Part 1

Name: Zohra Atash aka Zohra
Nationality: Afghan-American
Current release: Zohra's Murder In The Temple is out via American Dreams.
Recommendations: Here’s three!
Carolee Schneemann’s Kinetic Painting.
Lydia Lunch’s The War is Never Over
Zazou Bikaye's Noir et Blanc

If you enjoyed this Zohra interview and would like to know more about her music and work, visit her on Instagram and Facebook.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I was recording music and making sound collages of bits and pieces of music and film even as a kid - my sister just unearthed another one of these gems recently. It was one I think I’d taken extra care to keep hid because I enjoyed batshit pacing and lack of form … and singing over sections of synth pop, new wave, Italo disco, musicals and what was on the radio. And cut in were interviews with a kid who lived on my street.

My father had a bunch of records and microphones and tape machines to record himself when performing at a “gathering” which were drunken happenings where the mixed bag lot musicians that evening sat on the floor with these beautiful handmade traditional instruments of wood and animal hide or whatever. You’d mic the tabla and harmonium like the way you would a kick or something, and then of course run the lead vocals through the 16 channel Mackie or Yamaha mixer and like Peavey speaker cabinets - the gear is hilarious, actually.

I think my dad just went into the strip mall nearest to where his car was pointed with whatever generic violin and cheap upright music store sat the nearest to Radio Shack. Like Radio Shack in a pinch, for a garbage mic but surprisingly great shoebox tape recorders.

I learned how to rig stuff up really early in my childhood - it’s really wild how much faith my parents had in my ability to make it so that television / stereo / recording gear / family desktop computer with AOL and dial-up worked - which was a happening of sorts, where you and whomever is deigned the musician, but there’s not a focus on PERFORMANCE and all the kinds of things that seem to be a feature in performance as we know it in the West.

Playing on the floor, these beautiful really handmade instruments, sitting close to the ground, you are creating something with the people around you - it’s heavy, interactive, conversational, intimate, and so extraordinary.

So anyway, he’d collected mandolins and rhubabs and tablas keyboards, amps, mixers and PAs — and I’m not sure how but it just ended up that I would lease this stuff like it was a public domain DVD at the neighborhood library. I was like, five! I liked singing, and then, when I got the full weight of the “made for outdoor church ministry” live gear going with the microphone fused with my tape deck or CD or vinyl record of choice with amplification and recording capabilities? That was really my first education into the mechanics of sound and singing.

Formal choir training and then traditional singing for “the east” techniques - it came later but man, it’s really magic.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

It’s really wild, actually. You get your own Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular! I definitely have keyed in synesthetic approach when I’m writing - for sure.

When I’m playing with sound - and there are various ways I do that - and it’s all manner of stuff from sampling my own voice using the extended Method Technique, sampling my metals, and of course - playing with the little library of analog synths I’ve collected — anyway, it starts with a sequence that resonates, and I meditate on it. I go deeper with one of the fragments because it triggers all manner of sensory stuff - colors texture heft and all that.

But it’s different when I’m like, listening to a tune I dig - that’s almost always a kinetic response. My body literally cannot sit still - I jump. Like seriously jump - this used to be a kind of feature of knowing me well. If you lived with me or something, you’d know that I need jumping time.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

The work, the “doing” of the work, over accumulated time—those things in conjunction—is the vehicle where the metamorphosis takes place, where you emerge. Development is self-appraised, but from a space is very much at the helm. Happily wearing “girl boss” like a badge of honor, since somehow that coinage is already mocked up the wazoo by boys and girls from the left right and center, me included.

It is ridiculous somehow, because what I determined the tenants to follow and the raison d'être - to interrogate what is propelling the work at any given time, what the galvanizing spark was/is, the impetus for creating it and guiding it, and not allowing for any external force to cheapen or have too much say, is what all goes into honing a craft.

All of that is to say that I didn’t find myself searching for a personal voice as much as whittling down the options and features that may seem small, but is so crucial in how your voice is making the listener feel - not just emotionally, but there’s a temporality there, where certain choices in production and mix can evoke a space so vividly that you can’t “untangle” it.

I’m from the South and grew up talking through those elicitation passages, like I’m a beat or two away from telling you all the happenings on the family farm that you don’t hear tell from now. I was teased into silence after moving to VA for schooling. I recalibrated, and it was really easy. That could have been the informal start to studying lexical sets that sounded cool to me - aping sound best I can, be it in conversation or sung.

So finding an honest voice to melt into the spaces I created sonically, it required meditation and thought. But realizing it will finally reveal itself without the thought I was always bringing into the mix to muddle up the answer. But at least it was honest in its confusion.

I think I at least sounded engaged in the various iterations of the journey to getting it wrong. That’s the only way it got right.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I have such a rich tapestry of art and music - I am thankful for it, I don’t know what life would be like for a people upended by violent upheaval, persecution, exile. I’m not shackled or predisposed to appreciating one thing over another cos my ancestors think what the kids are offering are for the birds. They don’t care - and really couldn’t catch break from having to fight the torrents of invaders with better tech and all that.

So I gave myself carte blanche to love any art / artist that ran a kind of electricity that gets me, you know, jumping. I don’t care - I don’t discriminate. You are one of my people if your art speaks to me. I don’t care what makes up the little ladder of your DNA. I will celebrate the shit out of you.

I guess the only exception is if there’s incontrovertible evidence that you’re a rape-y jingoist asshole - I can’t think of one time that’s happened where I didn’t have any problem giving their ass music a pass. Like, Death In June? It’s like barely an inconvenience swiping left on that ooze of snooze.

Beyond that, I don’t care if someone was, like, a bad or neglectful father, or if you got a teenager pregnant when you were 23. I’m pretty sure I love a lot of people in my real life that have done weirder stuff than that.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

It starts with a nagging - an urgency that is nebulous, which is weird, but it’s that internal unconscious voice speaking in fragments and images and, as things become more clear, as the fractured selves created a path to connecting, the urgency to create a felt space with the tools I have (one that speaks for the collective us, not just me). The work has to suggest a narrative that speaks to an “us”.

The sounds and textures and momentum and form - I used to write on piano or guitar or harmonium or whatever. It forced shapes and form because the songwriting was anchored to the limitations I reckon I have with my playing. I got a real fantastic education in hardware analog synths and machines and the DAW I was using to capture it.  I got to sit with the Prophet 6 we had in our New Orleans makeshift studio area and explore the 500 presets - it’s a really beautiful thing.

I want to make records that radicalize my material of fragments I’d been writing and recording. I had no interest in cosplay and recreating or reconstructing as this accepted approach to creating.

Mark Fisher’s History collapsing onto itself - it’s how I found his work and I’m really glad for that.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or a “continuing a tradition”?

I think I just addressed that ahahahah - I guess my answer is the former “music of the future”, the Mark Fisher quote about how dated “the future” sounds now.

The future doesn’t have to be a sonic presence in obvious ways - it just IS the sound of adding something to the conversation.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

The studio is the writing implement, rather than launching the structures that playing guitar or piano forced on me. I’m not happy enough with my playing capabilities on those instruments to using the approach.

Building up from the fragments (or embracing the more Eastern modal approach) suits me better.