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A musical avant-gardist is back where she belongs

WASHINGTON – She is electronic music’s new Bjork, a singer with an ear for weird, ambient syncopations and a trunk full of angular costumes that seem to puff her up to stage-filling proportions.

Nika Roza Danilova – the musical avant-gardist who performs under the moniker Zola Jesus – is so intertwined with art and spectacle that her planned performance last year at Washington’s contemporary-art temple the Hirshhorn seemed like a no-brainer. The 25-year-old had already turned in a stunningly meditative show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2012, all while dressed like an ethereal Glo worm.

The universe had other plans.

Days before her show at the Hirshhorn’s After Hours bash, the concert was pre-empted by – of all things – the first government shutdown in 17 years. The Smithsonian museums are funded by the federal government, and the shutdown proved the equivalent of a stop-work order for the arts.

Bureaucracy stopped the music. But now, almost exactly a year later, Danilova will have her night at the museum. On Friday, she’ll perform at the Hirshhorn’s opening celebrations for two exhibitions.

“It’s kind of the ideal place to perform,” Danilova says. “I love contemporary and modern art museums because they are themselves aesthetically interesting.” The Hirshhorn, with its impenetrable Brutalist facade, Danilova says, makes the visual elements of her stage show practically a moot point. (It also has served as the backdrop for a few other notable musical acts, including electronic performer Dan Deacon and the house-music act the Crystal Ark.)

But those expecting to see the Glo worm should know that Danilova has retired that version of Zola Jesus, like last season’s shoes.

This month, Danilova released “Taiga,” the first new Zola Jesus material since 2011’s lauded “Conatus.” On it, she abandons the billowy effects that made her lyrics sound like Gregorian chants.

“When ‘Conatus’ came out, that was a very electronic record. To me, it felt very, um, cold,” Danilova says, pausing to find the right word. “I wanted this record to feel very warm and bombastic and full of life. It was kind of a reaction to where I’d been.”

“Taiga” is attracting attention from critics precisely because it represents a racecar swerve to the left for the singer-composer: a thumping dance album that is still intelligent, still artful, but fun and hooky in ways “Conatus” never was. Big, warm brass sounds complement strings. And Danilova’s voice (the classically trained singer began studying opera at 9) finally comes out to play.

“I was studying a lot of opera again, so I was listening to a lot of Maria Callas, Jessye Norman — those are my two favorite opera singers,” Danilova says of the new focus on her voice. “I was also listening to Mahalia Jackson, a lot of gospel singers, like Dorothy Love Coates.” And she cranked a little Mariah.

“Her voice is the complete opposite of mine,” Danilova says of the high-pitched pop star. “I’m like a bulldozer when I sing, and she’s like, so, delicate.”

The influence is palpable, particularly in the soulful bends of Danilova’s voice on such tracks as “Dangerous Days” and the gospel-tinged “Dust.”

If it’s all a little more buoyant, the album title suggests that Zola Jesus still has a dark streak. A taiga is a desolate, life-quashing sort of forest, and to make the album, Danilova holed up in her own version of one: Vashon Island, an islet in the Puget Sound accessible only by ferry from Seattle.

It wasn’t Siberia, but compared to sunny Los Angeles, where the singer had been living, it might have felt like it.

“I was on Vashon Island for nine months, and every day I would wake up and write,” Danilova says of her time in virtual seclusion. “Most of it I threw away, but toward the end, I started honing what I really wanted. You go through all of these permutations of what the record can be, and you finally hit something and you follow the thread.”

It also felt like a homecoming. Danilova grew up in northern Wisconsin and traces her roots to Russia (the word “taiga” has Russian origins). After making the album, she says, it made sense to settle in Seattle. “I was in the woods, just like I grew up, with a feeling of being at peace and at home.”

She won’t be in Seattle much, though. To promote “Taiga,” Danilova is heading to Europe, Asia, South America and beyond. “I’m going to go all out,” she says.



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