Zola Jesus On Failing The 'Test Of Being You'

Nika Roza Danilova isn't the most obvious person to speak in public. But, four years after her last Australian tour, the 27-year-old - who's made five LPs as Zola Jesus - will both perform with a string quartet for Melbourne Music Week, and hold a talk as part of the Face The Music conference. She isn't sure what she'll talk about - "I don't know, I guess whatever they ask me," she laughs - but the conversation will be far more difficult, for her, than the performance.

"I'm very much an introvert, so trying to make conversations with people is very taxing," says Danilova. "I'm very private; I don't have really many friends, at all. Relationships with people sometimes stress me out. My personality is to want to make other people comfortable, so it takes a lot of energy for me to figure out what it is that will make this other person super-comfortable."

"When things are destroyed, it creates a different sound from it, in a way that doesn't sound real. You have all these overtones, so, sonically, it becomes like this patchwork quilt."

After years living in Los Angeles, Danilova has returned home to Wisconsin. She grew up on a rural property in Northern Wisconsin, amongst back-to-the-landers, playing in the snowy forests in which her father hunted deer and pheasant. The self-sufficiency she was surrounded by blessed her with a staunchly DIY approach to music-making. So, after a childhood of operatic training, she threw herself into the local noise-scene in Madison as a teenager. "I was this little girl with a shitty keyboard I bought at a big-box store, and I was plunking out little pop songs. That was very different from what everyone else was doing," she recounts.

Her early records came thick and fast - in 2009 she released two EPs, a split, and her debut album, The Spoils - and thick with tape-hiss. "I did that, at the beginning, just out of necessity," Danilova says, "but I really ended up loving the texture of noise, and distortion, and lo-fi. When things are destroyed, it creates a different sound from it, in a way that doesn't sound real. You have all these overtones, so, sonically, it becomes like this patchwork quilt. I got really into that - weaving these noisy threads through these sonic tapestries, which always had a song at the centre, holding it together. Now that I've become more hi-fi, I miss that plane of textures that I used to use so much."

Currently writing her new album, Danilova is out to rediscover her old "unrestrained creativity". But, she confesses, "it's been really hard" after her last LP, 2014's Taiga, was governed by structure. "It was very much 'how can I fit everything I believe in and stand for as an artist into a very digestible pop song that could be played on the radio?'" Danilova offers. "Pop music is very concise. It's very plain in a beautiful way, and it's very minimalist in a beautiful way. I was working within a framework that was very tried and tested - verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus - and then seeing what I could do within that. Trying to work out how I could make something accessible yet experimental, see how many unsuspecting people I can get to question things that they've never questioned before."

So, how many people did she? "Honestly, not as many people as I thought. If anything, I think I just confused my existing fans," Danilova says. "When Taiga came out, I was very surprised that people had perceptions of me that I wasn't meeting. You don't really think about that, you're just doing you; I'd never considered that I had this responsibility to people to uphold their perception of me. To be honest, it was a little scary. It's scary because people are, in a way, pressuring you to not be you. It's like you've failed the test of being you. I had people say to me 'we just want you to be you!', thinking that I was trying to be this pop star. But I was just being me! It just goes to show that people will create this version of you that they think you are, and then demand that you live up to that. It's part of putting stuff out into the world: the more things you put out, the more it creates this character of who you are. And then that [character] becomes a different person."

Given the rise of social media, this 'character' is something most citizens are hell-bent on creating for themselves; Danilova calling the daily online performance "trying to manicure a corporate personality". Fittingly, as introvert - and artist out to subvert the trope of pop starlet - she'd rather not be a participant in it. "It's difficult, because it's such a huge part of being an artist - or, even, just a person - in the world at the moment. It's not just about the art. It's about who you are. People don't just want to buy your record, they want to buy you as a person."