A Beacon of Hope in the “Cataclysm” // An Interview with ZANIAS

• Let’s start with how you got into music. What are your earliest music-wise recollections that captivated and fascinated you?
  

When I was just starting pre-school, the teachers asked my mother what I liked to do, meaning what sorts of toys I liked to play with etc, and she told them “She just likes to sing”. I’d just sing to myself all the time, both songs I knew and songs I made up on the spot. I think it has something to do with being born while my family was living in a war-zone (on the island of Bougainville during the start of its civil war in 1989/1990), and I became quite an anxious child as a result of stress both in the womb and during my first months of life. Singing is a scientifically proven method of soothing the nervous system, so I guess that’s what I was doing.

Regarding my earliest recollections, the first band I ever became obsessed with was Eurythmics when I was about 4 years old. I’d ask my mum to repeatedly play the cassette tape we had. Annie Lennox’s voice had me bewitched, and her androgyny really fascinated me. I wasn’t sure if she was a man or a woman, and it didn’t matter. Then, when I was seven years old and we were living in Malaysia, I got my hands on a bootleg VHS tape of Madonna‘s music videos from the ’80s and ’90s. I was fascinated by all the video storylines, the melodies, the way she danced, and her evolution over time through all these different styles and sounds. “Ray of Light” then levelled up my fandom even further. I can probably trace back my propensity towards wearing black to the music video for “Frozen”, which has since become a permanent fixture on my own video moodboards.

When I was a teenager, I got into some more popular alternative bands like Placebo, A Perfect Circle and AFI, and was introduced to the 80s sounds of the Cure, Sisters of Mercy and Psychedelic Furs by my very cool aunt, so that’s when I learned the guitar and started dreaming of maybe making my own music someday. But it would be a good few years before I put that into action beyond a handful of songs I wrote on the guitar and keyboard.

• When and how did you become attracted to the darker side of music?
  

As soon as I hit adolescence, a dark cloud descended over my moods, and I started to find existing rather difficult, as so many of us do at that age. I was extremely sensitive and philosophical and couldn’t handle just how dark the world could be just yet, so I fell into classic teenage nihilism. I gravitated heavily towards music that reflected my existential angst.

It was when I moved to London that the variety of goth I was into shifted from the more traditional 80s kind to the modern Coldwave revival. It really felt like something exciting was happening as EBM was making a comeback with exactly the queer and sexy undertone it needed to be appealing to me, minimal synth could be heard all over Dalston and Shoreditch, and bands like Trust, Light Asylum and Austra were releasing all these incredibly catchy songs with synthesisers. And that’s when Linea Aspera was born.

• When did you start singing? How did you sculpt and improve your shapeshifting vocal delivery over time? Is there anyone you’ve been inspired by? Talk to us about your distinctive wordless ‘glossolalia’ as well.
  

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. I didn’t really ‘know’ I could sing until Linea Aspera started, though. I was always quite shy about my voice, and would mainly just do it alone in my room, where I hoped no one could hear me (in fact, our entire household, which was full of extended family and friends staying over all the time, could hear me). I’m self-taught really, and my latest vocal evolution is really just down to me singing along to Caroline Polachek songs when I’m alone, often in the car. I like to experiment a lot and just play around, and I would encourage other vocalists to do the same. It’s fun and easy and really does improve one’s vocal control.

Glossolalia first entered my conscious understanding when I got into Dead Can Dance at age 15. I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Musica Eternal”. Such a revelation, for such emotion to be conveyed without words. It’s such a freeing concept, and so maddeningly simple. I can imagine the first singing humans ever did must have been wordless. Could singing even pre-date language itself? I like to ponder questions like these.

Lyrics don’t always come to me immediately, but I can always find a melody. I now approach my songwriting with the idea that words can be added if they come to me, but they aren’t a vital ingredient. This allows me to focus more on melody, flow and rhythm, and truly treat my voice as an instrument.

• When did you have the first connection with a synthetizer?
  

In the earliest days of Linea Aspera, I bought a Juno 6 for £300, and its simplicity made it nice and easy to learn the basics of attack, decay, sustain and release. I can’t say I fell in love with synthesis per se, because I never quite became the gear-head that so many of my peers became, but I certainly fell in love with the sound. I lent it to Ryan for a few weeks, and he immediately composed “Malarone” using its arpeggiator.

photo by Apostolos Zanias

• Are there any particular sounds/songs that conjure a sense of “home/comfort”, or whatever you want to call it, for you?

