Monday, September 26, 2005

Lily Kiara, a dancer and songwriter

A DAY WITH LILY KIARA ON LIBRA RADIO: Thursday, 29. 09.2005
ONE HOUR SHOW WITH LILY KIARA
Thursday, 29. 09. 2005 at 23.00 (Central European Time)


LILY KIARA acoustic singer/songwriter, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her songs are intimate and melancholic, rhythmic and intense. Her debut album No Alibi carries 10 of them.

Lily wrote her first songs in 1985, but for many years her music took ’second place’ to her primary work of creating and performing dance projects in Europe and the USA as a dancer/improviser. Her own dance pieces often evolve in collaboration with musicians, such as Michael Vatcher, Tony Buck, Anne La Berge, Marc Nukoop and Alex Waterman, who is featured guest musician on No Alibi.
Her dance and music find their mutual influences mostly in rhythm, in playing with timing and a clear sense of detail within the whole of a dance piece or song.

Her first cd No Alibi released at Bait Records, an independent label Lily shares with Nathalie Wesseling, Ruth Weijers and Nicolette Lie (all ex-Marshmellows).
The album got reviews in Fret, at www.popinstituut.nl, in Heaven en Music Maker, with a place for ‘When he Smiles’ in ‘Antjes Achttien’, Hollands most unreliable poplist. Her music has radioplay at radio 98.6 in Berlin and at local stations in Hamburg and Spain.

Lily Kiara has been making music for a while, which you can hear. Although on her cd, she seems to play the modest girl-with-guitar, she sounds a lot more mature than most Dutch female singer/songwriters.
Kiara’s voice, and also some of her songs, vaguely remind of Suzanne Vega. The compositions are mostly magnificent. Well-balanced in set-up and sometimes complemented with beautiful, though sober arrangements for, for example, strings. As in When He Smiles, the climax of the album…No Alibi is a fine cd. Now let’s hope that Lily Kiara will get the chance to present herself to a large audience.
She played in Amsterdams Vondelpark at the finale for singer-songwriter competition ‘Mooie Noten’ in 2002.
She performed her music at open mikes in Amsterdam, Seattle, New York, San Francisco and London.Most recently she played at the successful series house concerts “Live in the Livingroom” in Amsterdam.

Thank you Lily for sending your CD to Libra Radio!