Little Katya first appeared on TV channels in the summer of 1986. Her performance during the “Children of Chernobyl” concert in one of the pioneer camps was shown on our television. This was the first serious performance where the eight-year-old singer performed the song “33 Cows.” While studying in the third grade secondary school Katya attended a folklore club and sang in the Orelya children's folk choir. In addition, she also studied at a music school, studying piano and cello. Later (in seventh grade) the folklore department of the art school. Next came the turn of the National Humanitarian Lyceum at the National University. Taras Shevchenko. Katya received her higher education while studying at the Faculty of Philology of the National University. Taras Shevchenko (specialization - Folklore). Since the spring of 1996, Katya’s work has focused on a pop-avant-garde project (combining ancient ritual singing with the most modern arranged music). This caused a real stir in the media and a storm of delight among fans. Katya has become a symbol of new Ukrainian music, a new musical alternative. On May 30, 1996, Ekaterina Kondratenko began performing under the pseudonym Katya Chilly. Alexander Shchegolev The ethnic material in the singer’s interpretation charmed even those who were far from folklore. Fans of Katya Chilly gathered under the flags of different people: representatives of generation “X” who were waiting for unconventional music, adult fans of Ukrainian folklore and admirers of the “world music” phenomenon. It took the talented girl less than a year to gain confident star status. Numerous interviews, participation in television programs, performances at the largest and most prestigious concert venues in the country, victories at festivals (including the Chervona Ruta (festival)). The singer’s work aroused keen interest from the Western community. For example, in 1997, MTV President Bill Rowdy invited the singer to participate in the programs of this channel. Katya Chilly’s work has been celebrated at various international festivals. Among them is the Fringe festival, which took place in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. In 1998, Katya Chilly released her debut album “Mermaids in da House”, the appearance of which became a landmark event for the development of Ukrainian musical culture. Representatives of the mass media dubbed the singer’s performance style “the singing of a beautiful elf.” During her performances, Katya Chilly truly transforms into a representative of another world: she seems to fall into a whirlwind of vibrations, becoming a medium of the ancient inhabitants of the Slavic land. About history ancient world Katya knows firsthand. After all, the research that Katya is working on in graduate school at Kyiv national university, reveals the secrets of the worldview of ancestral civilizations... Restoring archaic ethnic material, Katya Chilly gives it a unique modern interpretation. This is how the musical soul of the people finds a new embodiment. Since 2000, Katya has collaborated with composers, arrangers and multi-instrumentalists Leonid Belyaev (“Mandry”) and Alexander Yurchenko (ex-Yarn, Blemish). The album “Dream”, recorded later, was never released, despite the fact that the program was successfully tested on venues in England and Russia. Katya at this time received higher education and continued her postgraduate studies at both Kyiv and Lublin universities.

Katya Chili returned to the stage last week. Some have known her since the distant 90s, others only heard her voice now. Who is this singer and what made her return to big stage– see the following facts.

The beginning of creativity

Ekaterina Kondratenko, later - Katya Chilly, appeared on stage completely by accident, at the age of 8, when she performed and appeared on television in 1986 during one concert. As the singer said: “All this was accidentally filmed on television, and I felt like a stage virus had entered my blood, which, in principle, cannot be removed.”

Later in 1992, Katya received the grand prix in a song competition. There the singer found her future composer and mentor Sergei Smetanin.

Concerts and albums of the singer

Katya's success in show business made itself felt. In 1997-1999, the singer released her first album "Mermaids In Da House" and declared itself in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Egypt, the USA and other countries. And already in March 2001, Katya Chilly performed a concert program in London, where she gave more than 40 concerts. The artist's performances were broadcast on live on the BBC channel.

In the early 2000s, Katya, together with other members of the groups, created a joint album "Dream", however, it was never published.

In 2003, the hit “Ponad Khmarami” was released, recorded together with the leader of the Tartak group Sashko Polozhinsky. In 2005 he presented a new single “Pivni”, and already in 2006 he released another studio album"I am young".

The beginning of the "calm"

In 2008, Katya decides to create the group Katya Chilly with other musicians. Since in 2007-2009 the singer was the headliner of the festivals “Jazz Koktebel”, “Golden Gate”, “Chervona Ruta”, “Rozhanitsa”, “Antonych-fest”, “Junior Eurovision” there was a slight lull in her work.

Since 2010, the singer delved into working on solo acoustic material and began to appear in public less and less. However, the singer did not “disappear” and remained well known. Only in March 2016, in the studio of the M2 channel with Sashko Polozhinsky, the singer performed the old hit “Ponad Khmarami”.

Return to the big stage

It became a real sensation. According to the singer, she did not plan to stay on the project, since she came only as a guest. But the judges convinced her to choose one of her mentors and continue singing on the show. Katya unexpectedly changed her choice and chose Tina Karol. The singer was amazed by Katya’s choice and touchingly commented on this event: “How Ukraine needs you.”

