People Think Ambition is a Dirty Word, But Zola Jesus is Tackling Expectations on Her New Record

At the bum end of 2012, Zola Jesus absconded from Los Angeles; ditching civilisation for nine months of living internet-free and in isolation on the island of Vashon in the Pacific North West. Submerging herself in a wilderness similar to that of her childhood home in rural Wisconsin offered respite after relentlessly releasing and touring her three previous albums; a chance to realign herself, and feel out a new direction, too.

Unsurprisingly the resulting work, Taiga - Russian for boreal forest - echoes with sonic inferences to epic landscapes. But that’s not to say it’s a call to whip off your wavy garms, smash your iphone, and peg it to the nearest bit of woodland to live among the cast of Bambi. “Taiga” instead exploring the tensions of our inner-lives, as well as that friction between the external realm of concrete towers and ultimate connectivity - and those distant lands we churn up in its pursuit.

Having emerged through the noise scene by way of operatic training, before claiming a wider audience through the gothic majesty of Stridulum and cavernous art-pop of Conatus, Zola Jesus has history merging contrasting sonics. But with Taiga, she reveals the full scope of her musical identity: embracing punk and noise, her classical background, and a predilection for powerful pop songs; aided by new co-producer, Dean Hurley - who previously worked with David Lynch. Zola Jesus also rid her voice of its signature reverb-shroud for this album, a change triggered by performing her orchestral record, Versions, with co-creator JG Thirwell at the Guggenheim last year, where she trialled a purer, dynamic style of expression. Oh, and “Taiga” will also be released on a new label too - the stridently independent Mute. Phew. All change then. So we caught up with Zola Jesus on a Dalston roof top to find out where she was at after shaking it all up.

Noisey: Had you been to Vashon before moving there?
Zola: I hadn’t. So I was a little wary, but it turned out to be wonderful. I set up my studio really quickly and started to write music every day as an exercise to get my muscles going, but then I also had this impulse to see my old voice teacher again. I wanted to tune up - and writing with her again changed everything. It built my confidence, not only in my voice but also in my vision. It was a long process.

Was there one song that clearly stood out as the start of something new as you were writing?
“Hunger” was the first song where I was like, “This is the album”. I knew as soon as I wrote it I knew it represented something.

Was its vast, ambitious pop sound the feeling you wanted to follow then?
I had told myself there’s only two ways to go, I can either make a record that’s huge with musical ambition or one that’s very quiet, introspective and slow. And I felt I needed to tackle that challenge of making a big record, as I feel I’ve always approximated that in the past, but I didn’t have the confidence or the skills to make it truly big.

Your music has never seemed small to me. How would you define truly big?
Fully cooked. Expansive, but not claustrophobic. For me it was the musical taiga, when you look out into a vista and see all these mountains, this amazing tableau made up of all these details. That’s the ambition. I feel like, everything about this record is about ambition, but I’m afraid that people will misunderstand what that means. Everybody has so many ideas of what ambition can be, and it has so many definitions.

How do you define ambition for yourself?
It means the desire to accomplish something that you never thought you could. With this record I was breaking through walls creatively, like working with brass, programming beats, and recording vocals with no reverb and not feeling terrified by that. Facing that vulnerability, that’s ambition. It’s wanting to become greater and to fulfil your potential. And that’s my piercing ambition: to constantly peel back the layers, to constantly try to find the purest essence of what you’re trying to do, and who you are. It has nothing to do with Billboard charts or arenas, though I do joke about that as it’s funny.

When people talk about ambition though, it’s can be a hungering for status or plain greed?
People in the world think ambition is a dirty word, but my whole life is ambition as it’s your instinct to survive, your drive to get better. It’s the same reason we bulldoze trees and build skyscrapers that look like trees on top of them. It’s constantly trying to think of a better way to do things.

I feel like in the indie world sometimes ambition is looked down on as if they don’t want you to try. There are all these musicians who become known for having this innate genius, it never feels like they’re trying - and that’s also what’s magical about them. But then when someone does try it’s looked down upon. They just want your genius to be seeping from your pores.

I got my start in the punk world and my friends are noise musicians, and they hustle really hard. Going on a noise tour probably the hardest thing you can do as a musician: there’s no show you can play that’s not a house show so you have to really want it. Then in punk, if you try to reach out of that world, you’re totally lambasted - like it’s sacrilegious. But I’m neither of those.

