• SANDRA VILCHES

    @ssandravilches

    Madrid

Updated Sunday,6August2023-00:08

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At the age of 22, he has already achieved everything he wanted in life. He doesn't complain, he doesn't compare, he doesn't ask for anything. Well yes, a short coffee with vegetable milk. Other than that, nothing. She plays this Wednesday at the Sonorama Ribera festival sharing the bill with Vetusta Morla, Miss Caffeina or Iván Ferreiro, whom she covered not more than six years ago from her room when she was a teenager misplaced in life. She now lives in Madrid and has become a modern like "all the girls who move to the capital". She sings to love, her name is Jimena Amarillo and everyone pigeonholes her as an indie lesbian singer, but she claims that she is a rapper. And then, lesbian.

His life is full of contrasts. He wears an alternate T-shirt that makes him look more like a "garrula", white pants at the knee and several tin plates hanging from his ear. However, his voice is sweet and his music melodic. Everyone imagines her hyper-feminine and with long hair. She wears a Mohican cut. It only flows with her Cafeliko, although she has ended up hating the song that bears that same name and that raised her to fame.

He fills the festivals at eight in the afternoon with 5,000 people to the rhythm of Long rock, his latest single. He started in music being "a nuisance" long before the pandemic, but it was in full confinement when he discovered his sound and became known on Instagram. His latest album, La pena no es confortable, came out four months ago, but writing albums is something he already knows how to do. It takes two, now he just wants to experiment and live up to the day.

If the government becomes what we don't want, we queer singers will be by the neck

The singer claims the LGTBI + movement in her shows, which she did not do before: "I used to say that I did not want to get into that because they only told me that I made music for lesbians. Then I said to myself, 'what nonsense, you are a lesbian reference', and that has cost me a lot to assimilate, but like it or not, I am." As for the current political situation: "I really think that all queer singers are screwed up because we're not going to be able to say anything," laments Amarillo.

"If the government becomes what we don't want it to become, we're going to be by the throat. In my case, I have very explicit lyrics. At first we think that they are nonsense and that they will not censor us, but we have already seen how they have done it with the play in Paco Becerra. The truth is that we are afraid," claims the singer.

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His traditional music talks about going home to eat tangerines, emotional hangovers or playing Sims. Its main theme, love. He doesn't know why: "It is the greatest force that exists and that moves us. To everything that happens that has nothing to do with love, I do not give so much importance."

Being "moñas" is his personality, "but only in music, outside of it I am a stone". Or a robot, which is the colorful tattoo on his right arm that expresses the same idea. "I have a hard time saying everything I say in my songs," he says. What does not materialize in conversations, is explicit in songs: "I would fuck being my ex because of the number of songs I write."

The music is like weird: you enter Tiktok, it makes you a viral 'hit' and lasts a week

"I'm a rapper, but I've been pigeonholed in the indie world for putting guitars in my songs," she complains. Not a single song is known by Amaral or Melendi. She has tried, her parents just didn't raise her like that. In his house he listened to La Casa Azul, Los Súper Elegantes, music in Valencian, "all very alternative". He has tried to become fond of flamenco and Spanish pop classics, but it has not worked. Where you put a ballad by Silvia Pérez Cruz that removes the rest. In addition, he only listens to female references after the musical MeToo.

A couple of weeks ago "I was crying thinking about my music career." Amarillo, despite the success of this summer, recognizes that she has been overcome by the pressure of the shows and the rhythm of today's society: "The music is like weird: you enter Tiktok, it makes you a viral hit and lasts a week." In this context, "I don't know where to place myself, I'm very far from what people want. I've found myself forcing myself to make another kind of music and automatically saying, 'But what is this?'"

However, this is his year of yes to everything. Until now she had not done a collaboration with other artists for fear of "being very self-absorbed or not knowing how to work with them", but she already has one in hand with Irene Garry, her friend and indie singer. He has overcome the stage of talking about love, although that never passes, "only that it is done in different ways". Their new musical collaborations are about sadness.

I'm a little girl, we're playing a lot, I have no idea how we got here

Sadness with 22 years, and that, she says, she can not complain about anything: she lives alone, works in music and if she did not, she would want to do it. She and her "locas", who are her drummer and bass player, do not lack work. "I'm a little girl, we're playing a lot, I have no idea how we got here," she says. Amarillo began her first concerts with a flash drive and a microphone, then she was accompanied by her friend Manu DJ. For less than a year he has been leading a "half band".

Aesthetics is important for his musical project, he explains that "the grace of listening to my music is knowing how I am, understanding my physique and my sexual orientation", it is the complete experience.

Tattoos are also part of its performative side. The first is a heart with thick strokes on the wrist, representing a relationship with an ex-girlfriend. The most significant is on his left arm: a snake surrounding a pencil that symbolizes the number of times his skin has mutated since he began composing.

His life is a randomness. As a child she played the violin and left it. When he grew up, he saw a guitar and it seemed pretty, so he learned to play it. He started dating a girl who sang when he hadn't yet experimented with his own voice, and the day that girl left: "I was voiceless, half empty, so I had to start singing." He does not have a base set list prepared for concerts because "the more frame you are in the live, the more you like it". She decides the songs on the fly, which is why her "crazy" women would often want to kill her. And, despite everything, she defines herself as a very squared person: "I'm a crazy maniac. I always have to have two round cookies for breakfast."

The contrasts of Jimena Amarillo: in live everything improvises, in real life, no. "When I arrived in Madrid I thought I was going to have my routine and, on the other hand, the music, but no. Music is your routine, it's your job, it's your hobby, it's everything," he stresses. Beauty, for her, is rational. It is listening to a letter written by someone else and wishing it had been theirs: "The word, what is said or how it is said, beyond seeing." Because shenot only wants to be seen, but to know how to look at her. Jimena Amarillo does not cut herself, she goes out of her grip and begins her concerts saying "lesbian" and "faggot": something that, although surprising, even her 60-year-old festival audience likes.

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