Catching Up With... Zola Jesus

The Sacred Bones staple on her solo piano tour, looming new LP, and finding inspiration in everything from 'Eraserhead' to Brian Eno

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Considering she’s classically trained as an opera singer, and still receives semi-regular lessons from her longtime teacher, it should be no surprise that Nika Roza Danilova (better known as Zola Jesus) recently launched her first solo piano tour of such major North American cities as LA, New York, Calgary, San Francisco and Seattle.

What’s surprising is how much resistance she had from a former booking agent at first. “I was really nervous about how the American audience would take this show,” explains the singer/producer, “because it took so many years to get this tour to happen. It was not for a lack of trying. I was told by a booking agent that promoters didn't want to take the show on — that it wouldn't be successful. Fans don't want to see this; venues don't want to book it.

“When I played in Europe, it was a proof of concept,” continues Danilova, alluding to the powerful live performances epitomized by the booming chapel EP Alive in Cappadocia. “I kept coming back because there was so much interest. And then I found a new booking agent who was really open-minded and was like, ‘Yeah, this is totally something we can do easily.’”

Of course they can; Heavy Trip has built their hard-earned reputation on supporting the singular visions of artists like William Basinski, KMRU, Marie Davidson and Alessandro Cortini. In Danilova’s case, her current set is a spare-yet-spellbinding run through her back catalogue and far-beyond-fitting covers of spiritual and sonic forebears like Giacomo Puccini (“Dido’s Lament”) and David Lynch (“In Heaven”).

The following conversation was edited for clarity after Danilova’s stellar kick-off show in Minneapolis, her second city after many years of residing in rural Wisconsin.

Your live set, and the people you perform with, has changed a lot over the years. Where did the idea for your solo piano show originate?

It was really organic. It definitely stemmed from me feeling burnt out from playing in clubs with bands — where there's a backing track and everything is energy-based. I did the Versions tour with a string quartet, but the bulk of my touring has been in clubs with the same setup and a lack of detail being put into the dynamics of the performance. It's more like, 'Let's just put on like a rock show.'

I wanted to do something that would challenge my sense of performance. I know how to be on a stage wielding a mic, commanding a crowd that way. I have a tendency to move back and forth — to harness that energy physically. The new challenge for me was, 'How do I harness that energy musically, with no one else on stage to help me?'

There was this feeling of needing to challenge what I'm capable of as a musician. The idea of sitting behind a piano for an hour and still commanding people's attention felt horrifying to me.

So this was a proof of concept for myself — that I can just sit behind a piano, not even look at the crowd for the bulk of the show, and still hold the stage. Harnessing and controlling that intensity when you can't give it physically requires a whole different level of musicianship and interpretation.

Is some of this you coming full circle with your classical training?

That was another part of the challenge. I sing a couple arias in the set. The big one is 'Dido's Lament,' which is from a [Henry] Purcell opera. The first time I ever sang that live, I basically choked. I've tried to sing it operatically, publicly, many times — especially like when I was studying as a child — but I would choke back then, too.

I have really bad stage fright when it comes to showcasing a skill set, because I'm so hard on myself. The opportunity to do a piano set, and sing operatically in public, was overcoming a lifelong fear. It was preventing me from being able to really use my entire voice, because I didn't trust myself to be able to get through it without choking.

When you say you're choking, do you mean not being able to fully let yourself go?

Yeah. Most embarrassingly, I performed this with a smaller orchestra as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York. William Brittell made an arrangement of 'Dido's Lament,' and when it was my time to come in, I literally choked. I had [the experimental classical ensemble wild Up] stop and start the song over.

In order to sing operatically, you have to have an open throat. But when you're nervous, your throat closes. So whenever I would sing operatically and be really nervous, my throat would close so that nothing could come out. I would literally choke on the words because you can't sing operatically unless you're relaxed.

Your Minneapolis show was my first time seeing you in this kind of setting, and I just kept thinking to myself, ‘Why have you not taken a year off to be in an actual opera?’ Has that kind of opportunity been brought to you before, or is it something that would interest you in the future?

It's definitely a carrot that's dangled in front of me. That's what keeps me really motivated as a vocalist. To this day, I take voice lessons every single week with my opera teacher. I have been since I was a child.

You haven't stopped at all, huh?

I've stopped for a couple years here and there, but it's been pretty consistent at this point. I made a lot of progress within the past five years because... a woman's voice doesn't really mature until her mid-to-late 30s and 40s. That's when opera singers are in their prime. So my voice didn't actually start getting to the point where I could sing this way until [recently].

