Earlier in the year, Nika Roza Danilova was working on a new piece of music while a thunderstorm raged outside. The artist, who has just released her fifth album as Zola Jesus, has often been described in terms more befitting a mage or sorcerer: critics talk of her exorcising demons, casting spells, illuminating the nighttime that her songs invariably arrive cloaked in. On that night, it appears she channelled the elements in a more literal fashion.
“I don’t know, maybe you know more about physics and electricity than me,” she offers, incorrectly. “But I was in my house, and it was storming, thundering, lightning outside, and I was working on this piece. So I leaned over and I touched my desk, and all of a sudden my whole body got this jolt of electricity. It didn’t even just course through me, it was like my brain got shocked.” After the year she’s had, and the fulminating qualities of new record ‘Okovi’, it feels like a prescient moment.
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Mistress of the labyrinth, bride of Dionysus, goddess of mazes, paths, snakes, fertility, passion and wine, the legend of Ariadne is built on the twin pillars of ecstasy and uncertainty. Kedr Livanskiy, the musical alias of Moscow-based singer and producer Yana Kedrina, treads a similar path: her debut ‘Ariadna’ carries a thread that runs from the Romantic poets of the 1790s to the nascent electronic scene of 1990s Russia. Much like the Greek heroine, Kedrina’s ability to incorporate these strands into her music doesn’t prevent her from occasionally losing the way.
The great marvel of the past is how malleable its shape becomes in the hands of both artists and revisionists, abrading the old guard, chipping away at stubborn monoliths until they give out, easy as sand through the fingers. Brooklyn’s own Widowspeak are riddled with ghosts, hovering between each breath, every reverb-soaked gesture. HBO’s stylish adaptation of Westworld provides several useful pointers, particularly for art that wears its former lives on its sleeves and especially for those who — on perhaps a cruder, more literal level — provide an artificial American frontier as the graveyard for their own hauntology.
Reminiscing on the countless albums that have been signposted as eighties nostalgia, it’s striking how few of them actually sound like anything from that decade. Sure, the drums are loaded with gated reverb, the synth modules are preset to soft tones that were disowned in the nineties, fade-outs are a thing again, and the saxophone is suddenly an acceptable replacement for the electric guitar.
As a young man growing up in Torquay, the neighbouring town of Totnes seemed like a strange kind of heaven. It was full of anarchists, hippies, socialists, crystal healers, vegans; I pilfered their book shops for esoteric publications by all of the above, picked up tomes by Terence McKenna, read the words of men pushing for an intersectional approach to psychedelics, the Abrahamic religions, and the alien civilisations who, I am led to believe, introduced both.
Matthew Neale 