Versions
On the heels of her Conatus world tour, Nika Roza Danilova was offered an opportunity to perform at one of the most prestigious modern art museums in the world, NY's Guggenheim. Rather than doing her standard Zola Jesus electronic set she decided she wanted to work with a classical composer who could arrange her songs for a quartet. She recruited legendary industrial pioneer JG Thirlwell (Foetus) to do the arrangements. If there is a common thread to Thirlwell's varied musical styles, it is dramatic intensity and evocative, cinematic quality.
Versions, a collaboration with a string quartet led by J.G. Thirlwell, recasts some of Nika Roza Danilov's best songs in an orchestral setting. Danilova's powerful voice is still the focal point, but it's given a different cast by the neo-classical arrangements.
Last year, the Guggenheim commissioned a performance from synth-pop songwriter Zola Jesus (a.k.a. Nika Roza Danilova), who called on Foetus’ J.G. Thirlwell to arrange her songs for strings. The pair performed alongside the Mivos Quartet and ultimately recorded studio versions of these arrangements for the album Version…
Despite it technically not being new material, by doing away with the usual dark, semi-industrial synths, this collaboration with JG Thirwell and the Mivos Quartet is sufficiently different and worthwhile.
Nika Rosa ‘Zola Jesus’ Danilova talks a good, high-minded artistic game, one that’s echoed by much of what’s written about her.
The most startling aspect of Zola Jesus collaboration with composer/musician J.G. Thirlwell might not be what you expect.
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Zola Jesus, aka experimental musician and songwriter Nika Rosa Danilova, collaborated with veteran producer Foetus, aka JG Thirlwell, on these neo-classical arrangements of her understated, gothic electronic compositions for a show at New York's Guggenheim. These tracks, the studio versions of their collaborations, take her melancholic, cinematic songwriting and strip away the more experimental aspects, revealing the fragile and intense songwriting at their core
Versions is a collection of songs from Nika Roza Danilova's, aka Zola Jesus, career to date, made over with Thirlwell's string arrangements, an idea that originated when they played a collaborative show together last year.
Album review: Clash rates 'Versions', the new album from Zola Jesus featuring JG Thirlwell and Mivos Quartet., released on Sacred Bones...
With Versions, Jesus achieves something her previous albums hadn’t: She’s created art so unobjectionable that it attains a kind of beige obscenity.
[xrr rating=3.25/5]The diminutive songstress Nika Danilova, better known by her Zola Jesus moniker, has over the course of three previous LPs established her voice as ethereally symphonic.
Bringing strings into the mix often leads to the clichéd assumption of slowing down an artist’s music, drawing out notes for dramatic effect and poignancy. However, when that artist is Zola Jesus , the cliché doesn’t work, and that’s mainly down to her most talked about feature: her voice. Nika Roza Danilova’s music was never