But yeah, my dream is to write my own opera. It's about getting to the point where I feel like I have the chops and the skills — not only as like a vocalist, but as a composer. That's my ultimate dream.

Have you worked with the same teacher over the years?

Since I was 7 years old.

What's kept you taking those lessons? Does your voice feel like this instrument you have to keep refining?

In the beginning of my career, I sang with really bad technique because I was trying to sing with a voice that I didn't have. I had so much tension because of that fear; it created so many bad habits it took me years to get rid of.

Now it's about, ‘How do I sing with my voice? How do I just open my mouth and my voice is what it is, where I’m not trying to affect it?’

Because these days, so many vocalists are singing with the voice they want, instead of the voice they have. That makes you sing with bad technique that will make the lifespan of your voice very short, because you're creating a lot of tension.

So for me, I'm just like, ‘I need to just accept who I am and sing with that voice.’ That's a psychological process, as much as it is a technical one, so I work with my voice teacher to make sure I'm not falling into those bad habits.

Not to get too off track, but what does she think about how you've evolved? It must be surreal to have a student that you've had since they were a kid playing the Guggenheim and doing a concert for David Lynch.

I think she's really proud of me. I’m not doing the normal opera thing, but at the same time, she’s like, ‘This is someone that I’ve known since they were 7 years old, and they’ve taken their passion to make it into this career.’

She’s the GOAT. She’s a real one. She’s so meticulous [laughs]. I love her.

She can probably call you on any bullshit, too, if she's known you for that long.

Yeah, and she knows that I can take it.

It's nice to hear that your ultimate goal is to write your own opera, because that feels like one art form that that hasn't figured out how to appeal to a younger, newer audience the same way newer classical artists like Max Richter have.

It’s the most profound live experience — to hear someone sing without needing a microphone. And also being in [different] spaces. Why I want to play in churches isn't for the goth-ness of it; it’s for the acoustics. Because churches were made to amplify instruments naturally. There's an acoustic experience of listening to music and performing music in a church that is so sonically superior to a black box rock club.

Clubs try to make a sterile environment where you have to synthetically recreate space. A church has the space built into it. The most exciting thing in the world is to hear music in these spaces — to hear music that is amplified by nature.

You started your Minneapolis set with an Armenian folk cover (‘Krunk’), right — something you'd released as a benefit song before?

Yeah, I released it as a charity song for for Relief Armenia. It was composed by Komitas and sang by this beautiful Armenian singer. I couldn't stop listening to it when I first heard it, so I learned how to sing it.

I like it as a way of opening the set because it is in the range I need to be in to really release my voice. It starts me off in a place where I really need to be relaxed in order for it to sound good. Therapeutically, it sets a good groundwork for the show.

That's one of the notes I wrote down when I heard it — that this is setting the tone for the rest of the show. It’s like, ‘Okay, shit’s gonna get real now.’

That's great.

You talked a little bit about ‘Dido’s Lament’ before. Of all the different opera songs you could do, why that one in particular? Do you feel a personal connection to it?

I just love that song. Two of my favorite singers have done amazing versions of it: Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman. It's such a beautiful song. It's also one of the few arias I can play on piano and sing at the same time. So it’s more digestible in terms of what I can do in this show, and it's also one of my favorite songs in the world.

Is there anything about the lyrics that really connects with you?

It’s a lament of someone who's losing their lover, so there’s this deep sorrow and grief. It's very dirge-y in a way, because it feels like this kind of death, you know? I tend to be drawn towards arias or songs that are very dark, very melancholic.

There aren't as many [arias] as you'd think that have that heaviness. I love it. It just resonates with me, lyrically — ‘when I'm laid in earth, forget my fate.’ I don't know; it's just got these words that embody when I sing.

It sounds like lyrics that would have been on your first record or something.

Yeah [laughs].

What's another aria that would appeal to fans who are hearing ‘Dido’s Lament’ for the first time and really connecting with it?

One of my favorite songs isn't from an opera. It’s an art song, which is basically an operatic song that isn't part of an opera. ‘Um Mitternacht’ is part of the Rückert-Lieder cycle of art songs. I'm prepared to perform that one at some point, too.

What's one of your favorite versions of it?

Jessye Norman has done a great version of it. She's the GOAT — my favorite singer. [I] also [love] anything by [composer Richard] Wagner. The songs from Tristan und Isolde are so good.

What do you love about Jessye?

