Zora Jones is forging her own fantasies

The Austrian-born, Barcelona-based artist is known for forging stratospheric productions that distort the very fabric of pop, club music, and R&B. Since emerging from the club scene of Barcelona as co-founder of imprint Fractal Fantasy, Jones has knocked on some pretty unusual doors. She once launched Gucci Mane’s ad libs into outer space, just as one example, and co-created an entire virtual club during the pandemic. 

The visual artwork of her 2020 debut LP Ten Billion Angels, meanwhile, was partly inspired by the hyperspecific fetish of digital tentacle porn. Though some might find such kinks a bit pervy, Jones spoke about it with blithe empathy in an excellent interview with club music platform Electronic Beats that same year. “[These modders] don’t care about getting famous or getting money from these things. They do it purely for the passion of needing to see these things and needing to make them,” she said at the time.

Since the arrival of generative AI software, the dedication and practice in summoning your fantasy into existence has eroded. What once took manuals and manuals of information to absorb and execute in order to make ideas tangible, can now be executed with a lazy prompt. 

Thankfully, Jones herself doesn’t seem to drink that type of Kool Aid, dedicating the half-a-decade between Ten Billion Angels and her new album 50 Bullets to the Heart to further improve her skills as a musician, vocalist, and performer. Given her maximalist, all-embracing approach to sound, it seems quite a task to take it someplace novel yet again. More specifically, someplace just outside of the familiar hierarchies of clubs and stages. 

At the start of our video call, I find Jones in the lab, in the midst of working out the second part of new song “Full Moon” for a live performance at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. She retrieves a paper sheet littered with notes from her keyboard and shows it on the screen. “I'm super happy because, about a year ago, I didn't think I was going to be able to play my songs on the keys,” she enthuses, her voice buoying up infectiously. When I mention the strange whispering voice simmering beneath the sparse, cyber-renaissance fair atmospherics of the song, Jones reveals it to be something else entirely: “That’s actually me crying, with a crystalliser effect.”

For Jones, making an album is about presenting a whole story, whereas EPs are more like a theme you explore that stays contained in one space.  “The full story doesn’t only have just one feeling,” she explains. “When I make albums, I try to incorporate the entirety of the story I want to tell, not just one emotion. That’s why a lot of my music speaks about pain and grief, but there are also sides of me that are very intimate, seductive, even celebratory. I want to present a complete body of work, not just a fraction of it.”

A sonic contortionist, Jones plucks elements from myriad styles and bends them within her own distinct production vision. With that ability also comes an awareness of where those more candid, unfiltered moments can live inside the songs. When I bring up the virtual club project, Jones immediately stumbles into an anecdote about the club simulator getting hacked by someone who, for some reason, inserted Crazy Frog into the room. “I swear to God, all of a sudden this big Crazy Frog object popped up in the middle of the dance floor, and then he did strobe lights, and it was just like, ‘What is happening?’ Everyone was completely chaotic. It was very fun, a very, very fun moment.”  

For an outsider looking in, a balance between design and accident seems rather tricky to uphold, but for Jones it's almost like riding a bike. “It’s not that much of a challenge,” she counters. “I actually felt quite confident doing it at the moment, because a lot of those songs were written from a place where the fear of expressing myself, or expressing who I am, just wasn’t there anymore. It didn’t feel like a challenge in that way. I felt very confident about not hiding behind effects and actually going to that vulnerable place I’d wanted to reach for a long time.”

It was only a year ago where Jones found herself unshackled from the fallout of a long-term relationship breaking apart. “Last year I reached a point in my life, after a very big change, where I could create from a place that wasn’t constantly contaminated with fear. Before that, I think I’d been living in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight and survival mode, and in that mode you can’t really express yourself fully or create honestly. That’s what informed the album and the process of using my voice in a more unfiltered way, and really daring to say ‘Okay, this is what I want to say, and I’m confident in the message and the story’, if that makes sense.”

“Tony Montana” was written on the final day of the relationship. Jones traded Montréal for Barcelona to create enough distance to write with clarity about the fallout; an ache she initially attributed to the chronic physical pain she's endured since childhood. That sense of removal from these wounds, however, revealed a pain of a different, perhaps metaphysical nature. “Since I was 10 years old, I’ve had chronic pain in my upper back, and for about seven years I had chronic pain in my lower back as well. And that vanished almost instantly last year, when there was a big change in my life, where I was able to exit a situation that wasn’t safe for me, to put it that way. That pain was so strong that I almost couldn’t walk for seven months at one point. That’s how bad it was; it just vanished with me being in a different environment and being in a different place in life.”

