Musician Nadja Zela lives in Zurich. The composer, singer, guitarist, lyricist and producer has a long career with many years on the road and is an indispensable voice on the independent rock scene in Switzerland. From her all-girl band Rosebud in the early 90s to her current solo project, she remains true to herself as a front woman with an unbound, uncompromising and wild spirit.
Musically, she is an experimental explorer of genres between psychedelic rock, blues, folk and black music, condensing her influences into a very unique language that repeatedly earns her compositions enthusiastic reviews.
«I like to deal intensively with a topic in terms of content and music and then compose an album based on this exploration.»
In 2003, for example, she worked with Vierspur-Songs on the subject of four-track tape recorders, in 2009 on the subject of folk music with Ciao Amore, in 2012 she dealt with delta blues and fingerpicking styles and wrote the follow-up album Wrong Side of Town. In 2016, she released Immaterial World, a tribute to her idol bands from the late 60s, such as The Doors. After the tragically surprising death of her husband Christophe Badoux, a double album was released in 2020 as a tribute, Greetings to Andromeda. Requiem, on which Zela and her bandmates spent two years intensively exploring Requiem and then channeling their inspiration into a modern, lyrical rock requiem, which also contains Swiss-German lyrics by Nadja for the first time.
«Beuys' quote about art as a sculpture of warmth is close to my heart... I locate my music in a similar way:
Where the cold sits between people, that's where the warmth has to come in – that's the sculpture of warmth.»
Her music flirts with the warm sensuality of the blues, but she leads her raw songwriting into cinematic sound spheres that undermine any emerging genre-nostalgia. The songs shake, then give unexpectedly gentle comfort again. Zela‘s writing draws noticeably from personal experience, but she finds a true, lyrical expression of our existence‘s brokenness and fragility in times of decay. A closer listen reveals razor-sharp social criticism alongside dreamy humor.
Nadja Zela has been awarded various prizes for her own musical work, including a 4-year scholarship from the Árvore Foundation, the Werkjahr of the City of Zurich and the ERB Percentage Prize "Space and Time" and a recognition prize from the Canton of Zurich for outstanding artistic achievements with Greetings to Andromeda. Requiem – the multimedia Requiem project, for which she has also released a teaser film and various short videos.
Zela also works on other projects, writes film music, works for theater productions and is involved as an artistic coach for young women in the music scene.
Nadja has a special bond with the writers Ariane Koch and Susanna Schwager – she has performed live with both of them many times. She is currently working on music for a 90min documentary movie, a program with the Ukrainian lyricist Liliia Zhernova and she is writing her 6th solo album. Nadja has also started writing poems in German and Swiss German.