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Combining her passions for music and theatre, Barcelona-based electronic artist Clara Aguilar has built a stunning portfolio over the past near decade, from working on over sixty productions to composing for screen and releasing her brilliant debut album, Figura, on local tastemaker label Lapsus. Now she’s ready to bring her talent to the rest of Europe.
Aguilar grew up in a small village just outside Barcelona, moving into the city in her mid-teens to study. Her childhood was filled with music, with her dad often playing the likes of Björk, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave at home. “My mom is a teacher. My sister is a nurse. My grandma was a teacher. So, I come from a teachers and nurses family,” she says. “But my dad is a total music lover and my mum and dad, they pushed me to study and they gave me this opportunity.”
Growing up, she learnt piano and taught herself guitar. “I wanted to study cello, but I just did one and a half years,” she says. “I studied classical piano but it was pretty obvious that classical music wasn't my thing. Although I enjoy studying harmony, I don't have a degree.”
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Instead of music, Aguilar studied journalism and humanities at university. For her masters, she was close to choosing theatre, one of her lifelong passions, but opted for gender studies instead. Fate had other ideas, and she soon found herself joining a theatre workshop organised by some close friends who had taken inspiration from a similar scheme in Berlin. “Young people have the opportunity to create something and it doesn't matter where you come from, it doesn't matter if you didn't study theater,” she says. “It was in 2017 when I took part in this workshop and began my relationship with theatre and dance.”
Joining the workshop’s founders, they created the VVAA collective, a group of creatives who collaborate on everything from plays to videos. “It's like an acronym for various artists. In Spanish VA would be barrios amigos, like friends,” she says. “We split up last year but we are all friends and we are sure that we're going to work again in some years in the future.”
Prior to her work in theatre, Aguilar spent several years playing synth in a local post-rock band called Böira, Catalan for fog. It was this experience that gave her her first step towards electronic music. “When I was sixteen I didn't have a synthesizer. I'm not this artist like, ‘Oh yeah, when I was sixteen I had a drum machine and I had a Moog and I had a synth. No no no no,” she says. “Because of theatre and because of this band, that's how I started with the synths and with sound design and Logic Pro as a producer.”
With a prodigious work ethic, when Covid hit in early 2020 and theatres began to close up, the pause gave Aguilar the space to turn to her own project. “I love collaborating and sometimes I'm not this artist that is super focused - I do my own albums while I'm working with others, while I'm creating a soundtrack, while I'm creating whatever,” she says.
Shortly after, she began receiving commissions to compose for screen and in 2023 she released two scores for the film Creatura and the series Selftape. “I always wanted to be a movie composer when I was super young. That's why my dad gave me Michael Nyman’s soundtrack from The Piano or The Hours by Philip Glass. I was obsessed and now that I'm doing projects and doing movies I love it but it's super different,” she says. “When I do music for theater I go to a rehearsal and I meet everyone, so I'm involved with the whole thing. Whereas when I'm doing music for cinema, I'm just alone in my studio and I only talk to the director and sometimes the producers. It's more solitary. Now that it's happening and I'm doing a lot of projects in the cinema here and internationally too, I'm discovering some things that I didn't know from my own language.”
After releasing a couple of strong singles, she was invited to perform an original work as part of Sónar in 2023. Her set brought together her theatrical experience with her nuanced and textural approach to electronica. Dressed in a red ballgown and flanked by bright stage lights, she weaved together undulating sonic loops and waves of melody. From the music she created for that show, she built her debut record, last year’s Figura. “When I'm playing, I never play the same. That's one thing. I improvise on stage, always,” she says. “Then when I was back in my studio I changed some things to release it.”
For her live show, Aguilar taps into her theatrical capabilities to create a heightened live experience. “I wanted to be the other side of me - super fem. I wanted to be like a soprano singer,” she says. “I asked my friend Joan Ros, who is the costume designer - I told him I want to honour my theatre background and I want to be just the opposite of the electronic coat, like that I'm supposed to be in black.”
Every January Europe’s music industry packs its bags and travels to the small city of Groningen in the northern Netherlands for several days of showcases, meetings and tiny beers. Eurosonic Nooderslag is the continent's leading festival and conference for emerging artists and partners with the European Talent Exchange, providing artists with a platform to play festivals across the summer. Catalan Arts is continuing its collaboration with Eurosonic again this year to help emerging acts break beyond the region’s borders.
For Aguilar, playing Eurosonic is an exciting booking. “I’ve never been there and I'm super happy because it's going to be the second time that I play Figura outside Spain,” she says. “I would love to play in a scenario like a theatre because it's better for the lights, but I've done it on an outdoor stage and it works too. We're not going to bring all of the lights, I have twenty and I'm going to bring fourteen, something like that. I'm going with all my team. It's going to be beautiful.”
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