Zeroone

Zeroone from 2001 is Mia’s third album and the last of her solo acoustic recordings. She recorded the songs herself at her home studio in Los Angeles, using the first generation of ProTools’ Digi001, and released it on her new label, City Zen Records. This was the beginning of the digital era and independence for many artists enabled by the new technology. The first track “Digital,” encapsulates this ethos and also makes reference to the Butoh concept of “body on the edge of crisis.” Many of the songs on Zeroone were written while Mia was living in Japan, studying the modern dance form Ankoku Butoh with Kazuo Ohno, Min Tanaka and at Asbestos-kan. The tenets of Butoh are embedded into the songs, especially the idea of casting off the everyday body deformed by society to uncover the raw pre-Industrial body closer to human nature. In much of Mia’s work, nature and romance go hand in hand, in such a way that metaphor operates both on the personal microcosmic level and also on the macrocosmic level. Poppy Fields is the most unique of the tracks on Zeroone, with its plucked arpeggios increasing in tempo and swelling vocals which give a hint of Mia’s early operatic training. This song is a sign of Mia’s return to the west coast after several years in New England, New York City and Tokyo. The blooming of the poppy fields is a sensational experience of spring—colorful, saturated, ripe. The album closes with “Tugboat,” a song about oppression, redemption and freedom, recurring themes of the album.

After landing on a handful of critics' year-end top ten lists with her 1997 debut, Come Out of Your Mine ...

After Come Out of Your Mine landed on many critics' Top Ten lists for the year 1999, Mia Doi Todd's follow-up was the subject of a minor indie-label bidding war.