LONGING FOR BELONGING
Her debut solo album is a collection of delicate treasures: graceful, expressive and elegantly poised, exploring the great depth of her abilities as a musician and the cultured poetry of her lyrics.
Longing for Belonging– while on the surface an album of songs – also offers unexpected turns. Its tenderness is balanced with subtle moments of darkness; its verses and choruses are subverted with free, improvised experimentalism.
In keeping with the album’s wider creative process – which Zola describes as “allowing intuition, feeling and subconscious into the process and letting go of expectations” – the lyrical threads chase various narratives, memories and hopes.
Longing for belonging was released on figureight records on 13th Nov 2020, a creative project led by Shahzhad Ismaily. The label has to date released records by múm founding member Gyda Valtysdottir, NYC super-producer Randall Dunn, Jon Hopkins and Brian Eno collaborator Leo Abrahams, Spotify chart-topping indie artist Toth and several more.
Johanna Borchert: prepared piano, Nicole Hogstrand: viola da gamba, Syzmon Pimpon Gasiorek: percussion / Zola Mennenöh: voice, guitar, flute, piano, composition
DUO SONNTAG
DUO SONNTAG is an improvising, international duo based in Copenhagen and Oslo. After meeting in the the beginning of 2018, the musicians quickly discovered their common interests in exploring the textural and tonal possibilities of their instruments while keeping the expression minimal and concrete. They work with nontraditional approaches to voice and piano by combining acoustic and electronic sounds. The music is responsive, gradually moving in different directions that can lead both to quiet, grainy, non-tonal parts, but also melodic, rhythmic, song-like fragments.
Guoste Tamulynaite: prepared piano, Synthesizer / Zola Mennenöh: voice, sampler, electronics
SOLO
Improvised and Composed collage work and creation of soundscapes w/ field recorded samples, sung & spoken words, melodies and sounds. Playing with form and formless fragments of past memories, recorded conversations of seemingly unimportant everyday stories. Acoustic, electronic, low-fi, live – all merging into one emotional landscape.
A sonic explorative experiment, meditating on what remains when nothing is as we know it. When all order no longer exists and we are exposed to what is there. No more, no less. What then, matters really? An invitation to be still, and listen to the small things. An attempt to detect the beauty of the moment and to arrive in the here and now.
Zola Mennenöh: voice, sampler, fieldrecordings
OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
Of Cabbages And Kings is a Cologne based collective band of four vocalists, exploring the possibilities of the human voice times four. All four vocalists are solo performers and composers themselves, and therefore wish to create a space for everyone to express their individual stories, and at the same time become one body of sound together. A democratic, supportive structure leaving space for genre-crossing music from poem settings, free improvisations to arranged folk or pop songs.
Veronika Morscher / Laura Totenhagen / Rebekka Ziegler / Zola Mennenöh: voice, composition