Don't get me started. Not only does Jessye have one of the most beautiful voices — a huge, dark voice — but her taste and repertoire is unlike anyone else's. So many singers go into opera and they do Puccini; they do Verdi; they do all the normal bullshit, which is what you do if you want to survive.

Jessye went over to Europe and did Schubert. She did Mahler, and she had a big voice, so she could do Wagner. She would do Stravinsky. She would do this weird stuff that not many people do. Her repertoire was top-notch. She had amazing taste. And she always dressed amazingly too, like she had these flowing gowns.

Are there any other performances of hers that you would recommend?

She did a couple staged recordings. One of them is of 'Dido's Lament.' She's wearing this really beautiful costume. It's very cinematically staged. It's kind of like a studio music video for 'Dido's Lament.'

Dude, it's so good.

That sounds awesome.

It's so inspiring.

Another song I wanted to ask you about is your cover of ‘In Heaven.’ Singing that song must feel like a full circle moment since you originally did ‘Lady in the Radiator’ on your first record a long time ago, and then you eventually ended up performing that song for the David Lynch Foundation, right?

Yeah.

Could you tell me a little bit about the version you did on your album, and how you connected with that movie originally?

I originally saw the movie when I was 14. My brother bought a Korean bootleg. This was before it was on Criterion.

A Korean bootleg?

Yeah, a Korean bootleg — those were the days! It almost felt like a snuff film back then: Eraserhead. I was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was one of the first art films I had seen. And then from there, it basically opened up my brain. I was like, ‘Whoa. Movies can be like this?’

I got into other weird stuff from there — things like Brothers Quay, Jan Švankmajer, and [David] Cronenberg. It basically opened up the floodgates for me. That is the most beautiful song, and the weirdest scene [in the movie].

When I was asked to perform it at the David Lynch Foundation concert, it was completely, utterly surreal. I was able to meet with David and talk to him about the song. Then he passed, and I started doing these shows. I felt like I wanted to put it in the set — just intuitively — because it was a very full circle moment.

What was the closest thing you'd seen to something like Eraserhead before that?

Maybe [Quentin] Tarantino or Troma movies — stuff like that.

Did you know what you were in for? Did your brother already have a sense of what Eraserhead was?

I think maybe we had known about David Lynch prior to that, but I am a year and a half younger than him, so he was a little ahead of me, mining the caves of culture. He definitely turned me on to that. When we watched it, I was a little too young to be like, ‘Whoa, this is sick.’ I was more like, ‘This is insane.’

And then the older I got, the more in love with it I got. But yeah, it was more of a ‘this is a crazy movie you can't find anywhere’ moment. You had to get a bootleg, so there was this kind of occultness to it we both liked.

David Lynch's passing felt like losing someone who was on another plane entirely. Do you feel compelled to push things even further as an artist because someone like that's not in the world anymore?

I do. I don't know if I said this during the show, but usually I do this spiel — almost like a plea to everyone in the audience, where it's like, ‘now the onus is on us to bring that like weirdness and that unconscious channel.’

That's really why I want to perform it — because it’s a reminder not only to myself, but to everyone else, 'Okay, it's on us now. We all need to be channels for the divine, and for the weirdness, and for the strangeness, and for the things that we don't actually understand.'

These days, we're subject to this pressure to make art that you can already understand, because when it makes sense to you, it'll make sense to other people. But that's not where art becomes magic; when art is magic, you only understand a portion of what you're doing. That's when it truly becomes a mystical experience. That’s what David did so uncompromisingly his entire career.

When somebody like that passes, the common refrain is ‘there's never going to be anybody like that again.’ But there's gotta be some way to tap into what he was tapping into — something we're all capable of. We just don't know how.

We're all capable of being channels of things that we don't understand. We're all artists; it's just a matter of trusting ourselves to let go.

I love that idea. Something else I noticed about your set was the album you played the most from: Okovi. Is that the record you're the most proud of in your career?

It's really funny you say that because just before [this call], I was playing ‘Soak’ on piano. I was just rehearsing, and then I pulled up the original song and the rest of Okovi because I hadn't listened to it in so long. I was just like, 'I'm so proud of this record.' It still holds like this kind of aura to it — this essence of what I felt when I was making it with Alex DeGroot, my longtime collaborator and bandmate.

I didn't actually notice that a lot of the songs [from my set] were from Okavi, but a lot of them fit together. Like I love playing ‘Siphon’ and ‘Witness’ together. They're also easier to play on piano for some reason.

