The young lady in a black gown with her perfectly styled blonde hair looks like a celebrity – even an arrogant one on the home page of her website alloise.com. But 28-year-old Alla Moskovka, who goes by the stage name of Alloise, is a down-to-earth star in real life.
Moskovka says she’s no “queen” – on stage or in real life. “This is a classic Soviet pop school – you should go on the stage and be a queen there. Why on earth should I be a queen if I am not in real life?” she asks.
Alloise started her solo career about a year ago when she quit the Kyiv-based electronic band Gorchitza after spending five years as its lead singer.
“With Gorchitza I started, with Gorchitza I learned a lot and I am grateful, but my leave is still an open wound for me,” she says. She remains reluctant to describe what triggered the split. “At some point I might become just insufferable, so they couldn’t bear me.”
She promise herself to “create a better band than Gorchitza ever was”. “Alloise is not just me, we have a great team, we laugh and drink together on tours and create our music together, we are definitely a band,” she says.
During her time in Gorchitza and as a solo singer, Moskovka has been singing in English and writes her own lyrics, and sometimes the music too. All of her English-language creations are edited by a British friend.
So far, Alloise has only one album to her credit. Her income mostly comes from corporate events and DJ sets.
Alloise says that singing has always been her only passion. She recorded her first song and distributed it to a radio station at age five. “I hardly remember that, but it was all about “oh our little girl sings, you know that,” she laughs, recalling her childhood.
Moskovka’s stage name also comes from the childhood days. “I had a book by Alois Jerasek, a Czech writer. I never read it though, but I liked the name. I added one more L and E at the end, so it would become female and it worked. Alla-Alloise you know, friends use it since my early years,” she says.
Moskovka’s adult singing career kicked off in a beau monde night club Tsar. That experience, she says, made her resistant to brutal comments or indifference from the audience.
“The guests there were mostly eating, drinking and paying no attention to me. It was a good school,” she says.
Nevertheless, Alloise says she never doubted that she wanted to sing even though “so many people tried to dissuade me.”
Alloise says she has more fans as a solo artist than with Gorchitza.
“You know, Gorchitza was some kind of an underground indie band, while what I sing now is more mainstream,” she explains. The singer says that many regret her move towards mass culture, but she herself fails to identify her style as either pop, jazz or something else. “I guess I have a blues or soul voice, but I don’t know and I don’t really care what style I am working in,” she says.
Alloise says she was also never taught how to perform on stage – nor does she want any training of that kind. “Now I can say I am a professional, but when I just started I always had problems with hands, never knew where to place them. But if someone would teach me it would be artificial,” she says.
Now she says she is as natural as can be, tries to be a cosmopolitan singer and opposes the Soviet leftovers, especially the absence of sexuality. “And I don’t mean performing in a bra, rather an inner sexuality,” she explains. “I believe that the better the musician is in bed, the better he is on the stage,” she adds with a playful smile, probably referring to her own skills in both fields.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