Whenever I’m really stressed and need to calm down, I listen to “Caribbean Blue” by Enya. I can gauge how stressful a time has been by how often I’ve played it. I also turn a lot towards Caroline Polachek and Ethel Cain lately. Both their voices are divine.

• Who were the most significant persons who supported and influenced your artistic growth and development?
  

At the start of my solo career, Alex Akers from Forces was my primary mentor. He taught me about production, songwriting, and was a role model for how to approach the art form of being a musician with passion and a specific kind of insanity that assured everything he created was authentic and new. My signature sound could not exist without the signature sound of Forces, and you can especially hear its presence in my latest work.

Ryan from Linea Aspera, of course, also played a crucial role, and I probably wouldn’t even be making music if our paths hadn’t crossed in a London bar. It’s pretty crazy to imagine that the songs we threw together in his Caledonian Road flat while we were still at university are, until today, the most successful works we’ve ever released. I didn’t even know what reverb was at the time.

Ryan also introduced me to another key player: Silent Servant, whose music was my gateway drug to techno, and his DJ sets introduced me to so many genres beyond that. I remember the moment Ryan played me “Negative Fascination” for the first time so clearly, because until then I didn’t realise how dark and cold yet delicately emotional Techno could be. The influence of this moment on my musical taste was really what led me to my Berlin circle of peers, and when Juan later became a friend, his advice and enthusiastic support always left me feeling confident that I could, in fact, do this job, even when things felt really difficult. He had this effect on so many of us, and his loss is still too huge to comprehend.

• My early 00s clubbing memories of Berlin are of an electrifying improvisation, where the venues swiftly changed location or lasted no more than a few weeks or months. The underlying roots of your solo project remain the club culture you keep exploring through your sounds. Your label, Fleisch, started out from a series of raves. How has the Berlin scene evolved over the years, for the better or worse, and what are the experiences which have touched you most deeply?
  

I can imagine Berlin in the early 00s would have been very exciting! The scene between 2013 and 2019 was a particular golden era for my friends and me, and it’s bittersweet to reflect on because the pandemic really swept most of it away. I had so many treasured moments on various dancefloors surrounded by friends, feeling so fortunate to have finally found ‘my people’ after most of my youth was spent feeling like quite an outsider. An especially beautiful experience was Silent Servant’s first closing set at Berghain in 2018. I’d never stayed until the end before, and when he played “Electric Cafe” by Kraftwerk, I had a transcendental moment of feeling like I was touching God.

Since the pandemic, the scene has felt very disjointed. Most former promoters just got tired and gave it up, with fewer venues available and costs that just keep rising and rising beyond what feels fair to pay. A lot of the community has moved away as Berlin became gentrified and housing became impossible to afford. I think we’re also just growing older and have less interest in staying up all night partying, but it even feels hard to get people together during the daytime. I have a lot of nostalgia for the decade before this one, that’s for sure.

• How did you become interested in archaeology, anthropology, psychology, mysticism and the psychedelic experience? How do you weave these subjects into your music, specifically on “Cataclysm”?

I was interested in archaeology for as long as I can remember, and as a child got really obsessed with ancient Greece, then ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Anthropology was a natural progression from that, and certainly growing up in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia contributed to my desire to understand humans via their culture. Due to being exposed to so many different cultures, I always had this intrinsic sense of humanity being highly diverse, and I wanted to know why.

I feel like anyone with a mind should be interested in psychology, since it helps to make sense of so much about our internal experiences. It’s been an undercurrent to all my other interests over the years. To understand the mind is to better understand oneself and others.

Regarding psychedelics, one of the few experiences that helped alleviate the existential angst of my teenage years was when I tried magic mushrooms for the first time. It really showed me that within all the darkness of the world, there was tremendous beauty to be experienced, both in spite of it and within it. I became really fascinated by all psychedelics/entheogens and immediately got into reading Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin, and experimented with as many substances I could access through my early twenties, which included acid, salvia, ketamine, ayahuasca, DMT, 4-ho-met, 5-meo-DMT and 2C-B.

