ABOUT
A unique cello experience rebelliously merging the classical with the modern
“Music for Aliens & Cats” is how Rafael Kalil defines his solo music work. The difficulties in putting a label on the highly unique musical work with his cello is highlighted by the name of his musical project.
Acting as an actor and a musician, developing a new technique of playing the instrument like a guitar standing up, searching for a very particular way to express sound, Rafael continues to discover an infinite number of possibilities that playing a cello offers him.
Musician from an early age, Rafael began his career studying violin. At a very young age Rafael was already performing with chamber orchestras alongside experienced musicians. In his personal musical journey, he collaborated and performed with underground rock bands, fanfares, Brazilian popular carnival orchestras, comedy and drama theaters, cabarets, and movies. In addition to the violin, Rafael experimented playing a piano, recorder, and trombone, but his perfect musical match was born when he returned to the strings to learn the cello in 2014.
In 2017 Rafael moved to Amsterdam to begin his solo journey. Rafael spent his nights in the tunnels of the Rijiksmuseum where he found the perfect acoustics and the ambience to explore sonic and aesthetic opportunities by combining his angry cello with a loop pedal to replicate the effects of a guitar.
After many hours of sound in the middle of the night in the tunnels of Amsterdam, Rafael left for Cairo, Egypt, to find a personal connection with an Arab and African music. After 8 months in Egyp, Rafael returned to Europe and started participating in cabaret projects, contemporary and traditional dance performances, circus festivals, music for video games and films, as well as performing his solo shows in several countries in Europe, North Africa, Central America, and Asia.
In 2019, invited by a music producer Murilo Sguillaro, Rafael recorded his first single, first EP, and a very first music video in London.
After several successful performances in Paris in January 2020, return to Hong Kong to record and produce new videos and shows, Rafael was stranded in India where he was studying Sitar and Indian classical music due to worldwide Covid-19 pandemic.
Rafael is currently in Brazil producing and filming new videos to finish the work on his first EP and pre-producing the new songs targeted for release throughout 2021. This work is the intense immersion of sound that increasingly blends influences from oriental and african music, classical music, rock, Brazilian and international pop music. Experimental and innovative, something unprecedented within a universe inspired by artists and groups such as Apppocalyptica, 2Cellos, Lindsey Stirling mixed with Jimmy Hendrix, Nirvana and Bach, much more than music and performance but an indescribable experience called by the artist Music for Aliens and Cats.