There are those who make art, and those who make music, and then there are those, like Czarina, who build worlds. Starting from her voice and working outwards, her performance builds upon the raw elements of her powerful imagination to give us more than sounds and lights and movements. More than the sum of her parts. Somehow it makes perfect sense to blend medieval and futuristic aesthetics, to don chainmail and sing songs about magical ceremonies while playing an electric guitar laid over waves of orchestral synth melodies. Czarina occupies a complete world of imagined traditions that are both dreamed up from the depths of history, and drawn back from a potential future where technology and magic are somehow the same thing.
Putting it like that, she seems to embody the present moment perfectly. She is a statement, a declaration, an aesthetic manifesto placing beauty and mystery together on a throne built of techno-mythology to challenge the armies of dystopian cyber-punks who view the present and the future as tragedy. Czarina sings with hope in her voice, with anger and fire and a tangled poetry that grants one the feeling of having encountered a great spirit. Like a dream, the message is not always clear upon waking, but the songs draw one back again and again. For weeks now, I have awoken with her music in my mind. I listen over and over until the songs become a feeling inside me, a theme upon which my day floats, and in the night, her magic works its way inside me, spinning threads of inspiring melodies that bolster my resolve and strengthen my heart. There is magic in her music, and healing.
Technically speaking, her songs feel built upon structures deeply familiar from folk singing traditions, layering harmonies and melodies upon each other to wrap the listener up in a swirling rainbow of sound. Yet Czarina does not rest upon tradition, but from it she leaps into the sky, her music expressing a deep love of the techno-future and all its potential. Her lyrics attest to the strength of her mind and heart, as the best lyricists do. She has carved in stone the pillars of her belief and recorded these rituals for us.
It is a gift, to be in company with such a magical being. Her spells have been cast upon me and I submit to her, this monarch of imagination.
https://www.czarinaofficial.com/
