Crack

When Bob Dylan first picked up an electric guitar with the sole purpose of poking hippies in the eye with it, the folk world was shocked. “Bob”, one disgruntled fan mumbled, “that different type of guitar you’re playing is really weird and unfamiliar to us. Please put it away and rediscover your love for the unamplified string”. Of course, Bob did nothing of the sort, but the hippies’ argument only made sense because at the time, the difference between an artist using an acoustic guitar and an artist using an electric guitar was a meaningful one. Today, few draw that distinction: it goes without saying that bands will use acoustic and electric guitars in whatever combination they see fit. No-one cares. We no longer categorise bands according to whether they plug in their guitars. We’re totally over that.

But while we might scoff and jeer at those narrow-minded folk fans and their silly distinctions that don’t really exist, we can’t help but carve out the boundaries of our cultural world with questionable categories of our own. We don’t notice they’re even there until people pop up who don’t fit easily into either camp, and although plenty of artists blur the line between ‘electronic’ and ‘live’, between ‘producer’ and ‘composer’, few blur it is articulately as Emika, whose eponymous debut album of ice-cold bass-drama is released in October on Ninja Tune.

“Something I’m quite interested to open up for discussion is what electronic music actually is, because I don’t believe I make electronic music. I sing, and I record everything, lots of acoustic sounds and I record my piano. If you want to be academic about it, technically its electro-acoustic. It is strange referring to stuff that has a live vocals as ‘electronic music’, and everything’s just very mixed up. I keep being called ‘a producer’, but I’m not a producer (laughs), I’m a composer. It’s strange how anyone working in electronic music automatically refers to themselves as a producer, I’m not really sure where such an industrialised term came from”.

It’s a fair question: why describe someone who has conceived of, written and developed a piece of music using machines powered by electricity as a ‘producer’, and someone who does the same thing using a guitar as a songwriter? Maybe it’s because we like to be weirdly selective about the things we label ‘technology?’ Laptops count, whereas guitars don’t anymore. But when the first caveman knocked out Stairway to Heaven on his prehistoric Stratocaster, that guitar would have been bleeding-edge technology. New things are technology, old things are just things. But Emika’s things are resisting this lazy dichotomy.

“I’ve got a digital audio workstation from the days before Ableton Live developed. I take that on the road with me and it doesn’t have a screen, it looks something like the kind of thing King Tubby might have had back in the day. I play a lot of the music through it. It feels more like playing the piano or something. I can play it in the dark. It just feels more like an instrument rather than a gizmo. It doesn’t have flashing lights; it doesn’t have a tempo which I play to and it’s got a nice singer-songwriter feel, as well as a techno feel”.

A techno singer-songwriter is probably not far off what Emika is, although her music weaves a winding path through dubstep rhythms as often as techno stomps. The blend of her voice (fragile and composed) and her music (snarling, clinical ballads made from bass, dead-handed piano, and industrially tinged electronic beats) makes for a slightly disorienting listen. Close your eyes and it’s the soundtrack to a Brothers’ Grimm animation. It sounds like the output of someone who has poured over every detail of their song writing and production, and it is pretty obvious that Emika gives 100% to her craft.

“I feel like I will never wake up and think ‘oh great, I’ve learnt that now, I’ve learnt music’. There’s always a new way of listening, or a new way of perceiving the sounds around you. I will never be satisfied with what I discover in music, and I will always seek to discover more”. Like any musician worth listening to, Emika has a healthy obsession with noise. But Emika’s brain seems to have also literally become wired for sound:

“I work with sounds, and I think about sounds before I think about music. It’s strange, I’ve noticed that the more music I’ve made, and the more obsessed I’ve got with music, the less able I was to draw and paint and understand photography, I find it really hard now when I go to an art gallery. When I was younger I was just really obsessed with painting and drawing. I used to make all my own clothes, and make fabric too. But then I just really fell in love with music…maybe it will come back one day.”

But visual media’s loss is music’s gain, and besides, there’s plenty to think about when taking the Emika show on the road. “I always get stuck behind this huge table with everyone else’s gear on it and a massive banner, and you can see, like, my shoulders”. And hidden away behind the banks of machines, Emika is plotting a new concept in musical performance: pop-up venues where you can choose not only your tech-spec but the physical parameters of your show too.

“I’ve played in all kinds of places – I’ve played in classical spaces, and I’ve also been booked to play at one, two, three in the morning at dubstep parties full of kids. It’s nice to be able to play a range of venues – one thing I have realised though is that there definitely needs to be some other type of venue, or location. There’s either venues for gigs and concerts or clubs for DJs, and I think a new type of location needs to develop, you know, with different opening times, and maybe not with a stage, because I don’t really feel like my music belongs in a concert type space, but also not really in between techno at three in the morning. It would be so good if you could put on your rider the space that you require! Then your location could morph and change a few hours before you arrive, how cool would that be?”

In Emika’s world, the venues are the wrong shape, producers compose the music and electronic acts get live-er by the day. But the end result of all this messin’ with the fault lines is an album full of quietly creepy music delivered with the smile of a silent assassin. Breathe in, and inhale deeply, it’s a heady mix.



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Words: Adam Corner

http://www.myspace.com/emikamyspace

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