Despite her vast experience in Ukrainian show business, Katya Chilly has appeared on stage again and perhaps this time she will once again win the attention of her loyal listeners.

The very first question that comes to mind when you mention her name is: “Where did Katya Chilly go?” A singer whose voice was and is called unique, and whose style of performance is the future of Ukrainian music. Katya sings with her soul and accompanies herself with her heart. And, in fact, she didn’t disappear anywhere: the singer just stopped appearing on television for some time, and for an artist this is always akin to sinking into oblivion. But not for Katya Chilly. As soon as she appears for even a couple of minutes on the air of some show, the media immediately explodes with dozens of materials, and Youtube with millions of views of videos with her participation. This happened in February of this year, when Katya Chilly came to the blind auditions of the vocal show “The Voice of the Country”: with her soulful “Svetlitsa” she made all the coaches turn around and arrange a real battle for such a fantastic participant. Despite the fact that Katya did not win the show, although both the audience and music observers predicted this to her, she left an indelible impression and told everyone that she had returned, that she was again ready to delight Ukrainians with her music.

Katya Chilly: photo Tatyana Kizeeva

Katya Chilly was a revelation this year. Now you can hear her live more often, she gives seminars on the topic “Sound Healing”, takes part in yoga festivals, gives concerts with her group Katya Chilly Group 432Hz, and sometimes attends social events. It is noteworthy that Katya is a young mother and she goes to all events with her 3-year-old son: be it a concert or a presentation. The singer practices transcendental meditation, does not eat meat, adheres to, preaches Vedic philosophy, starts her morning with prayer, is inspired by love and... never ceases to amaze with her views on life. Read a unique interview with the most unique Ukrainian singer and find out more about her!

Katya, this year you triumphantly returned to the stage. Why did you decide to take part in “The Voice”?

The rule of three presentations... I trusted Space. Three times they tell me “no” - I let go. They invite me three times - I go. I took this for myself as one and bookmarked it in the direction 2 years ago. And a few more rules. One of them is to follow Joy. Where I feel Joy inside my heart, when the sea is calm inside. Invest my energy only in what gives me goosebumps and tears in my eyes, what makes me want to laugh like a little child.

You have changed a lot since the hit “Ponad Khmarami”...

Nobody knows me. There are only fruits of labor, which are few. But I intend to work hard.

What kind of music do you make? Who is it for?

She is called to open the heart into a space where access to Knowledge is open to everyone... She is for People... She is for Children... human, who are called upon not to dominate, not to be blind kittens, but to take care of all things... she for Life... It is designed to awaken Life...

All our works are Alive. They cannot be compared like maple and oak leaves. They are alive. This is already a victory. This is a reaction not to a work... but to Life. Life cannot help but respond to Life.

Katya, you are the soul of Ukrainian folk music. Who do you think you are?

In spirit, yes. I am part of a Very Big Soul.

Katya, what inspires you?

The question is “how to help love.”

Katya Chilly: photo Sergey Savchenko for Fezzery

Katya, you are a fan of ethno-style. What interesting things can you find in your wardrobe?

I have very few things in my house and wardrobe). Of the things, these are two colors of the same style (for replacement). It’s the same story in summer and winter...only I can change the decorations, following my feelings in life. And keep your hair in order.

Which Ukrainian designers do you enjoy supporting and wearing?

Honestly, I don’t know any greater pleasure than wearing vintage clothes: there is so much Life there! There is so much Attention and Quality! These are real things of power... These clothes structure the space of Life. These clothes help you feel connected to the living world, to the Universe. I’m happy that the guys created the Ukrainian Institute of Fashion History / Ukrainian Institute of Fashion History, where the tradition of clothing is maintained at a level that brings tears to my eyes. And I receive great inspiration from everything that happens through the space of the National Center of Folk Culture, the I. Gonchar Museum.

Do you have special symbolic objects and things with which your memories, secrets, dreams, special events are connected?

If there are things in my life, then they are just like this.

Katya Chilly: photo Sergey Savchenko for Fezzery

Katya, a profile question: how do you maintain your beauty and youth?

This is Living Food (raw). I don’t eat killed creatures or anything that contains ingredients obtained by killing, I don’t eat GMOs (complete sterilization through generations and mutations), synthetic food, I don’t eat anything that contains yeast (this fungus is not friendly to the microflora of a living person and rearranges it for itself ), I don’t eat trans fats, I don’t eat mushrooms (they suppress the immune system).

The food industry has transformed into a massive flow directed against people and towards their destruction. Being weak, we are able to feel and control little.

For health - everything is simple: fruits, vegetables, clean water. Consciousness directly depends on what we let in. There are products that extinguish the ability to be Alive, and there are products that help. The latter are everything that nature gives us, products obtained without violence.

