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Are you ready to enter the world of Karima, to know his history, his musical influences and to find out what inspired him in the creation of No Filter his latest album?
Below you can read this extraordinary interview that will reveal all the details and curiosities of
"No Filter" and will make you feel even closer to this talented artist.
Albert: How did you build the choice of this story and how did you re-market yourself as an interpreter by living everything without filters?
Karima: I built my new story by seeking a sound that could become my new musical identity, an acoustic sound, full of true imperfection, as if it were a vinyl. Not perfect in execution but perfect in emotion.
The choice of the songs was not easy at all: after a first skimming, I reached 25 songs, then 18, then 15. I wanted to make a record that did not contain many songs because I prefer to leave the listener with the desire to listen still rather that with the desire to keep the songs forward.
The ideal would have been 9 songs but too many would remain outside, then I opted for the number 11, not too few and not too many. I re-designed new interpreter, leaving from my comfort zone and interpreting some songs that I would never have thought of singing in my life as as Together and Walk on the Wildside.
I must say that in some respects, I also surprised myself.
Albert: filters or masks?
Sometimes we define the interpreter in singing as a sort of unspoken character, precisely because of the lack of personal writing.
One of the things that comes to mind by listening to you is what the interpreter can abandon his being to be something different, unique to such an extent as to abandon himself to his destiny.
The question I would like to ask you: is it how difficult it is to be interpreters without masks, without superstructures and what advice would you give to those who choose to be interpreter today?
Karima: I have to make you a confession, when I sing a piece published and then I take the role of the interpreter, I live it, I face it and I feel it on it as if it were mine!
I forget that it is a successful song, I forget that different versions have been made but at that moment, at the time of the execution there are only me, the music, the musicians, the new arrangement and takes everything a new shape and a new sound .
I recommend to those who want to become an interpreter or those who feel interpreter, to give voice to that song with their soul, so that that song so famous and so known can become "even a little unpublished", because the soul of each of us is Unique and authentic and every time you sing with that it is like rewriting a song from the beginning, with new emotions, experiences, pains, scars and smiles.
Albert: love and passion.
A question that I would like to ask you dear Karima is:
how much love lives in your interpretations and how do you express it?
Extension or dynamic? Intensity of the word or melisma?
For you the "vocal passion" phrase where does it lead you?
Karima: For me singing is love, it is only love.
I grew up with music, already at 3 years old I sang and my brothers recorded me, I was doing the Juke Box of the house! Then at 6 years of age my first experience in the recording studio to sing an unpublished that was written specifically for me, standing on a stool and the headphones that were giant ... music as well as being my childhood and life partner , was also my salvation.
My life in many respects was not easy and if there hadn't been music, who knows what happened to it.
I make love live through sound, through a wide breath that I take before performing a long note even if you undress.
I love playing with the dynamics and when my body and voice are not too tired and follow the desires of my mind and my feeling, sing becomes fun and pure enjoyment, like being a playground.
For me, the word passion leads me to the heart.
Albert: Now let's talk about your CD.
It was built in a short time and has 11 songs lived with your travel companion Piero Frassi.
What were the elements or stimuli that led you, after 6 years, to live a new "engraving"?
Karima: this no filter has been in incubation for a couple of years, a year of work and a year waiting, waiting for this pandemic to settle: the wait is art and he, like good wine, in this year has improved within us and with us.
I needed no filter as you need the simple gesture to drink a glass of water or how to breathe.
No filter for me was a real rebirth.
A moment of maturity and growth that I lived in the studio and that I had not lived in the other records, the freedom to be able to express myself, advise and direct artistically precisely without filters.
It was liberating, it was like feeling alive.
Albert: usually wonders which song represents you more. Instead today I would like to ask you, according to my listening where you bring you Tears Heaven, and why eleventh?
Karima: Tears in Heaven is one of those brand new songs for me, which I had never sung before this album.
A song that I immediately imagined as a pampering, a caress, an image of extreme intimacy, as if it were a lullaby and I tried to face it with a reverential respect for the composer and towards the emotional world he has crossed due to the 'happened.
That's why the choice not to use the battery ...
the choice to close the disc on tiptoe, giving it gently: a greeting under a voice that was not a farewell but a goodbye.
Tears in Heaven as number 11 .. or 1+1 = 2 .. 2 units, 2 hearts, 2 souls who will never separate, father and son.
Albert: the future? The mystery? your voice? your life?
What would you like from you today, after you have deposed your filters?
Karima: What would I like to me today, you ask me?
I would like to have the courage to continue living without filters.
Because sometimes it is known, life requires them, for protection, for help, defense ...
Sometimes it serves, but if we can live our life and therefore also music, as if every experience was not conditioned by past experiences and past scars, but every encounter, every person, every adventure was a white canvas on which to rewrite whether Themselves, life would take a flavor of true authenticity!
Every year that passes, I hear my voice closer to me, to my heart and my feeling, the communication between the ego and her, it becomes more and more direct and transparent, so that we can become a us and cooperate.
Writing songs, composing music -apart from some thoughts, some text -have never been part of me. The improvisation yes, that yes ... but I have never been the artist with the notebook above the bedside table waiting for the night inspiration.
For a period I met several people, managers, producers, musicians who told me "you will have to learn to write!"; "Singing your things has another charm"; "Writing is the turning key."
I was very young and I suffered from these "requests" because my inner voice told me another thing, he told me the story of a young interpreter, who made every song he faced "personal".
So this way of doing in reality made me close in a hedgehog, the more they told me you have to write and the more I moved away from the possibility of being able to compose something.
Maybe if they had told me less times, today I would also have composed something, who knows.
So today, as always, when I sing I hope to let live and vibrate the sound in the air, which can reach the ear and heart of the people, who can make them excited and that can make them feel alive.
Because unfortunately in this frenetic life we forget that we are alive.
Listen to the album on Spotify
Read also the article: Gianluca De Rubertis, the Hermeneuta of the human universe
