The world ended. The last whistle blew. The moon waned away, the sun plunged so low it burned out of the sky, and a last wave took out the planet. You’re one of the lucky few who escaped to another galaxy. But sometimes you can’t resist climbing into your spaceship and coming back to see all that’s left of your old Earth: a jungle on a floating rock, where monkeys are mutated by the acid rain, birds are turned to neon and the ocean drips into nowhere. And where a paradise nightclub band is playing at the last cabaret in town, the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel. This scorched old bar has become the only hangout for anyone who’s left, and they’re all partying like it’s the end of the world - because it is - lulled by the sultry sounds of the enchanting hostess Sonja Khalecallon and her band Los Strobscopious Luminous. As she sings and shimmies, it tastes like a cocktail so sweet, so sad, so seductive, that you will forget all others. Welcome to the pleasure zone to end all pleasure zones. But please remember: don’t feed the monkeys. READ MORE
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 photos (c) Socrates Mitsios
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Sonja Khalecallon is in fact one of the alter egos of CIBELLE, the London-based tropical punkster whose take on music is entirely her own. With each album it’s a whole new story, a new universe.
Let’s let CIBELLE explain the inspiration behind Last Vênus Resort Hotel:
“I say I’m Brazilian and people go, woooh, that’s exotic, as if I was an Amazonian swinging in leopard print from a tree like Tarzan! But then I grew up thinking all Arabs were dressed like beautiful odalisque slaves from the movies… we all have fantasies about each other, even though we can travel so easily today. So I decided, you know what, exotica is awesome, and I’m going to embrace my exoticness and push it to the next level, and incorporate all that is considered ugly and cheesy and vulgar, because I’m tired of cool. I am so tired of cool - because cool is cold. And I like hot. I am hot.
I’ve been an exotica DJ for six years, that’s what I listen to: the Mayan singer Yma Sumac, who danced on top of Peruvian mountains in the 1940s, Gal Costa lying in a red sequinned dress on a plinth with a parrot strolling around her breasts and a smoke machine as she sings, a ‘cha cha cha’ version of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, Cambodian garage rock, Italian 60’s rock’n’roll, soundtracks with film dialogues… I fall in love with the beauty in everything. A lot of exotica is considered cheesy so I thought I’d sing it over the top; if anything is considered ugly, unfashionable, I go and do it. I love pushing preconceptions, so I embrace it to the max and bring the drama out… also I live in Dalston, a land full of contrasts, Turkish wedding shops, pound stores and a street market that propels you into both the Caribbean and Taiwan at the same time. People always stop me to ask where I got my amazing rings and I say, yup, Dalston’s finest.
When it all hit me, I went into the studio with my heart open from everything I’d been playing recently. A sonic colour texture world of all these records. Then I started understanding what was happening: I was in this world. It was being born. I was in the jungle, I heard animal noises and sweat and dirt, then the jungle was around my head, And I was the decadent showgirl for all this, playing at the last cabaret in town. How happy that makes me! Especially coming from Brazil where singers are such impeccable divas and they don’t walk onto the stage - they glide over the mist. I find that sort of perfection hilarious.”
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