Mexican singer Ximena Sariñana will celebrate her 40th birthday with her new album Existencia Kamikaze, a sound experience inspired by this stage of her life in which she is a mother and a female reference in national music, a path in which she said she has faced “machismo”.
“I entered (the music industry) with the same sexist discourses of: ‘There is only room for one woman and they are very competitive’. That’s not true, they were always the ones who reached out to me first,” said the artist, who will turn four decades old on October 29th, at a press conference.
Sariñana debuted as a soloist with her album Mediocre (2008), which was nominated for the Latin Grammy Awards. Her voice has successfully accompanied the talent of Natalia Lafourcade, recently nominated for the aforementioned award, or Julieta Venegas, exponents of music in Mexico.
The composer sees in the distance that 15-year-old teenager -who had her musical awakening through Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) album- although she still has that “volcanic force” that she expresses in this album inspired by the documentary Fire of Love, which tells the story of the French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft.
The actress explained that this album is a “metaphor of how human beings live from cycles”, and also confessed that “kamikaze existence” is a phrase she replicated from the tape of Katia and Maurice, who died in a volcanic explosion in 1991.
“They have this very risky life of studying volcanoes up close, always risking their lives and one of them says: ‘I prefer to live a kamizake existence if I get to live it next to the beauty of a volcano,’ and it really resonated with me, because it’s a metaphor for how to exist and be open to feeling everything,” she said.
Ximena Sariñana’s album has been split up
In addition, he said, “we decided to divide this album into different EPs that represent the three stages of an exploding volcano”.
He commented that Ojos diamante is a composition prior to “the effervescence of the explosion, as if at low temperature”, while Rompe is the opposite, as it releases everything the artist has experienced, and, finally, Las cosas simples represents calmness with a more “poetic and acoustic” tone.
For now, these releases have counted with the collaboration of Mexican artists Caloncho and Samantha Barrón, although the interpreter reveals that there is still one more to be revealed.
At the beginning of the century, Sariñana marked the generations that are now 30 years old, some of them treasure her for the soundtrack of ‘Amarte Duele’ (2002), one of the films that marked the genre of Mexican romantic drama.
This year the singer even revived the song with two new versions that awakened nostalgia for this soundtrack in which Zoé and Volován, well-known groups in the country, also participated.
At almost 40 years old, she admitted that “she is more passionate than when she was a teenager” and that she experienced that “kamizake” spark when her children were born.
“The first months of my children were a kamizake experience. I wanted to keep working full time and breastfed for five years non-stop while I had to go to awards, shows, press conferences, just a year ago I went back to sleeping a full night,” she concluded with a smile.
The composer will hold a concert on November 14 at Mexico City’s Teatro Metropólitan with a capacity of more than 3,000 people, reported Agencia EFE, and the show will also include performances in Spain.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.