How Zheani is embracing the dark feminine

Online, Sparks appears to be part nymph, part alien, a shadowbanned lovechild between Grimes and Mew-Two. In real life still, she’s not too dissimilar to the scantily clad caricature that floods her shadowbanned Instagram. She only appears visually on this call for a few minutes as she finds being on video distracting: a ghostly modelesque alt queen, unironically wearing a Twilight t-shirt that reflects the chasms of her inner stan.

Sparkes wasn’t named until two weeks after she was born. Her father, “crazy into numerology and tarot” needed to sit down with his daughter’s birth time and chart the planets, to find out what her name was supposed to be. “The name was really special to him,” she tells me, “he put a lot of time into it.”

“I'll tell you something beautiful,” she continues, “I've just done this tour and I met a girl who has a two-year-old daughter who’s named Zheani. [My dad] went to great lengths to find this name and pick it just right for me, so I feel like I've done it justice.”

While she may now be selling out live shows in her home country of Australia, with internet followers in the hundreds of thousands, Sparkes’ climb to the echelons of sonic cyberspace has been anything but straightforward.

Zheani Sparkes grew up in central Queensland, “super rural…really impoverished, low-socioeconomic,” she tells me with grit. “Everyone's on government weekly payments. No one has careers and jobs, parents don't work. I'm going to public school, and all the adults are wrapped up in their own dramas rather than choosing to invest time in creation with their kids.”

She likens her “shit hole country school” to a prison, “I'm not an art school kid,” she says, “but shout out to kids that get to live that. It sounds like an amazing childhood. I was just another fucking mutt bitch trying to make my way in the world, and getting caught up into a series of absolutey bizarre events.”

Sparkes’ experiences in her early twenties left her “spun out and even more fucked up than I was from my teens and my childhood,” eventually turning to art as a way to work through her feelings, “once you're so exposed to shit, you can't really un-expose yourself…”

Using music to purge her emotions, Sparkes slowly unfroze herself from a stagnant life that was not progressing, “it was almost like writing memoirs,” she says of her early material, “if you listen to my back catalogue, it's very self authoring. That's why I have an amazing listenership now. The things that I spoke about that were really personal to me, so many people have experienced things so similar. We might be on different sides of the globe, [in a] completely different community, but the archetype of that experience, and being that vulnerable person in a situation, is so generic and textbook. It was like diving inside myself and telling myself about these things that as a teenager, you’d do anything in your power to not even have it brought up in relation to you.

"You want to give a perception that you're not from all that awful shit, and you're trying to make your way in the world. So I kind of spiralled straight back down to the thread of the needle.”

Those early memoirs were soundtracked by moody and atmospheric electronic and trap beats, narrated by Sparkes’ loose raps. Years later they have evolved significantly, into hyper processed rave and trance fuelled stupors.

“I've been processing what it means to have been wrapped up into insidious magic, sex magic [and] really weird shit,” Sparkes tells me of the inspiration behind her brutish new mixtape The Spiritual Meat Grinder. “As a young person I'm trying to channel how I'm meant to process that energy moving forward. At the time, I was scared and I felt like that was real, and I wanted to re-inbody the rejected feminine, and face something that I had spent many years not expressing in a conscious way…not really sexual and not embracing that aspect of femininity. I needed to embody that fully so the energy couldn't hurt me. I didn't know what was ahead, but I knew that I needed to embody sex, magic, and the dark feminine.”

Growing up in a household where there was domestic violence and extreme drug use on a daily basis, Sparkes was drawn to making electronic music because of its accessibility. “There wasn't any fostering of the arts,” she says, “so I get on a MacBook, and I slap a fuck in dirty YouTube trap beat on a garage track, and then I’m ready to go!” she laughs.

Despite being a self proclaimed (and still identifying) “loner”, the internet provided connection for Sparkes, not to people per se, but to other musical minds. She’d upload tracks to Spotify and Soundcloud, and DIY music videos to YouTube channels she describes as “full on underground scenes”.

Sparkes even met her main producer for The Spiritual Meat Grinder via Beatstars, the digital production marketplace that allows music producers to licence, sell, and giveaway free beats. “This Serbian kid had a beat, it was actually the ‘I Smell Good’ beat,” she smirks, “I reached out to buy this beat, and then they just started sending me a lot of beats. Their name is Venesia and at the time they were like 16, and they're just a kid on the internet in Serbia. Growing up as a kid on the internet from Berajondo, [I think] it's super cool.”

“They’re an amazing artist and I think [they’re] grown beyond their years. They're sending these beats and they're fully novice, they've got no real formal experience,” she explains, going on to tell me that she actually met Venesia in person in Austria recently. “He wasnt trying to drink or smoke around us, he was just being a fucking adult, it was so cool. I was a bit tweaked out. It made me feel very maternal,” she laughs, “as you can see, you don't need to have any experience to work with me!"

Now for Zheani, music is slowly becoming more tangible, and the fruits are luscious. For her recent tour, she checked outeach music scene in each city, and handpicked the artists to open the respective night. Solsa, who produced her spaceage hyperpop rager ‘BWC’, opened for her recently in Sydney (look at the Youtube comments of the music video filmed in Japan too, and one reads “I have a feeling this is going to blow up. I can see it been an anthem played in gay clubs.”)

“Its so fucking fulfilling, its really cool,” she says of seeing her fans in real life on the tour. “Ask me what my favourite part of the show was and it was meeting the fans. Meeting all individuals, being able to have a human experience with them and give them a human experience. The whole night is for people to come out of that internet mode, and be in their body and have it manifest in reality.”