VIDEO OF THE DAY: “FALL BACK” BY ZOLA JESUS

Last summer, Zola Jesus gave one of the hottest performances at the Catalpa Festival on Randall’s Island, prancing across the stage, smashing cymbals, and climbing the scaffolding. Things are likely to be somewhat more subdued when Nika Roza Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, plays Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights on September 14, supporting her gorgeous new album, Versions (Sacred Bones, August 2013). In May 2012, Zola Jesus was invited to perform at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and she decided to do something different, teaming with industrial music guru J. G. Thirlwell (Foetus, Manorexia), who rearranged Zola Jesus’s songs for a string quartet, removing the electronic techno aspects and giving the songs a whole new life, with the vocals allowed to take off front and center. Zola Jesus and Thirlwell continued the collaboration on Versions, reinterpreting such songs from Danilova’s repertoire as “Avalanche,” “Fall Back,” “Hikikomori,” “Seekir,” and “In Your Nature,” which previously appeared on such albums as 2010’s Stridulum and 2011’s Conatus and the 2010 EP Valusia. On the new disc, Danilova is backed by the Mivos Quartet, consisting of Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney on violins, Victor Lowrie on viola, and Mariel Roberts on cello, offering mesmerizing takes on Zola Jesus’s intimate songs about love and fear. “Oh, it hurts me / Yes, it hurts to let you in / But I won’t make a sound / when the crowd comes to call,” she sings on “Collapse.” The crowd will indeed be coming to call on Saturday night in Brooklyn, when Zola Jesus will be making very different yet still beautiful sounds, with Thirlwell and a string quartet.