I don’t consciously weave the subjects into my music, but rather, my music is a reflection of those interests. I certainly find that the more I learn about them, the more excited I get about the concepts arising in my subject matter. It’s so rewarding to make those connections through the songwriting process.

• Does your songwriting approach mainly follow instinct and feelings, rather than a pre-arranged, definite idea set from the very start? What are the essential elements you try to capture?
  

• Your music-making is a constant quest into a heady and balanced cross-pollination of diverse sound elements, which you define as ‘post-industrial ethereal wave’. Tell us about your sources of inspiration (DJing, clubbing, friends…) and the process of distilling your rich, distinctive music vision, especially in your last opus.

I can’t really describe a process because it’s all pretty unconscious, and “Cataclysm”, more than any of my other works, was really a result of ‘going with the flow’. I wasn’t planning for the album to become what it was, and every time I sat down to write, I had very few expectations of myself.

I think the process of distillation was perhaps amplified by me living my life with a curiosity towards my experience and emotion that I hadn’t quite achieved before, simply due to being young and over-identifying with my emotions rather than simply listening to what they were trying to tell me. I no longer felt trapped within experience, as various life lessons had taught me to step outside of it, and become more of an observer. This is a practice very much inspired by Buddhist teachings, with the concept of ‘radical acceptance’ at its core. It’s made living so much more tolerable, and I think it must have improved my artistry also.

The last few years were also characterised by a massive change in my attitude towards work. I used to shame myself into working all the time, granting myself very little rest, until I burnt out and felt completely destroyed for months. Now I live very differently. Rest is my primary ‘input’. It’s time I set aside for processing life, and it’s the foundation of my creative process. By ‘doing less’, I get so much more done.

• The album comprises 10 distinct songs written and self-produced over a period of 4 years (2020-2024). Intricate breakbeat patterns and euphoric trance with synthpop dashes, but there’s also a semi-acoustic ballad, “Ashes”, and the ethnic downtempo incantation of “Naiad”. Let’s talk about the shaping of the whole LP. Is there an all-encompassing thread that links them all together?

I feel like my voice and the way I process my voice by chopping it up and pitching it up and down provide quite a clear thread. I also tend to use similar effects on the instruments, and aim for a general atmosphere that inhabits the same planet. Each song is a distinct environment being explored on that one planet, so things are visually different but obey the same general laws of physics and contain overlapping species of sound.

photo by Dovile Shurpo

• You say ‘Cataclysm’ is a poignant call for revolution of both politics and consciousness. Tell us more about it?

After Israel began its genocide in Gaza after Oct. 7th, 2023, I started to say a few words about Palestine before closing each show with “Chrysalis”, which was a song I wrote about finding the strength to survive during one of my darkest hours. Despite feeling quite helpless watching a genocide unfold in real time, I found that by adding this to my performance and feeling the passion of those in the room who agreed with the sentiment, I felt a precious moment of empowerment. I noticed the potential of music as a platform for encouraging collective action and hope. I made a conscious decision then to try and channel my feelings about the wider world into my songs, expanding from the usually very intimate and personal themes I had lingered upon in the past.

I also had the revelation that hope is truly the most vital ingredient to imagining a brighter future. We can lose our optimism, but hope is something deeper than that. Hope is what allows us to even imagine any chance for a better future, and once it’s extinguished, we also extinguish that chance. I’ve really seen the power of hope demonstrated as our Palestinian brothers and sisters still hold onto it despite facing unfathomable cruelty each and every day, for generations.

I feel a strong responsibility to contribute something to the somewhat dwindling supply of hope in the world. In dark times like these, it’s so important for us to step up and play whatever role we can in changing things for the better, and artists have far more power than most of my peers realise. We are the creators of culture, and culture is a primary influence on behaviour. If we can create a culture that is hopeful, just and compassionate, then humanity might stand a chance of surviving the meta-crisis it has constructed for itself.

When I reference a revolution in both politics and consciousness, I’m referring to us harnessing our collective power to deconstruct the capitalist colonial empire and patriarchy, which will require healing a huge amount of trauma. I have to agree with Gabor Maté’s proposition that we live in a toxic culture that has basically traumatised us all from a very early age. We need adjustments to our way of approaching literally everything, from raising children to basic everyday interactions – and this is the revolution of consciousness. To build a world that values peace, compassion, truth and equality over domination, status and all other destructive illusions.

