Senior makes her mark in the music industry

Aspiring musician Nika Roza Danilova was disappointed when she received her rejection letter from Juilliard. She wasn’t too discouraged, however, since the reason she was turned down was not her music, but her age.

She was 10 years old when she applied.

Danilova’s premature application is exemplary of her ambition and disregard for assumed boundaries and limitations in her music career. Not to mention, of course, her talent.

Now a 20-year-old senior at UW–Madison, Danilova has garnered an international following under the name Zola Jesus for her experimental caterwauler music.

Her music carries the trademark of her opera-trained voice layered with sounds from analog synthesizers and drum machines. The result is evocative, fervent and difficult to forget.

Her sound is a product of nearly 10 years of opera training and musical influences across the board, from experimental jazz and blues singer Diamanda Galás to the avant-garde punk rock Talking Heads to the ’60s girl group The Ronettes.

“I’m not afraid to get weird or eccentric with what I do,” she says, likening her musical career to art. “If you’ve seen the same painting over and over again it’s boring, but [then] you see something new and different, especially in a time where people feel that everything’s been done before.”

Danilova, a French major also studying philosophy, credits her studies as musical inspiration as well.

“The philosophy that I read teaches you to just do whatever you want and ignore the systems of society and just go for it,” she says. “That’s kind of what you have to do. That’s what I’ve done.”

Although most of her following isn’t local, Danilova enjoys the campus and Madison environment because of both the growing local music scene and academic atmosphere.

“I’m very proud to be a student here,” she says. “It’s taught me to work hard and that whatever you want, you’ll get if you work for it.”

Danilova came up with the name Zola Jesus when she was in high school in Wausau. Zola is for naturalist French writer Emile Francois Zola, and Jesus is a play on faith.

“I really respect religion and everything like that, but I think it’s interesting to play with those kinds of ideas,” she says.

It was also in high school that Danilova began recording. She writes and records both the music and vocals herself, then at her home in Wausau, and now in her campus apartment. She then sends the music to her major record label, Sacred Bones, in New York City.

As Zola Jesus, Danilova has produced five albums, some of which are singles or combined records with other bands. Her latest full-length album, “The Spoils,” was released in July and is 100 percent Zola Jesus.

“The Spoils” refers to a painting by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

“I was looking at Francisco de Goya’s work, and I was like this is so gorgeous and it’s so dark, and yet really beautiful,” she says. “That’s totally what I think my music is like: dark, but accessible and beautiful.”

She recently traveled to Detroit, Jersey City and Brooklyn to shoot a music video for her song “Clay Bodies” from “The Spoils” album under the professional direction of Jacqueline Castel.

The video, which features Danilova pulling a trail of lace through a series of abandoned buildings in Detroit, ending up in an old theater in New York, is stylistically based off of Czech films from the ’60s and ’70s.

“In the beginning it’s all decrepit, and then at the end it’s really beautiful,” she says. “It’s also kind of like an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ thing where you’re exploring around and you don’t know where you are, and then it becomes just more and more surreal.”

When it comes to her music, she just wants it to feel personal.

“You know when you’re watching a movie and then there’s a song that comes on in the movie and it fits so perfectly with the moment? That’s what I want. I want to make soundtrack music,” she says. “I like it to be a moment where the music and your experience in life aligns and it can become part of your life.”

Danilova frequently plays in New York and at the SXSW music festival in Austin.

In January, she will tour the west coast and after she graduates in the spring and moves to Los Angeles, she’ll be performing in Europe to accommodate her international following. When she gets back to the U.S., she will launch another nationwide tour, and then return home to work on her next full-length album in a studio.

Then she plans on doing it all again.

Though she records alone, when Danilova performs live, she plays with a backup band, which currently consists of two friends she met on campus, Nick Turco and Shane Verwey.

Between an 18-credit class schedule, a traveling performance itinerary and writing music, Danilova is a successful student as well as an accomplished musician.

Though people tell her she was lucky to break into the scene, Danilova credits her success to creativity and just hard work.

“I’ve been making music that not everyone makes and I’m really passionate about it,” she says. “I’m really serious about it. I’m not messing around, and I think people can see that.”