![]() This is another one where I can’t even explain the plot because it’s so libertine. I was trying to create something that felt primal but at the same time surreal or larger than life. This dreamlike, folkloric environment was affecting me within my work. You never know if it’s based in reality or not. ![]() It’s my favorite type of fiction: magical realism, or surreal or dystopian fiction. Reading this book and then watching the seven-hour-long film was deeply affecting in the core of my DNA. I feel like I learn so much about myself and humanity through that. It forces you to see things in a different perspective or from a different body. For me, that’s so much of art - world-building and universes. There’s a strange, ancestral feeling that I experience in reading it. This book is so incredibly immersive and one-of-a-kind. Sometimes you can’t let the mind get in the way. It’s so much about bringing the unspeakable or the unconscious outward. I always think, _Oh, man, if my perception of the world were different, would this album have been different?_ So much of making _Okovi_ was about turning my brain off and letting the stupor work for me. For better or worse, I see how my own development or lack thereof colored how the album turned out. I really felt my own emotions mirrored in this book. That’s really all that matters: your perception of life and how it can completely change your sensory experience of the world. The world exists around you in one way, but how you perceive it can change. It’s the inner journey of finding yourself and seeing the world. At the same time, it’s such a dynamic story. He just goes through life feeling like an empty vessel. The thing that I love about it is that the protagonist is a very nihilistic, depressed young boy in a stupor. I found this book at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Reading that and knowing that other people have thought this as well, it felt very validating. It’s almost like our incredible sense of self-analysis and consciousness is self-defeating. I was reading it on a plane and I almost did a “Yes!” out loud when he was talking about how human evolution is almost like devolution. These are things that I’ve been thinking for so long. It’s extremely nihilistic and very depressing, but in some ways, I felt very vindicated by it. In Ligotti’s book, he grapples with the brick wall that we’ve reached as a species. When I’m feeling that sort of existential grief, I turn to philosophy or nonfiction, trying to find other people who agree with me or who will challenge my thoughts.Ī lot of the themes on the record have to do with legacy and other existential themes. Being an artist, you wonder what impact you’re really serving in society. When I was writing _Okovi,_ I was feeling very lost. The books that kept Danilova company during the recording of _Okovi_ had subjects as varied as nihilistic philosophy, a brokenhearted Japanese minor, and zombies (yes, zombies). It helps get me through darker moments just knowing that there’s someone else that’s sharing the sentiments of what I’m going through.” “When I’m really depressed, I read nonfiction. “Reading is a way to dip out of reality and sink into something outside yourself,” Danilova explains from her new home in Wisconsin. But while recording her latest album, books became all the more important, as she looked for meaning and reason in her own struggle. ![]() Given her proclivity for polysyllabic words, it comes as no surprise that the singer-songwriter is a voracious reader. ![]() To gain some distance from her emotional entanglements, Danilova turned to books. The ghosts of her experience feel present in the album’s DNA, from her haunted, opera-trained soprano to the dense instrumentation - equal parts electronic and orchestral. Because of this, she calls the recording process an exercise in letting her emotional muscles work while her analytical side felt frozen in place by depression. There was the big-city noise of life in Seattle, which left her feeling cut off from nature a close friend’s suicide attempt and both physical illness and death experienced by people close to her. While recording _Okovi,_ her sixth album as Zola Jesus, Nika Roza Danilova was emotionally buried.
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