Yoga. Breathing practices. I swim in the ice hole and shower myself cold water. Prayer of repentance. TM.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the revolutionary of Ukrainian show business will have new album

Katya, more than a year has passed since your successful performance at Edinburgh international festival arts Then everyone was talking about the real prospect of performing abroad, that BBC producers had filmed one of your performances and edited a video. Didn't things really go beyond talk?

Having performed in front of a very serious audience in England - leading producers, critics, musicians come to the festival - I felt how much more needs to be done to look decent on the European stage. Preliminary arrangements - no set date for the concert. But I also graduated from university, and these are state exams and a diploma.

Few of your listeners know the name of your specialty…

I graduated from the Faculty of Philology. My specialty is the culture of the civilization of the ancient Slavs. The thesis is devoted to the same topic. Now I continue my graduate studies, studying scientific work. But I had to work a lot on vocals and other stage sciences.

What about the music?

In parallel with my studies, I recorded my new album. It will be called “Dream”, and was created in collaboration with composers and arrangers Leonid Beley and Alexander Yurchenko at the Asteroid studio. The same one where the Mandry group “lives”.

Is it somehow different from the previous one - “Mermaids in da house”?

The 1997 album was quite revolutionary and even provocative. The new work is distinguished by grace and delicacy. Stylistically, it is a synthesis of ancient Ukrainian chants and modern musical culture. And the mermaid has become more mature.

Is the album ready yet?

Fully. The circulation is now being prepared for release. But I won’t announce the premiere date yet. I can only say that this will happen in the new millennium.

And when we see you with new program on the stage?..

Since the New Year, I have had a busy schedule of rehearsals and performances, scheduled for six months in advance. But in order not to reveal all the secrets at once, I will say that in the near future I will have an official website on the Internet. There will be all the detailed information about my plans, concert dates and a lot of news.

An 11-minute video with Katya’s performance collected 100 thousand views in a few hours, and after a couple of days - about 600 thousand. The video was cloned on Facebook at an impressive speed, and admiring reviews of the singer have not subsided to this day. This time the hype on social networks was secondary, and not primary, as in most cases. And it was the television that caused him to do so.

The unearthly Katya Chilly, with a voice range of three octaves, decided to return to the big stage and agreed to take part in the show, although she initially did not intend to. The effect exceeded expectations for one simple reason: Katya appeared at the right time and in the right place. Despite many reviews in the style: “I listened to it even before it became mainstream, before you had to open your eyes,” everything is quite natural. Ukrainians can appreciate and adequately perceive such material right now. This took many years, evolution and revolution.

Ekaterina Kondratenko began recording her songs in 1996: folklore and ethnic motifs, folk songs in a bold, modern arrangement. Then she took the pseudonym Chilly for herself and her group of musicians. Everything happened quickly: the unconventional singer became the then sensation of the Chervona Ruta festival and won first place. The songs from the debut album “Mermaids in da House” turned out to be diverse: from the soothing “Go to the Ocean”, which immerses you in a state of trance, to the hard psychedelic “By the Earth”, which is somewhat reminiscent of Linda’s “Crow”.

Ukrainians can appreciate and adequately perceive such material right now. This took many years, evolution and revolution.

Katya herself later said in an interview that she was then driven by “a youthful thirst for revolutionary going beyond the boundaries of established norms.” At that time, the music of independent Ukraine was just emerging: “Okean Elzy” and Green Gray burst onto the scene, and the guys from “BB” returned from France. “TNMK” were Katya’s main competitor at the “Chervona Ruta” festival and lost the fight.

At that time, the petite girl, 152 cm tall, was only 20 years old, and the power of her voice was so stunning that everyone slowly started talking about her. But not because of the revival of Ukrainian folklore, but because of the strong vocals and screamingly bright presentation. The folk core was rather crudely wrapped in electronic music, but the output was still a high-quality product for those times. By the way, an imperishable song like “Go to the Ocean” is still perfectly listenable.

Against the backdrop of the perky early “Oceans” and simple as three kopecks “TNMK” with their “Zrobi meni hip-hop”, Katya Chilly’s work was indeed more mature. It is unlikely that the audience listened to the deep meaning and tried to establish a connection with the cosmos, but general impression non-format music did the trick. In the late 90s, on the wave of success, Katya began to travel to festivals, including abroad.

On the tour of the “Chervona Ruta” winners, something happened that she doesn’t talk about much: at one of the concerts, Katya fell off the stage, lost consciousness and severely injured her spine. The only one who helped her was Sashko Polozhinsky. He carried her in his arms to the ambulance and supported her afterwards. There was a long period of rehabilitation, the singer began to experience depression. She reconsidered her outlook on life, realized that there were very few real friends and loved ones, and because of what happened she began to have stage fright. I thought about stopping performing altogether, but then I got out of my depression, recorded a new album and went on tour with it in England and Russia. He was never destined to see the light of day, because after the concerts they decided not to release him. Later Katerina will call him too introverted.

