Kalipluche – Silence amidst a crowd

With such a huge load of emotions transmitted along, I felt like I had to bury my face in my hands when listening, although nothing was wrong. This song hit me unexpected with a ton of melancholy.

Singing like someone who has either seen too much – or too little, the dutch singer/songwriter/producer Karianne Hylkema, better known as “Kalipluche”, managed just through her vocals to make my heart heavy, and I am not even talking about the lyrics in the first place. It’s the emotion she’s giving us listeners along with her singing style.
While the track is taking its time with a soft played piano, several reverbed one-shots and some reverbed strings and rather classical influenced synths, the vocal harmonies are my absolute favourites within this sad song. Almost brutally honest, this song rather confronts you with emotions than just giving you a shallow melody and a linear rhythm.
Also, lets focus for a second on the creative process of how such a song is composed/written. With everything happening in there, including those playful intermissions, the breaks or the percussive elements, all of it is a real thing of beauty in my opinion. Everything is in the exact spot where it belongs. The artwork is the icing on the cake. Whoever thought until now that Kalipluche was just some constructed stage act is proven wrong by now. This is living, breathing music with everything that needs to be part of it.

I had a hard time deciding about which track of her to write… there are quite many so far, her own work as well as collaborations with other musicians. Often times she makes use of this outstanding… “disconnection” of the vocals with the normal world. It’s hard to describe…they feel a bit synthetic (like in “Social sentiments“), almost metallic, sometimes angel-choir-like – but never to a point where it feels unnatural. She also often has the pop-influenced signature synths involved along those crisp vocals (as heard in “Monochrome“).

Karianne Hylkema is a Jill of all trades. People who are recurring visitors to the kms reviews probably know that I like to do a little “Sherlock Holmes magic” to find out more about the people behind the artist names. It’s really not happening that often that I am stopping my search because there’s TOO MUCH information out there. Normally it’s the difference (and I can’t even find out the real name of an artist), but with Hylkema this isn’t the case. At all. I learned quickly that the young dutch multitalent  doesn’t just stop with creating awesome music. Noooo. She is into art painting, shooting /editing video (check out the video to her song “Glitter out of rain”) , photography, journalism and much more. She calls it “being passionate about” those things, but I think that’s not true. It’s not just passion. Some people have a certain strive for creativity engraved in their DNA, and that’s the case here, folks. Don’t believe me? I dare you to check out what she accomplished in any field she has embraced so far. And I think she just started her creative journey.

Kalipluche website
Kalipluche on soundcloud
Kalipluche on youtube
Kalipluche on bandcamp