Okovi must have felt like a turning point record for you, a return to your roots after your clearest attempt at making a pop record.

And the one that I play nothing from [laughs].

Do you just feel like you just don't connect with that record anymore?

I guess I don't. That record kind of broke me, because it was technically considered my sophomore [album] in some ways. I had the pressure of following up Conatus, and I put everything I thought I needed to put into that record. I was like, ‘I need to clean up all the edges. I want to make a great pop record. I don't want to be a lo-fi musician anymore; I want to be a real musician.’

In order to do that, I thought I had to scrub away all the dirt and make myself really clean and presentable. In some ways, I felt like I needed to conform to a template of what I thought music is.

While I love that record so much, people call it a flop. I felt like the response was really negative, because a lot of my audience didn't want that from me. They didn't want me to be squeaky clean.

It made me feel resentful of my entire career, and of myself. I went into a really dark depression after that, because I just felt like nobody wants me. I'm not good enough; even when I try to be the goodest girl, they don't want me as the goodest girl.

Okovi was a very wounded record. You can kind of hear that pain, but at the same time, it was so much more honest in a way, because I was like, ‘I’m just gonna do me. Fuck everything. I’m over this. I’m done.’

Which makes sense; some of our best work comes out of saying ‘fuck it.’

Right?! I wrote ‘Exhumed’ when I was so angry. And I wrote some of the other songs when I was so sad. My uncle attempting suicide during that process really pulled me out of my self-pity. I was like, ‘Oh man, now I’m really sad, but not for myself…. There’s real shit going on here.’

That's how a lot of that record feels to me — that it's not just about you. It's also about all the heavy stuff going on with the people around you.

Yeah. At that time, someone else around me was dying of cancer. So there was just a lot going on. And it was made over quite a few years. So the beginning was this deep self-hatred — almost like a misanthropy. And then it changed and became a deep compassion [laughs]. There's a lot in there; when you listen to every song, it’s like, ‘Oh man, this is quite a journey.’

It sounds like pure catharsis. Was the cover meant to be a nod back to Stridulum?

Jesse Draxler — a buddy of mine who's a visual artist — and I just kind of collaborated on ideas. I think I liked the idea of wearing a mask on, so he took that photo of me, and then he put this mask on me with ink.

It seems like a very clear contrast with the record before it. The record before it is you facing the camera like a pop star — the very opposite of wearing a mask.

That's probably how I felt: ‘I’m hiding.’ I’m such an extremist; whatever I did the last record, I need the opposite for the next record in some ways.

I was looking up who did the cover art for Stridulum; I didn't realize Indra [Dunis] from Peaking Lights shot it. Did you two know each other from Wisconsin?

Yeah, at that time, Aaron [Coyes] and Indra were living in Madison. They were really good friends of mine. She's a photographer, so she came over to my friend's house. I was in a bathtub, and my bandmate was pouring chocolate syrup over me as she was taking those photos.

So that cover art was a little less serious?

What I wanted was very specific because I was really into the Yugoslavian movie Sweet Movie and its director, Dušan Makavejev. It's ridiculous; there's a scene where this woman is naked and being covered in chocolate. I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, I want that,’ because I love chocolate. But I wanted it to feel kind of grotesque — almost like a studio photo.

Did you meet LA Vampires through Indra? I feel like that was around the time where everyone was working in the scene around Not Not Fun.

Oh man, bless up the scenes of the 2010s. I was just friends with [Not Not Fun co-founders] Amanda and Brit [Brown]. She asked me to do that project. It was super fun.

People were just doing shit back then. There was lots of collaborating, lots of connecting...

Not overthinking it.

Not overthinking anything. Things were just kind of like flying by the seat of your pants and just having fun.

Now that everything is streaming, it feels like you can literally do whatever you want. But maybe that's a bad thing, because people can literally just record everything now on their own and just put it out there. Figuring out how to self-edit is a skill that you have to learn.

Yeah, and there's also no community around music.... Like I remember playing South by Southwest and going to the Not Not Fun showcase, and, hanging out with Britt, Amanda and [Best Coast multi-instrumentalist] Bob Bruno — all the people in this scene. There was a feeling of formality with everything: 'Oh cool, you're in the new batch of Not Not Fun tapes.'

I think scenes and communities are really underrated, because now you just throw things up on streaming, and you're just like, 'Okay, this means nothing. None of this means anything.' There's no context.