The arrangement of  “Tony Montana” expresses this fracture quite playfully, with Jones’ vulnerable admission in facing the abandonment of a former lover. Helical arpeggios ascend upward like a beanstalk, as intermittent gunshots crudely clash against these warmer, nourishing textures. But it doesn’t end with that final barrage of bullets, fortunately: the arpeggios percolate faster, with Jones – almost like a nursery rhyme – repeating the mantra: “You will never die alone / You will never die alone / Shared our light too long / Shared our life too long”. Words that feel planted like flowers in the barrel of a a gun.

“Tony Montana” is exemplar to one of Jones’s progressions since releasing Ten Billion Angels. In situations once governed by spells of trial-and-error experimentation, she now knows exactly how to execute an idea with a more specific intent, utilising the skills she has accumulated over time. Conversely, the notion of ten billion angels does feel a bit more mathematically abstract than aiming 50 bullets straight into the heart. The fractured dancehall of “ULTRAFREAK”, hot-blooded reggaeton of “Summer Baddies”, and the vintage soul-inflecting “Crunk In Love” bring a real-world physicality to the more digitised sceneries Jones is known to conjure on a consistent basis. 

Via her socials, Jones recently cited Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me” as a big touchstone towards healing again; not just from the emotional turmoil, but the chronic physical pain she has been enduring for the bulk of her life. “I do think my music sounds a lot warmer now than it used to,” she says, nodding. “But I don’t like being stuck in nostalgia or making purely retro-sounding music. I prefer to consider my core influences and bring them into today, into my own sound. There’s a way to incorporate those roots, soul, funk, R&B, etcetera, into my world, to really bring in those elements to the world and that warmth without getting trapped in the past.”

Though Jones has her many limbs stretched into fashion design and digital art, among other things, music remains her most immediate practice to transcribe her daily experiences. Working on her music also helps pinpoint the exact source of her aches in different ways than maybe an MRI machine would. “I think I’m a person that processes emotional pain very, very physically,” she states. “I notice it if I’m very anxious, or if there’s something that happens in my life that’s a difficult moment, I get extremely tired, you know, or my back starts hurting more. I still have upper back pain, which is something I think comes from a lot of trauma I had in my childhood with my family. But yeah, I’m somebody who processes their emotions very, very physically in their body, I think, so I think it has more to do with that than with professional sports.”

Before producing , DJing, fashion and CGI-art came into play, Jones practiced dressage on a professional level. This sport requires the rider to build an incredibly deep bond of trust with the horse in order to execute perfectly balanced movements. Once that trust breaks, the whole thing crumbles beneath the weight. It takes two to tango, and there’s a lot of unseen work to get to that point.

“I was horse riding professionally and training horses and training people,” she remembers “I did that basically from when I could walk until I was 18 years old. I stopped because it was something that came with my family. My father’s side of the family – my father and his wife – were always involved with horses and that type of sport, so that’s why I started and that’s how I entered the professional horse-riding world. I stopped because I moved to Spain; I wanted to get away from that part of my family and was looking for freedom and a better life. That’s when I stopped the sport and started my life here in Barcelona, when I was really young.”

Growing up in Austria, she studied drums, guitar, and violin; she caught the electronic music-making bug when messing with computer software of Atari floppy discs. After making a name for herself as a young student in Barcelona’s club scene, Jones wrote 100 demos and lifted just seven tracks from that assembly for her debut EP 100 Ladies.

It seemed the work ethic Jones attained through dressage translated pretty spectacularly into her musical output. “A hundred percent, a thousand percent,” Jones affirms. “I actually spoke about this with somebody recently. I think I approach my project and making music almost the same way I approach sports, in terms of understanding that it takes a lot of discipline if you want to move forward. It takes a lot of studying and constantly pushing yourself to actually grow and get better at what you do.”

She calls it similar to weightlifting, pushing herself a little further where she can detect an imbalance, creating an expressway to grow and expand her practice. A fresh stepping stone was the performance at MUTEK she was preparing for during the time of this interview; it marked a return to a scene where a lot of her heartbreak lingers. Jones played this show with a much deeper bag than before, playing and singing live, and showing an eagerness in refining things further down the line.

