‘Rural Mentality’: Down the Rabbit Hole with @zolajesus
To see more of Nika’s photos, check out @zolajesus on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
When Nika Roza Danilova (@zolajesus) was a little girl, she and her brother would pretend they were Trinity and Neo, the characters in the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix. No surprise then that the singer who’s known as Zola Jesus is piqued by everyday things that aren’t as mundane as they seem–– from a scrawled bit of graffiti that reads “This life is a lie” to a rubber breathing tube snaked on a bed.
“That intrigues me, to try to find a really beautiful moment in a very plain, everyday experience,” she says over the phone from her home in the Pacific Northwest. “I see shapes and geometry –– things that aren’t usually that obvious.”
Since the release of her haunting 2009 debut solo album The Spoils, the 26-year-old Nika has repeatedly surprised critics and fans with her own unobvious choices. She first caught people’s attention while studying philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Describing herself in an interview with Pitchfork as “the kid in all black,” she was quickly branded a Goth girl. But she also possessed the kind of big voice Broadway belters are known for, and her karaoke song of choice is Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby.” “Dangerous Days,” a soaring single from her latest album, last fall’s Taiga, would fit comfortably on the playlist of any mainstream radio station.
Still, her aesthetic tends to be stark and minimalist, even when presenting a photo booth strip of pictures of her and a friend goofing off. “I have really strong ideas about what I like and what I don’t like — I feel like everyone probably does,” she says. “But maybe what I like is extremely specific? And so everything I see is through a very specific lens.”
As evidenced in her photos, that lens is drawn to showcasing vastness both indoors and out. The images are beautiful and startling, not least because they show just how small the human world is in comparison to the natural world. “It’s really interesting when you have the context of a human body within the photo, because it creates this life force in an otherwise very still environment,” she explains. “So I’ll use myself as the object that gives context to the scenery or the landscape. The human element makes photos powerful, not just a bunch of objects in a vacation photo: ‘This is a canyon!’ There’s an interaction between human and the outside world in a way.”
She comes by this ideology naturally, having grown up on over 100 acres of forest in northern Wisconsin. Her parents would take only one trip into town a week. (“You learn to stock up on everything. My parents have like four freezers.”) And she mostly played by herself, making up “little musicals” about her life.
“Things like that will always stay with you,” she says. “Rural mentality.”
Due to her husband’s job as an entomologist, she lived in Los Angeles for a while. With 72-and-sunny weather and the constant hustle of being in the music industry, the city was an unsurprisingly bad fit for a woman accustomed to icy temperatures and actual stars in the sky. “So much of your life is about the industry and working. It’s so easy to think what’s going on in that world is the entire world, when it’s barely even a sliver of it,” she says. “And once you remove yourself from that and move outside of those big hubs, it’s very grounding because you’re like, Oh right — what you’re doing is inconsequential to the greater world. I think it’s really important when you’re an artist to have that perspective.”
That greater world is often the subject of her work, especially since her move to the state of Washington. The transition has suited her, both artistically and personally. She’s been writing a lot lately, experimenting and preparing songs for “anything that could happen” — including a possible move back to Wisconsin. Wherever she goes, she’s sure to continue capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary, seeing through the matrix and dazzling us with what we thought we knew.
—Rebecca Haithcoat for Instagram @music
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