You’ve straddled a bunch of worlds - noise, punk, indie. Have there been any pop songs that you’ve felt encompassed all those good points recently?
I really like SIA. I think she broke through - and the world’s a better place because of that. She’s so unique, uncompromising, and has really beautiful songs on that record.

It’s incredible how she brought those vital themes onto the biggest platform almost surreptitiously through gorgeous songs.
The thing about pop that’s so seductive is that it is the western world’s music. If you turn on the radio and want to listen to music, and you’re not a music fan, that’s what you listen to. So it has this immense power to affect you. That’s the opportunity, and it’s being wasted on songs with no message, just escapism. Again that’s a really obvious thing to say, but it would be really nice if you could turn on the radio and it would be nutritious. I still have hope that that will happen.

Did you ever want to be a massive major-label pop star?
Yes, in between studying opera, and before I discovered punk, totally. I have a weird relationship with that world, as that’s what I wanted to be. Now that I’m making music I realise I could never be that, but I had those goals and they’re still a part of my DNA. I loved Britney, Christina and the Spice Girls growing up, and I want to be that to young girls as well. But I can’t play the games that those girls have to play to get to do what they want to do. They’re not games a regular human can play. There’s no way. It’s a weird dichotomy inside of me. Even something like media training: that you can’t answer questions that make you vulnerable. To me, that’s saying you can’t be yourself. What can you offer people if you can’t be yourself? Just a caricature of someone you want to be?

I read somewhere that the acts you listen to most are Kanye, Beyonce, Mahler and Wagner?
Those are a good four.

Everyone loves Wagner even though he influenced the Nazis. Does that tell us something about the relationship between biography and art or not really?
The fact that he is associated with that it makes it hard. I have the same problem with Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian author, “I would like you even more if you didn’t have all that weird pro-Nazi history.”

Do you see art as separate from the person then?
Especially in the noise and black metal world. I listen to some noise where I can’t even tell you what some of the content is, because it is so transgressive and so hateful. But they are turning those impulses into art versus acting on them interesting, and I’m very tolerant of that. I’m tolerant of art. I think it’s better they’re putting their hateful energy into art instead of violence.

But then you were saying about musicians having a responsibility to say something nutritious as well. Who would you tell a hypothetical younger sister to listen to?
Well, I did make my little cousin a mix. I told her, “You’re not ready as you’re only listening to One Direction right now, but you will be.” I put Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Brat Mobile, all the Riot Grrrl on it, then Bjork, Kate Bush, and just really strong creative women that I felt would be good role models. I think it’s important for girls to hear that at a young age so they can grow up knowing it’s there. You’ve got to set the spectrum so they know how far they can go, as sometimes when the spectrum is really small they don’t even realise what else is out there.

I read you need antagonising forces to write music, did you manage to find them in the wilderness? It sounds so peaceful on Vashon.
There was peace, but there’s never just peace. It’s always a sense of contemplation, and reflection. And there is something about being in the natural world, where you feel so wholly free and still part of the machine that is the world. But then once you feel that peace of, “oh this is how it could be”, you start feeling the anxiety of how it will be when you leave and go into the civilised world with all the other humans. That dichotomy of being in this natural world, but then being part of this synthetic world we’ve created for ourselves caused me anxiety, so that became the ultimate theme of the record - these two worlds clashing. Man feels innately alien in this world. That need to destroy the earth and build our own version of it. We always think our ideas are better, then we have a different idea. When you think about it like that, it’s so bizarre. It makes you feel so unnatural. There’s a lot of talk about environmentalism too, but this record isn’t environmentalist, but it’s the same thing people going, “Wait a minute, why are we doing this?” There’s no reason for us to create this infrastructure, this sort of insulated world.

Do you think we’ve fucked the planet irreparably?
Yea, and that’s why I’m not saying this is an environmentalist record as I don’t think there’s anything we can do at this point to inhibit our natural impulses and our desire to conquer the world. I think it’s something inborn, and as long as we keep procreating we’re going to keep doing it. It’s just the way it is, there’s no going back.

Sort of a calming thought that in a few hundred thousand years the world will probably be back at peace again, over us.
Yea. Like how natural disasters break down the world and then it slowly rebuilds. We are the natural disaster now, and it will recover from that, but it’s funny to be part of the problem.

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