Well, to frame this conversation, the first time I talked with you was at South by Southwest in 2010. There were so many different scenes coming together back then. And now South by Southwest isn't even a music festival anymore.

Culture is very cyclical, but it's crazy to be like, 'Wow, this thing that was so important in our lives, or so foundational — this big moment, and these big institutions — are gone now.' You know?

It's something that's totally normal and natural, but at the same time you're just like, ‘Man, that’s wild — how things change like that.’

Is that why you started doing Patreon — because it's a way of forming and maintaining your own community with fans?

I like it because I'm a very skeptical person. I’m very skeptical of institutions; I’m skeptical of platforms; I’m even skeptical of Patreon. I'm not skeptical of the people that use it, but I'm skeptical of the platform.

For me, it's all about redundancy. How can I make sure that I'm as directly connected to these people that I need to be connected to in case any of the shit goes down? Because it will. Labels and festivals fold; apps close down or change.

That’s so true. To bring things around to your last record, ‘Desire’ was one of the standout songs from your [Minneapolis] set. If people just saw the name of the song, they would think it’s about love, but isn’t it about something bigger — the different forms of desire that drive us as humans?

Yeah. Desire is such a big, loaded term, because it can mean something sexual. It can mean love. It can mean desire for a thing; what do you desire?

As a practicing Buddhist — which is funny to say, but true — desire is an interesting term in that regard. Desire is something you try to fight, because desire is attachment to wanting something.

But then at the same time, there’s good desire. I’ve talked about this with the abbot at the monastery near me. I asked him, ‘Is desire inherently bad?’

He said desire is not bad, so long as you desire something that's inherently good for you. Like you can desire to be a great Buddhist. You need to have a spark in order to feel a drive to get something done. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s something I experience a lot in my life, because I'm an extremely passionate person. I feel a lot of desire in all the different ways that desire can be felt.

So the song isn’t just a love song. I say ‘lick my wounds like you can taste them. Would that make much of a difference? If you knew my pain, if you could see my side only for a minute, just enough to empathize?’

The song was written about someone who didn't understand that desire in me. There was a feeling of can you just understand that this is just a part of who I am? It's not bad, but it's not always good. It is what it is, you know?

Photo by Andrew Parks

Well, that struggle never goes away, right? I guess it’s a matter of not letting that desire control your entire life. Following a Buddhist lifestyle doesn’t have to literally mean living with no possessions.

It's not like that at all. It's not this thing where you have to live in total poverty or deprivation. It's just about understanding human drives and being aware of the traps we often get stuck in as part of this human experience. Buddhism has been so healing and helpful for me. If I could be evangelical about it, I would.

Kind of like how David Lynch was with TM, right?

Definitely. It really helped him. There are these modalities in life that we can adopt to become better people. Buddhism has not only made me a better person, but it's allowed me to really handle the waves of life. It can sometimes feel caustic to be alive.

I have another question about this — something I'm sure many people have struggled with. How do you get past the feeling of being an interloper, since Buddhism is so closely associated with East Asian culture? How do you get the courage to just reach out to a local abbot the way you did?

I think it's so cool that he welcomed you into his community, and you have been able to learn from one another since then. That's the way life should be, and yet, many of us face criticisms of cultural appropriation when it comes to learning about something like Buddhism.

That's a totally valid question — something that I thought about. It’s like, if I was only going to be able to learn about or practice things that are according to my culture, I would have to be a Christian or whatever. And I don't identify with that.

For me, it was about finding something that resonated with me spiritually, and felt like it made sense. Buddhism is a cultural religion; people grow up Buddhist that live in Asia, but at the same time, anyone can be a Buddhist. Buddha would want everyone to be Buddhist; Buddha would want everyone to learn this technology, because it's about freeing yourself from the ills of modern, human life.

Zen is a particularly practical school, or sect, of Buddhism, whereas Tibetan, is very idiosyncratic and woven into Tibetan culture. It actually feels quite alienating to me, because that's where I feel like I don't know how to fit into this.

I also like Shingon a lot. It's like an esoteric Buddhism. It just works for me. I’m also much more familiar with Japanese culture than I am with Tibetan culture or Nepal.

I will say that Zen Buddhism is a technology, because it teaches you how to live. There's ways you can walk; there's ways you can see; there's ways that you breathe. You know? It teaches you how to meditate. There's ways to eat properly — to stand properly. That's why I call it like a technology.

Why did Zen Buddhism speak to you on a more personal, intrinsic level than TM?

