ideals and challenging the then-male-dominated punk scene. A purveyor of early internet archival works, Clara Kimera’s tongue in cheek choice of sampling paired with downbeat and post-apocalyptic chords create an atmosphere that’s not unlike the feeling of pirouetting at the edge of a very, very steep cliff. These early ideas from riot grrrl permeate the EP: of plainly being true to oneself despite the world telling you that you should act and be a certain way.

Her new EPs this year are the maxim of Clara’s artistic transformation in a new direction. Where Agar Agar was polished and almost glossy in production, Clara Kimera’s latest works are raw and driven by acoustic elements. It’s one that is characterized by sweet-but-threatening complex rhythmic structures and angular phrasing, drawing on her ability to create haunting layered melodies on “aside” and her latest single “eye2eye.”

This latest release, co-produced with 888rks, is centered on two beings in the mise en abyme of life and death, as they are listening to the track that killed them. With eye2eye’s music video accompaniment being visualized completely within the Sims, it draws on the artist's love for the video game, apparent from her middle school blog dedicated to recreating early 2000s MTV shows like Room Raiders, Made, and Pimp my Ride in the aforementioned meta-human simulation.

You produced a few things with notinbed this year. How did that collaboration come around?

I was just randomly digging music two years ago, and I ended up just really, really digging that song where he sampled this really famous old French video about this little kid that just lost his goldfish, and the goldfish name is Mustache, and the kid is so sad and it’s devastating. He's filming the aquarium, and he's like, ‘Mustache is dead. He's going to Goldfish Paradise.’ And this video is soul crushing, but so funny, but really, really devastating, and I love this video so much. It's really, it's just so sad. This little kid is realizing what death is.

And so he sampled this video, so I was just randomly listening to music and it struck me, and it was like, who sampled this? Who sampled Mustache? It was with ambient songs. It was so sad. And I was like, this is genius. This is so good. So I think I just messaged him on Insta and I was like, ‘Hey, I love Mustache.’ I was like, this is so out there. And so we just collaborated really quickly. It was just very intuitive, the two of us working on songs together.

Where did you record your latest project?

I mostly did everything in Paris, and in LA actually. But, I've been going to LA every year since I was 18. I met these girls back then. They were my besties and I was living at their place. They had an art gallery in Highland Park, but it was my first time there. I was so fascinated by LA. I loved it so much. And then my best friend, who's French, got married there and is living there. So I go once a year at least for a couple of months, and I love it there. It's kind of my second house. I don't have my license though, so I'm being passively driven by people.

It's definitely special. If I stay there for too long, my brain kind of explodes, but at the same time,. It's just so different from everything I've ever seen or grew up with. It is just very touching to me. Probably the fact that it's just so spacious and European cities tend to be so tiny, so restrictive, so narrow, and this space, this amount of landscape, and it makes me want to breathe really fresh air. Just the whole aesthetic, I guess it really influenced my music and just me as a whole.

On the songs that you've released this year, the vocals have almost become the beat on, no one belongs here, or aside, that acapella keeps developing.

No one belongs… it’s kind of crazy. I think I was feeling really tired that day, and it was nighttime, and I like night sessions. But not too late, I’m kind of a grandma. I like to wake up really early and read some stuff in my bed. I am really an early person. I want my day to be very, very long, I guess. So I was really tired and I didn't really want to be there. And I don't know what came out of me, but I started screaming my lungs out because the instrumental was so good, and something happened that day.

I don't know, I kind of went out of my body. I recorded one time, so there's no lyrics. It doesn't mean anything. It's just like this scream of the heart and that's it and we never ever touched it again afterwards. So it's really a one shot thing where I just scream so hard, but I don't even think I can do that again. I think it's really a one time experience type shit.

You have a really distinct sound and intentional aesthetic going into this new era. Do you know what kind of world you're looking to build or any key visual or musical inspirations?

What I’ve been listening to right now, definitely what influenced me recently is I love Shoegaze Japanese music these days. I've been really, really listening to Plastic Tree a lot. Worldpeace DMT, bod and this guy Neo Lapse. my dead girlfriend, all of these dudes, I've been obsessed. Obsessed. Yeah, these three bands I've been really listening to. My next project is really influenced by that, for sure”.

Such a remarkable artist, you feel influences from cinema and art in Clara Kimera’s music. I guess working with different artist brings all these new elements and influences into her own work. I am interested to hear her new E.P. and what she has in store this year. A distinct talent who we all should be aware of, go and listen to her stuff. It is incredible, and I guarantee that you…