Zone on Nine Album CD

 Jewel-case CD of the new album - "Zone on Nine".  Includes lyrics and credits in booklet!

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The second album from Chicago-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist BONZIE, Zone on Nine pulls off the sublime feat of feeling both intensely intimate and otherworldly in scope.

Throughout Zone on Nine, BONZIE eschews the confessional singer-songwriter approach and claims her role as a fiercely honest observer and commentator who delivers her lyrics with powerful abandon. That self-possessed artistry has earned acclaim from the likes of Spin, Vogue, and Paste, as well as led to praise in the pages of the New York Times (“Delicacy and drama, surrender and anger, made a riveting combination when BONZIE performed,” wrote chief popular-music critic Jon Pareles of a SXSW performance). At the same time, Zone on Nine finds BONZIE greatly expanding her sonic palette—formed from inspirations as eclectic as Tchaikovsky, Gil Scott-Heron, Judee Sill, and the score to Disney’s Mulan—and creating a more intricately composed take on surrealist pop.

In carving out that sound, BONZIE traveled to L.A. and England to record, discovering that each surrounding lent a strange new dimension to Zone on Nine. “Being in those different environments let me take my music to places it’d never been before,” she says. “It helped bring different colors and contrast to the record, which is so important to me. I love the contrast between chaos and stillness, and how those two things can exist in the same place.”

Kaleidoscopic in texture and spiked with startling intensity, Zone on Nine opens with the jagged guitar riffs and measured fury of “Crescent.” That intensity sustains for the dusky urgency of songs like “Combback,” and for the synth-laced title track’s anthemic determination (“Maybe you’re a horse head hanging on a harlot wall/You’re not gonna frame me/You’re not gonna take me down”). Featuring musical contributions from Adrian Utley of Portishead, Zone on Nine is also instilled with moments of ethereal serenity: the spectral haze of “If I Could Reach You,” the sleepy waltz of “Tiny,” the cascading piano lines and lilting strings of “Nettling.” And on its penultimate track “Mica Mori,” Zone on Nine unfolds into a seven-minute-long epic shot through with soulful vocal work, swirling guitar tones, and lyrics that attest to the easy magic of bending reality (“I make it summertime in my eyes”).

 Produced by Nina Ferraro aka BONZIE, in collaboration with Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) and Ali Chant (Perfume Genius, Youth Lagoon), Zone on Nine follows BONZIE’s recently released double singles As The Surface Rose and How Do You Find Yourself, Love?

In tracking the path from her first time songwriting to the continent-crossing production of Zone on Nine, Ferraro notes that a certain sense of purpose has endured in her artistry. “I’m always open to taking the song wherever it wants to go—more like I’m a vessel for the song itself, rather than a person who’s actually making the song,” she says. And with Zone on Nine, in all its unbridled grandeur, each listen illuminates the unending wonder that’s sparked so much of her songwriting. “I think we’re here to experience things and express our experience, and to notice and enjoy how we each have our own different perspective,” says Ferraro. “I feel obligated to participate in life that way, on a very visceral level. To me there’s a rhythm that already exists in the world, and I want to be a part of that.”