TM gives you a mantra you're expected to repeat for 20 minutes, twice a day. You don't need to know what the mantra means; you just repeat it. I guess it's even more of a technology than Zen Buddhism is. But that's it. That's Transcendental Meditation. You're done.

Zen Buddhism is Buddhism filtered through direct experience. You're learning about and practicing the tenants of Buddhism through how you live your life. It's like how you make tea every morning. How you make breakfast. How you eat. There's prayer involved, there's chant, but it trains you to see the world differently.

The meditation also strengthens your parasympathetic nervous system, which makes you less reactive. Which is similar to Transcendental Meditation; it's just done a different way. And it bakes in this whole lifestyle modification that allows you to live in a way that's kind of easier.

Less anxious, which is something many of us struggle with now.

Right. We have access to way too much information. We're also very alienated from each other; we don't have community. We don't have ritual in our life, which grounds us to the present and grounds us to the past. Zen Buddhism is definitely a Japanese practice, so you kind of have to be into Japanese stuff.

There's also people like this guy (Noah Levine) that runs the group Dharma Punx in New York. I'm pretty sure it's Zen [Buddhism], but he gives talks and records podcasts. He talks about modern issues and ailments, and really ties psychology and science in with everything.

Alan Watts Westernized Zen Buddhism in the ‘60s, so people have been doing this for a long time. But we need it more than ever, I would say.

I noticed you put something up on Instagram recently that seemed to allude to that — something about needing silence and space...

That's another reason that I really like these piano shows. When you go to a show these days, you're over-stimulated as fuck with your phone, your life, and everything coming at you, fighting for your attention. Going to a show [depletes] the energy reserves in you; it's loud and overwhelming.

So, for me, I want to play with silence and space and the humanity of what it means to see a performer — to give people an opportunity to breathe into the music, instead of feeling like they're holding their breath as they're watching someone play.

At this point, what I do needs to be healthy for me as well, because I deal with chronic pain and I deal with an anxiety disorder. So I need that just as much as the audience needs it — to play with tension, space and silence in a way we don't get the opportunity to do as much these days.

Photo by James Richards IV, via Brooklyn Vegan

How do the solo noise shows you've performed as Nika fit into this? Do they bring out a primal energy that was missing in your other live sets?

I played my first Nika show in 2019, at the Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago with Burial Hex and Bloody Minded. Yeah. It was unlike any Nika show I've played since — like the ritualistic evisceration of Zola Jesus. It was totally acoustic and completely improv, just me and a harmonium.

I don't even remember what I did. I blocked it out, actually, because it was so embarrassing. But it was kind of like peeling the skin off of myself and setting the groundwork for this other project with its own set of elemental, uncompromised rules. Number one: They're all improvised. They're all using a specific set of gear — this little noise synth, some pedals, and a microphone.

It's more like that experience of trying to access the channel we were talking about earlier — like how David Lynch accessed the unconscious and let things come out in a very focused, controlled way that is also very feral and primal.

That was really medicinal for me, because the psychology of Zola Jesus felt bound by certain limitations. The Nika project was an exercise in being able to have this unfiltered antagonism, aggression and intensity — a much more mystical experience. I don't really have to think about anything; I can just be and do.

What's been the purest expression of that goal so far?

At the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands, because it was so loud... The sound was so bass-y, so intense that the doors were rattling backstage. People said their hearts and their rib cages hurt.

With the good shows, I usually come in with ‘this is what I'm channeling.’ For that one, I was channeling one of my faves: Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war and health. She's this very double-edged sword. I work with her a lot in meditation, but I was really trying to evoke her in this show. And it really worked. It was this laser beam-like Sekhmet intensity.

Are there any plans to put anything out on record as Nika, or is that just going to be a live outlet for you?

I want to, but as soon as I say, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a Nika record,’ it's like the same shit that happened with Zola Jesus — it becomes compositional. So I'm just going to start recording the shows and putting them out.

If I have an idea where I'm like, 'I'm gonna put this out as Nika,' I'll do it. But this whole project is not supposed to [trigger] the part of my reptilian brain that's like, 'Oh, this is a real thing now.'

Right. That's something you're trying to reject on some level.

Let's talk about the recent LA sessions for your new record. You mentioned earlier that each record is somewhat of a rejection of the last one, but you’re working with [producer] Randall [Dunn] and [drummer] Matt [Chamberlain] again.

How is the process itself different? I believe you mentioned something about songs starting with them laying down rhythms rather than you presenting them with something that's already almost there?

