Akustikloft: Sara Filipova, Filiah

Sara Filipova

For years, Sara Filipova has been one of Vienna’s best-kept secrets. Her voice – capable of both whispered intimacy and full-throated acrobatics – has supported a wide variety of artists in recent years. With her solo debut, Black And White Café, Sara takes center stage for the first time.

The five songs on the EP draw liberally from her experience in R&B, jazz, and classical music, but are closer in spirit to great singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon. Accompanying herself at the piano, she reflects on the transience of life and the human condition; the result is an intimate, moving portrait of a young woman sung in her own words. Though often melancholy, a thread of optimism runs through the songs: there’s always a way forward, a way out. When it comes to facing our fears and moving on, Sara Filipova points the way.

In the last year and a half Sara has been busy playing in places like Germany, Portugal, Bulgaria – where she introduced her EP in Bulgarian television (March 2019) – and at Chicago’s Theater at Wilson Abbey. She’s also played plenty of shows at home in Austria, including a live session for the Austrian radio station Ö1, part of its “Kuntsonntag” series. Sara is currently at work on her first full-length album.

www.sarafilipova.com

Filiah

Filiah’s music feels like it comes out of a shadow and wraps you in light. The lyrics and her delivery are emotive. There is a substance to her tone that seems like more than words can share. (Independent Music Reviews)

The 23-year-old singer-songwriter Filiah has been in love with words since childhood. Thanks to her mum, she grew up surrounded by records and great songwriters, soon taught herself how to play the guitar and wrote her first poems and songs at the age of 10.

Over time she experimented with different projects and collaborations in various genres, although acoustic instruments always held a very dear place in her heart, making her find her way back to her roots of Indie Folk time and again.

In her music she tells her story openly and bluntly, using it as an outlet to process her most personal feelings as an attempt of understanding them better. Nevertheless, her lyrics leave plenty of room for individual interpretation.

This is also where her name stems from- a dedication to the singer’s “love of the mind“. During the last year she worked on her most personal project to date – her first concept album called For Someone, which she produced alone and very intuitively in her living room during lockdown. In the midst of several sessions with double bass, violin, creaky parquet floor and incredibly spirited gas heating, she found her unique, intimate sound and thus gave both her honesty and vulnerability a voice.

By releasing her first two singles Goodbye and 27 she sets the tone for the entire album- and exploration of love, grief, pain, nostalgia and all feelings in between.

Nostalgic yet hopeful she talks about self-worth, a lost love and letting go of old spirits in these 7 songs, all of their titles read together and in correct order even making up a little poem about it.

“I put all my heart in these songs. The whole process of making this album wasn’t to create something perfect and polished but hopefully something that resonates and makes the people who listen to it and might need to hear those words feel less alone.”