The Brag

Zola Jesus
Impulse Control
By Alasdair Duncan

Interviews with Nika Danilova often read like college dissertations, with journalists asking all kinds of complicated questions about avant-garde composer Stockhausen and cultural critic Baudrillard. Danilova’s intellectual pedigree – she recently completed studies in French and philosophy – is actually a little intimidating, and as soon as we’re introduced, I admit to her that I’m probably not going to be asking the high-brow, serious questions she’s used to. “That’s great!” she says with a welcoming laugh that takes me by surprise. “I’m sick of talking about that stuff anyway!”

The music that Danilova makes with her one-woman project Zola Jesus is lush and mysterious, with pulsing synths and powerful vocals that belie her childhood training in opera. Comparisons to goth and industrial music frequently come out, but the thing that strikes me, from the instrumentation on down to the chord progressions, is how much her records actually have in common with pop. She takes this comparison as a compliment. “I love pop music,” she says. “For me, it’s very much about the idea of impulse, or release. I’ve always been very passionate about it, and I would definitely say that the music I’m making is pop.”

Danilova loves the avant-garde as much as she loves the catchier end of the mainstream; for her, the excitement comes from finding the tension between the two, and bringing that tension out in her own music. “I’m inspired by Britney Spears and Mariah Carey,” she tells me, “and I really love Max Martin’s songwriting. He wrote songs for a lot of pop stars in the ‘90s, and he still does today. Pop music is the genre that’s the most immediately emotionally effective, and I think that’s interesting when contrasted with someone like, say, Stockhausen, who’s very esoteric and challenging – although equally as emotional.”
Personally, I feel that songwriters like Max Martin are often underrated because they’re working in a popular medium that most don’t consider as ‘art’ – and Danilova agrees. “The thing about pop music is that it’s the most produced music,” she says. “When you listen to a pop song and deconstruct it, you’ll find that it’s way more sophisticated and intricate than you would think. You can have ten different producers and songwriters working on a single track, and everyone will have their own piece, and every second of those three and a half minutes is fleshed out. I find it overwhelming and fascinating how much content is in some of those songs.”

When Danilova plays live as Zola Jesus, she performs with such abandon – jumping and gyrating, clutching the microphone with a manic gleam in her eye – that it’s not unlike watching someone singing into the mirror in their bedroom. Given what we’ve just been discussing, I’m not surprised to learn that her performances draw directly on the freedom and joy of this exact experience. “Performing to myself in the bedroom is exactly where that energy of the stage show comes from!” she enthuses. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to choreograph a show and have it be fake; I want to perform the songs like I would perform them if I was alone. When I’m up on stage, I feel alone. I’m not going to… I’m not going to starve myself of that release.”

The new Zola Jesus album, Conatus, came out this month, and is a sublime example of this fusion, with pulsing synths and haunting melodies resting in a bed of avant-garde strangeness. It’s a triumphant record that pays tribute to Danilova’s influences, and she is proud that she was able to pull off such a big sound using just her voice and her laptop. “I’ve done everything myself, ever since the beginning,” she says. “It’s been a learning process, and this album is the culmination of that. I’ve had to teach myself to be a musician, a producer, an engineer, a bass player, a drummer and a keyboard player. I’ve come a long way since the beginning. My aim is to make music that sounds as if it’s been made by ten people instead of one small young girl.”

Danilova recently collaborated with M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, and appears as a featured vocalist on his gorgeous new album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Before I can let her go, I just have to ask how that collaboration came about. “It’s kind of strange,” she tells me. “I contacted my manager and said that I loved M83 and really wanted to work with him, so she said she’d find out who his manager was and get in contact with them. A couple of days later, I got an email back from my manager, saying that Anthony was trying to get in contact with me because he wanted me to sing on his new record. In the same couple of days, totally unbeknownst, each of us had approached the other person separately about collaborating!

“He lives in LA,” she continues, “so I arranged to meet him, and we really got along. I went to his studio and recorded my vocals and it was very easy. We share a very similar sense of songwriting, I think. It was fantastic – it was so natural.” So has she heard the finished album yet? “I’ve heard a few tracks,” she tells me, “but I promised him I wouldn’t listen to the whole thing until he physically gave me a copy. I’m still waiting on that – but what I’ve heard is wonderful!”

What: Conatus is out now on Sacred Bones, through Inertia