What I traditionally do is sit at this computer and write songs. I'll make a demo or a rough version, then I'll take that to a someone and be like, ‘Okay, let’s replace this and that.’ With ARKHON, I was like, ‘Let’s replace [my electronic] drums with Matt Chamberlain,’ which is so fucking funny because he can do so much more than I can.

That's normally how I work, but I was getting really burnt out on that process because I felt like I start the song the same way every time. I'm working against nothing new in terms of what I have to work with. It's the same tools, the same patterns — me. I'm just feeling like I hit a roadblock of what I can do on my own, in terms of making something that feels fresh.

So this time around, I got in the studio with Randall Dunn and Matt Chamberlain in LA, at Matt's studio at Sound City. For a week, we just gave him random prompts — said maybe use that drum, maybe do this kind of beat. And he just went wild. So now I have a drive full of insane stuff I'm taking and piecing apart, and writing songs to. Then Randall and I are going to make sense of them; we're going to build everything from there.

I wanted the process to feel really collaborative, and write in a different kind of way. I've been really interested in the way Brian Eno works with people — where making records are more about discovery than they are about composition or paint by numbers. So I have a group of people around me that I really trust and I really like believe in as musicians. These people are better musicians than I am, you know? So it's allowing me to challenge what I'm capable of as a writer.

Something you said before really stood out to me: that you couldn’t do a record like this in your early days because you had something to prove as a female musician.

When I first started, the climate and the culture was really different. It was a lot more misogynist, and there was this lack of trust in a woman's skill to write her own music. And so inherently, I felt this pressure to prove myself as an auteur: ‘I wrote every note on this song.’ Even when I was working with people — with guys — I would almost want to downplay anyone else that was in the room because I was like, ‘I need to purify this; this needs to be coming from me.’ And so I would kick everyone out, and be very protective of my process.

I was also young, so I didn't trust anybody else or my own voice. That made everything worse; I felt like I needed to prove myself even more.

So I didn't ask for help. Or if I did have help, it was really controlled. I feel like a lot of my work suffered because of that.

But now I'm at a place where no one in the culture cares about that anymore. I don't care about that anymore. I'm like, ‘Dude, write the whole song — please. I just want to be a singer.’ And even though that’s not happening, I want to collaborate, because I feel like the best music is written with a group of people most of the time.

I guess the closest thing you had to that over the years was Alex [DeGroot], right?

Yeah. He was the co-producer and mixer for Stridulum and Valusia, and was in my band — the music director — for the next 10 years or so. Then he co-produced and mixed Okovi with me, so he was like my guy. But there was also a push-pull because I was afraid to give him too much control and didn't trust anybody around me. I regret that, but that was just how the times were. It is what is.

It was a totally different environment in the early 2010s, for sure.

Yeah, I was being compared with my peers to a pathological degree. Like I saw one blog post years ago where someone was comparing me with another one of my female peers — rating us and seeing who was the better one, you know?

So there was always this like feeling of, 'I'm not good on my own. I need to be good on these insane standards that I don't even understand. It was a really toxic environment.

If it makes you feel better, that entire industry is gone. None of us are making any money, and the whole blog thing is pretty much dead at this point.

I mean, blogs were also really helpful. They were really good, but the culture around comparisons was kind of degrading. I've read some horrible things about myself in the Brooklyn Vegan comment section for sure.

What made you feel ready to let Matt and Randall into your world?

Randall is like my dharma brother — a very spiritual guy, and a practicing Buddhist. We actually connect on a spiritual level. I became so close with him. I have a level of trust in him. And that's the thing — when I work with people, I really work with people. It was like this with Alex, too; a kind of brotherhood happens. That's how I can feel safe with people — I really need like that level [of trust].

I really trust Randall, and he really believes in me. He has believed in me when I have not. That goes a long way.

And then he has a relationship with Matt. Dude is down for anything; he is one of the best drummers in the world. He is a total beast, and also just like the chillest, coolest guy in the world — non-judgmental, so open, so down.

So [with] them together, I just feel very safe and free. I feel like we can handle anything, musically and otherwise.

I know we're still in the early days of what this record is going to be, but is there anything else you can share about the headspace you're in right now?

Well, the songs are rhythmic. I don't know if the whole record will be like that or not, because I'm also inspired by a lot of other things. I'm really into Pérotin and Léonin — these early sacred composers — right now. So is there going to be some of that on the album — early polyphony... stuff like that? I don't know.

