Erika
Songstress performer, ERIKA emerged from a life coloured by the musical corners of London and Japan. Crafting beautiful and innovative pop, the mood can switch from haunting to joyous and from hope to despair from verse to verse.
Her voice has also caught the attention of some very established artists. She toured with MIKA as his backing singer, provided backing vocals, keyboards & percussion for Skunk Anansie on their recent European Tour (2017) and recorded a guest vocal on two tracks with #1 UK artist, Bastille.
ERIKA is a huge fan of connectivity and interaction and so she has collaborated with Avant-Garde Japanese designer, Kei Kagammi. The dress he made brought her ideas to light. The dress using a type of velcro would be designed every night by the crowd. With the finale being a belt that attached to one hundred and twenty people spanning ten metres, bringing the audience and artist, together, as one. She is currently working with avant-garde sound artist, Sam Topley using conductive thread to create sound and noise through pom-poms for her live show, throwing a pompom out on stage which triggers sounds making the audience member part of the band.
Looking around at the faces facing stageward for the duration of ERIKA’s set, I couldn’t spot a single distracted or daydreaming man or woman. ERIKA can emote like a classically-trained actor, dissolving the artist-audience boundary by living every moment with a complete lack of inhibition and dragging all onlookers into that space alongside her. Unlike those world-class actors, however, ERIKA’s performance is one hundred percent real.
When talking about ERIKA, it’s not really helpful to start with the ‘normal’ stuff. We could talk about where she is from and where she grew up and what her influences were but it’s not that easy to break ERIKA down into such small, convenient pigeon-holes.
Instead, know this: Erika has emerged from a life coloured by the musical corners of London town and Japan. While it was initially opera and musical theatre in which she found her voice, as her birthdays passed she discovered the soundtrack to her early daydreams and pop greats such as Kylie and Carly Simon made their influence. Later ERIKA found herself as much at home with the 90s rave scene as she did with the heavy rock scene and from this union of diversity emerges a style of ‘epic pop’. But don’t get complacent, ERIKA is not all catchy riffs and bubblegum. There is a darkness to her songs that you don’t have to dig that deep to find.
On stage ERIKA is an icon of fashion and confidence and coupled with a vulnerability that is hard to ignore, it is really only in her performance that you can fully understand how interesting and impressive ERIKA is