Nevertheless, the British tour turned out to be very successful: the Ukrainian performer was noticed by the BBC and even recorded a live video at one of the performances. Returning after 40 successful concerts in England, Katya retreated into herself again: she took up study, training, and self-knowledge. She was still depressed and did not want to return to show business, but in 2003 she recorded her first duet with Polozhinsky and released a video. Everyone remembers “Ponad Ghmarami” - the song remained at the peak of popularity for a long time. The combination of two genres turned out to be very organic, but the artist did not continue in the same direction.

In 2006, a new album, “I am Young,” was finally released. It seems that at this stage Katya finally decided to plunge headlong into current trends. There are already original, and not just folk, texts here, and the album itself turned out to be even more electronic. The processed voice in “Pivny” is barely recognizable, “My Love” generally looks like standard pop music of those times, and if you remove the vocals from “Zozulya”, the track is quite suitable for a techno rave. Later, the singer will say that she overestimated that work: it seemed that it was brilliant, but “I am Young” did not bring much success.

If you remove the vocals from “Zozulya”, the track is quite suitable for a techno rave.

Katya disappears again for some time, participates in joint project with the jazz band Solominband, goes to Ukrainian festivals as a headliner, not a competitor. It was only in 2010 that she was engaged exclusively in the acoustic program and stopped accepting electronic processing. This qualitative growth, however, did not become a harbinger of the new album. In 2012, the singer married pianist Alexei Bogolyubov, who now plays in her group. In 2013, she gave birth to a son and plunged into family life, and now I’ve decided to return to the stage.

Katya Chilly Group will present a new acoustic program at the Caribbean Club, where will speak 2nd of March. In December there was a concert at the House of Actors, but it did not cause even the slightest stir: many simply did not know about the event. Obviously, after such a long break, the artist is forgotten, and a strong move is needed to attract everyone’s attention again. “The Voice” came in handy, and the scale of the response, the reaction of the judges, the enthusiasm on social networks only speaks of the fact that people are finally ready for such music. Authentic, real, without processing or refining. Ukrainian folklore is now perceived differently, and the point here is precisely in national identity. You don’t have to look far for evidence: a live recording of the same “Svetlitsa” was published on YouTube as part of the “Zhivyakom” project back in 2013. In three and a half years, it received 11 thousand views. Some positive feedback, reserved praise: the same thing could have happened if Katya had decided to go to some vocal show four years ago. Then, for the most part, people did not gravitate towards folk music and were not proud of such music. Because they were not proud of the country in which they live. We did not survive the Revolution of Dignity and all subsequent events.

The fact that Ukrainian culture and music were previously perceived at the level of sharovarschina is already an indisputable fact. Only years later, through stress, a surge of patriotism and the invasion of a foreign country on our territory, this stereotype went away. This is confirmed by her example not only from Katya: “DakhaBrakha,” which everyone now admires, began its journey back in 2006. And she released five albums before she was noticed.

The group gained real popularity only after the Maidan, and they started talking about them even more in 2015, after performing on the famous British show “Later...with Jools Holland” on the BBC. At the same time, lead singer Marko Galanevich stated in an interview that they were more familiar with their work in Seattle than in Kyiv: “For many years, a certain inferiority complex was imposed on us in Ukraine. They say, we cannot have a high-level culture, we can only perform in taverns, greet guests with a wreath and trousers.” Now for DakhaBrakha it is the same favorable period as for Katya Chilly: Ukrainians have straightened their shoulders and can allow themselves to love their native, Ukrainian.

Katya has grown over the years: both spiritually and creatively. I rethought my music and realized what I really wanted. The aura, atmosphere and presentation remained just as shamanically mesmerizing. But her manner of speaking, her way of communicating has changed: to understand this, it is enough to listen to several old interviews and compare them with new ones.

It seems that she knows something that is inaccessible to all of us.

Back in 2006, on air on M1, a petite blonde admitted with a laugh that she drank cognac on the set of the video “By the Ground,” but in an interview for “112 Ukraine” a couple of months ago, she no longer says anything specific, expressing herself only highly, figuratively and abstractly. It seems that she knows something that is inaccessible to all of us. Katya says that she communicates with God, and higher power send her a stream of energy, which she frames in songs. We don’t know if this is so, but even cynical atheists during the performance of the new Katya Chilly just want to close their eyes, lose themselves in the music and greet the thousands of goosebumps starting the race. We may not be fans of such music, we may not watch “The Voice”, we may not go to her concerts, but we pay tribute to her gift. Katya has grown up, we have grown up. Everything is correct.

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