“For example, when I started singing, I absolutely couldn’t,” she recalls. ”I’d never done that before. I was like, ‘I’m going to do this,’ because it’s something I wanted to do. I’ll never forget the face of my first vocal coach; she was just like, ‘Wow, that’s going to be a lot of work,’ because I didn’t really know what I was doing. But through consistency and discipline, and daily vocal training, I was eventually getting better and better.”

While making 50 Bullets to the Heart, Jones briefly lived in the same building as Catalonian artist Marina Herlop, while Herlop was composing her upcoming album Dja Dja. Herlop, hearing Jones compose from the other side of the wall, knocked on her door. “She got really anxious listening to my music and seeing me produce, because she was like, ‘You’re doing all this with the mouse?’” Jones giggles. “And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ And she told me straight, ‘This is giving me anxiety, can we please teach you how to play the piano so you can actually play the keys?’ And I was like, ‘Sure! ’So she gave me my first piano lessons, which was incredible. She’s an unbelievable musician, so I was very grateful to get any type of lesson from her.”

In getting more disciplined and efficient in making the music true to what she envisions, Jones is also learning to let go of the reins and embrace that flow state where her creativity can go completely unchecked. Unleashing the Crazy Frog again, if you will. “Often, when I’m in a real flow state, it feels like my head is opening up at the top, something’s flowing in, and it’s flowing out of my fingers and into my vocal. That’s how it feels, and there’s not much I’m personally doing… it feels like I’m just a channel for something that has to come out.”

It begs the question whether Jones breaking out during the pandemic is still informing her art to this day. It was a period when conventional spaces in which to enjoy art and music were challenged by new forms of engagement; with the absence of a club, you make one from scratch. If you wanted to see tentacle CGI porn, you had to put in the hours to make it all by yourself. In building the sonic world of her imagination, it makes little sense for Jones to neuter her output to appease any specific musical setting.

“I wanted to make something that can make you dance and cry at the same time, like on ‘Hysteric Angel’,” she says. “A lot of the lyrics are very much part of that concept. I wanted to be very intentional with what I say, but also flow at the same time. It’s this weird middle zone where you are intentional, but at the same time you’re just like… I know that in Spanish you say you’re just “completing orders” – you’re not really in charge that much.”

She adds that a lot of the lyrics on 50 Bullets to the Heart were written in her sleep, often arriving in a dream. “This is a real thing: it sounds insane, but I have about 500 voice notes of me just in bed, waking up and putting a melody, or a lyric that I dreamt, into my phone, and then the day after incorporating it into my song. That happened a lot. So it’s this in-between zone of being extremely intentional, but within that intentional space you still let yourself go and flow into spaces you didn’t expect to go.”

Suffice it to say, the days of grinding 100 demos just to get seven polished tracks are history.  Sometimes an idea pops to such an extent that Jones breaks it into separate outcomes, like on “Makeup Bag, pt. 2”, the sequel to “Makeup Bag, pt. 1” off of her ANGEL CRISIS EP. “Now I just try to make whatever I create into the best version it can be, and sometimes that’s the very first version you’ve produced, and sometimes it needs 50 iterations until it reaches its final form. And sometimes, even when you reach that form and it doesn’t necessarily get released on a project, maybe you’ll use elements of that song for another song or a collaboration you’re doing or something.”

Though much of Jones’s personal heartbreak is palpable within its tracks, 50 Bullets to the Heart may also attune to some kind of larger collective heartbreak; whether or not the joy of putting in time and labour into realising your vision now has been given a clear expiration date. With AI usurping digital spaces at what seems like an accelerating pace, where does our own agency as a creative being begin and/or end?

Does the value of the work live more inside of our dreams and our experiences than the prying eyes around us? By that equation, the joy and passion Jones exudes in her own process never seems in danger of extinguishing, regardless of who’s paying attention. Near the end of our talk, she speaks with a palpable glow about running new imprint Belly Fat, studying gospel music in the US, diving headfirst into flamenco music, and possibly picking up her favourite instrument, the violin, again. 

“I think I see more potential in artists fulfilling their vision, whether that’s within the digital art space or something more realistic. I think if an artist or a creator is completely obsessed with something and really puts their mind and heart and soul into that… that’s so potent, right? Whatever that means for that person, as long as it’s authentic and real and an expression of what they feel or who they are, that’s where I see the potential.”