I'm also into Hildegard of Bingen, and other music that has a sacred quality to it.

The rhythms of the recordings that I have are body music, but very organic. It feels kind of shamanic in a way. I don't want to use that term too lightly or heavily, but it feels mystical. I feel like the energy of the record is shaping up to be sacred in a way.

That's as much as I know. I'm really trying to not over-complicate the process, put the cart before the horse, or try to box anything in right now, because I've done that in the past, and I'm over that. I'm letting everything kind of just become what it is. But I feel like emotionally, that's where I'm at right now — doing things and making music that feels very deep. Like borehole deep, and communing with the divine in a way.

That makes sense. There's something very primal and shamanistic about hearing someone lock into drum patterns and different forms of percussion — something you simply can't replicate with electronic music.

There’s so many different types of rhythms that we're not really getting with electronic music because of swing and the human element and poly rhythms. I’m so sick of the computer right now. I’m very fatigued with electronic music, because I feel like I’ll hear electronic music and go, ‘Okay, I know how that was made. I hear Crystallizer. I hear this plugin. I hear that plugin.’

Well it's all so accessible now.

Yeah, I hear the production, and I hear what the tools are. I want to make something where you're like, 'What planet is this from? What are they using?' I want to make music that can't be made by AI, you know?

Is your goal to not overly process these recordings then?

Yeah, and if they're processed, they're going to be in ways where you're just like, 'What the fuck did they use?' They're going to be plugins Randall made, or, things that are modular.... I feel very inspired to make things in reaction to the technological circumstances of our time right now.

Because you feel like the whole AI thing is so inescapable?

There's just so much slop — AI and otherwise. It's so easy to make a decent-sounding, generic-ass pop or electronic song.

I want to make a Fleetwood Mac record — a great record. I don't want to just make a good record for this time, or a record that hits the boxes and fits into an algorithm. It's kind of anti-algorithmic music in a way.

So what is the general goal for how this is going to come together?

I want to get it done by the end of the year. I'd like it to be out by next year, but I'm also not rushing. I've been putting a lot of time into these piano shows, but they've been evolving me in a way that I wasn't ready for. So that's also been taking time out of my writing. But yeah, I hope it comes out next year.

These shows must be pushing your voice into new places, too.

Oh yeah. I didn't know how to sing quiet before. I didn't really know how to sing with dynamics. I didn't need to because I was on a stage in a rock club with so many musicians behind me, I could only project.

I guess that's the tradeoff of having a voice like yours — it's so powerful, it's easy to forget certain aspects of subtlety and dynamics.

Yeah. It took me a long time, even with these piano shows, to be like, ‘I have a microphone. I'm using a microphone. Use the microphone. You don't need to project all the time.’

The best thing my voice teacher ever told me was, ‘You know people like chocolate cake, but if you give it to them too much, they're gonna get sick of it.’ I have this voice that I can use, but don't do it all the time, because you're gonna blow your voice out, and then you have nowhere to go from there.

Learning dynamics have been a huge game changer for my future music.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is how someone who makes such emotional music responds to a world that's essentially on fire. At the end of the day, we need music to make us feel hopeful, not hopeless. We need people to wake us up and pull us out of this thing, right?

Yeah. Lately, I've been really inspired by ecstatic poets like Rumi, Sufi poets, and early Greek poetry that de-centers the direct human experience outside of a mystical, profound connection to nature. I think I'm getting really into that kind of poetry because everything is very literal right now. Our lives are very literal, and there's isn't a lot of creativity in the world right now. I think that grounds us in this kind of narrative-istic experience of life.

We know the world is shit. We know things are falling apart. There's a lot to feel anxious about, and in the past, my lyrics have been very blunt and direct in a way that's cathartic. But I think for me, what's the most inspiring is when I experience art that takes me out of my body and takes me out of my reality and builds a utopia or a dream that gives me respite from the world.

I'm not saying in an escapist way; I'm saying it a visionary way.

Lyrically and artistically, I'm much more interested in pursuing a vision that isn't just about why everything is bad. What is so bountiful and abundant and everlasting about life and the human experience that can follow us back down to the earliest artists and musicians? What has always been divine about life? We need to re-situate ourselves in in a world that is okay.

Because our world is okay; we are okay. There’s a lot of destabilization, but our world has always been unstable. People still survive and thrive, because art grounds them in the present in a way that is healing.

So that's what's most important to me — to contribute that kind of art to the world.

Check out Zola Jesus’ current tour dates here and read her old film column for self-titled.