Even if the chances of achieving such change within my lifetime feels impossible, I believe it to be our duty to move towards it for the sake of future generations who will continue the good fight long after we’re gone. Perhaps participating in the fight is our entire reason for existing in the first place. It certainly provides a huge dose of meaning to be perpetually striving for something greater than ourselves.

• How do your songs tie with the visual aspect? Walk us through the creative approach to transpose your fantastical sonic world into surreal, evocative videos.

I like my music videos to add an extra dimension to the music without distracting too much from the lyrics or spelling them out too literally. I stick to one single concept with aesthetically pleasing imagery that flows from A to B without challenging the viewer too much, so their focus remains on the music and lyrics. I approach the filmmaking process the same way as the music: follow an idea and see where it takes you without planning too far ahead. The answer always reveals itself, no matter how lost I feel at the start. I’ll usually decide a location and outfit/makeup, and then, with a little help from my friends and family, go out and just shoot. For “Dawn” and “Cataclysm”, I took a group of friends to Milos, for “Serpentsmile”, I took just one friend to Fuerteventura, and for ‘Naiad’, I just shoved my face into a fish tank at my parents’ house in Australia. None of them had storyboards, and the real magic lies in the editing process, which I approach like a really fun little puzzle. Editing music videos like this is one of my absolute favourite things to do. There’s something about creating a very rough storyline from potentially incongruous footage that just sets me on fire for some reason. Once I start editing, I have a hard time stopping, even to eat or sleep.

• How do you prepare yourself before a performance? Do you always have complete control/focus, or at times do you lose control in a sort of trance state? Are you always fully confident? What are your best and worst live memories so far?

I love it when backstage areas have a good mirror and lighting so I have a place to comfortably do my makeup in peace. It’s a process I consider a bit of a meditation before stepping out on stage.

I tend to maintain some level of control throughout my performances, even when I’m ‘losing myself’ in the music. Muscle memory is a powerful thing, and when it takes over, I can use that extra bit of brain power to plan my next moves, especially when I’m on a big stage with various spots I can climb up. My confidence is generally quite stable, though it’s certainly bolstered when I’m playing more professional venues with really good sound engineers and sound systems, and when the audience is giving a lot back. During shows where things aren’t going so well, I try to imagine I’m alone in my room and just have as much fun as I can without letting disappointment creep in. Though sometimes it does, and it’s always possible to walk off stage feeling a little defeated. That’s just part of the job, and thankfully, it is a very rare occurrence, especially since I added my drummer to the mix. Our energy together is very powerful.

My best memories are from playing live in Mexico and Brazil. The audiences there are just so enthusiastic and welcoming, and I feel so much love in the room. I prefer to leave my worst memories of playing live in the past so they don’t affect my future confidence.

• Looking back, is there a project, a release, a phase in your artistic path that you’re particularly proud of, or, on the contrary, other parts you would change? And is there anything you’d like to explore in the future?

I’m super proud of “Ecdysis” because I feel like I really explored some unique ground with that universe. I’m also really proud of the music videos I’ve made this year, and so grateful to the friends who helped me make them.

I can’t say there’s much I’d change since I wouldn’t want to alter the timeline much, but I sometimes wish I’d shed my fear of being myself and fully expressing who I am a little sooner. I spent an awfully long time hiding in the shadows, and it slowed down my growth as an artist.

• What are the records, books or movies that deeply inspire you lately?

I’m reading “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Maté, and it’s fueling my decidedly compassionate understanding of humans in a very validating way. I’ve also been listening to the “Esoteric”EP by Kiss Facility a lot, and “Chordata Bytes I and II” by Imogen Heap and Dan O’Neill.

“The Annihilation series” by Jeff VanderMeer was certainly the most inspirational book I read over the last year, though, since its words even made it into a track on “Cataclysm”.

• Many thanks for being our precious guest. What’s next for you besides the promotional album tour? I read about a project with techno master Terence Fixmer for the next year…

I can’t reveal too much just yet, but yes, there is a new project coming! Hopefully, a lot more gigs next year, since I’ve come to enjoy playing live so much more with the new songs and drummer.

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