La Chica Sophie Fustec Paris Belleville Meets Merida, Venezuela
Who Is La Chica?
La Chica is the stage name of Sophie Fustec a French-Venezuelan singer, songwriter, and producer born in Paris to a Venezuelan mother and a French father. She is one of the most genuinely original voices in contemporary French music: a classically trained pianist and violinist who makes fractured, emotional, multicultural music that sounds like absolutely nothing else.
Her music is what happens when Parisian electronic music meets Venezuelan folk traditions, when Debussy meets hip-hop, when the precision of a classical conservatory education collides with the raw emotion of the Venezuelan diaspora experience. It is alternately tender and fierce, intimate and cinematic, Spanish and French and English in the same breath.
“I am a collage of cultures, which is highlighted by what I propose as an artist: a collage of textures, sounds, sampling, elements that supposedly are not made to come together but form a whole with which I identify.”
Why “La Chica”?
The name La Chica simply “the girl” in Spanish has a personal story. As Sophie Fustec told interviewers: “When I was a teenager, I used to have a very masculine energy. Once, an uncle started calling me ‘chica’ to remind me that I was a woman.” The irony and the affection in that story became the name of her project an act of self-definition through a word that was first used by someone else to define her.
There is something characteristic about this origin the way La Chica takes external categories and makes them her own, the way she builds identity from contradiction. She grew up between two countries, two languages, two musical traditions. The project that emerged from that dual identity is, in many ways, an act of artistic reconciliation.
The Sound: A Collage of Two Worlds
Sophie Fustec studied violin for years, then piano for 13 years at the conservatory, then sound engineering at ESRA Paris. This combination classical training, technical production knowledge, and a deep immersion in both French and Venezuelan musical cultures produces something genuinely distinctive.
The La Chica sound draws on French electronic music and chanson, US hip-hop and R&B, Venezuelan folk traditions, classical composers (particularly Debussy and Satie), and the alternative pop of artists like Feist and Bjork. She builds her tracks like collages layering textures, sampling, processing in a way that mirrors her identity as a person caught between cultures.
What Critics Say
Vice described “Oasis” as combining “the piano playing of French composers Erik Satie and Claude Debussy with electronic textures and vocals that simultaneously recall Feist and Bjork.” Remezcla called her “the producer making fractured synth pop for kids of the Venezuelan diaspora.” Vogue Mexico named her “the franco-Venezuelan singer who does not resemble anything you have heard before.”
“Her music is a kaleidoscopic affair, glitchy in parts La Chica alternating between Spanish and English lyrics with complete naturalness.”
Vice Magazine, on La Chica’s “Oasis”Belleville, Paris: Where La Chica Was Born
The neighborhood of Belleville in northeastern Paris is where Sophie Fustec grew up and where La Chica was born as an artistic concept. Belleville is one of Paris’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods a historic working-class area that has been home to waves of immigrants from North Africa, West Africa, China, and Latin America. It is the neighborhood of Edith Piaf’s origins and of an ongoing creative energy that has made it a center of Parisian alternative culture.
“I grew up in a multicultural immigrant neighborhood that really enriched me,” she told Remezcla. The sounds of Belleville Arab pop from a cafe, Congolese music from a neighbor’s window, the French chanson of the local bar are all present in La Chica’s music, filtered through a Venezuelan mother’s influence and a classical music education.
Her project “Belleville” pays explicit homage to this neighborhood as a symbol of the fusion of roots and creativity that defines her work. It is not nostalgia it is a statement about what music can do when it refuses to choose between its influences.
La Chica on YouTube
Watch official La Chica videos and explore the visual universe of one of French music’s most original artists.
