Erika M. Anderson, who records as EMA, grew up in South Dakota. Her great-great-grandparents, dairy farmers who emigrated from Scandinavia to the Midwest, probably would not recognize the world today, with its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headsets and its online identities. But they would recognize the spirit of Anderson’s music, a half-electronic, half-organic project that has the feel of someone trying to figure out the world, using all the tools at hand. “The Future’s Void,” her new album, sprawls and pulses, as much like unpredictable weather as like music. (On its cover, Anderson is actually wearing an Oculus Rift headset.)
Improvisation is everywhere. When the drums sound big and echoey, they’re probably V-Drums, electronic pads that trigger samples of drum sounds. When Anderson’s vocals are most fevered, she might be extemporizing and layering the results, or she could be using the Pro Tools recording system to create roughed-up copies of her own voice.
When talking or Gchatting or texting about this album, Anderson frequently mentions “the void,” which is equally likely to be the sky she saw above her when she was growing up in Sioux Falls or the Internet. Referring to her grandparents, who were religious, she wrote, “The church gave them meaning and comfort in the middle of nowhere. The void can be terrifying but, like everything that terrifies me, I’m trying to see the good in it, the creative possibilities of the void.” Slowly, Anderson’s music is filling that emptiness.
One of her previous bands, the loose and brawny trio Gowns, recorded a song called “White Like Heaven,” which she still performs. She calls it an “improv spoken-word drone piece.” There’s footage on YouTube of a performance of it, from April, 2007, in San Francisco. A guitarist and a drummer are invisible, somewhere in the blackness behind Anderson. They generate waves of feedback and cymbal noise as Anderson sings lyrics that change every time she performs the song. Her vocals are a loud whisper, somehow tentative even when she’s yelling. She rocks back and forth, and when she gets more worked up she bends over and reaches toward the audience. The lyrics circle around the phrase “we were driving.” Eventually, the vision becomes clearer—“We were driving and suddenly I could see it, I could see it”—and Anderson ends on a question: “Is it white like heaven or dark like space, is it bright like God or ace black spades?” It’s our friend: the void.
Anderson now lives in Portland, where she shares a small house with her bandmate and partner, Leif Shackelford. She oscillates between spurts of isolation and open-ended collaboration, and, when she talks about the bands she’s been in, she voices a frustration at trying to retain the immediate sensation of improvisation while playing composed songs. “Chaos is chaotic, so you can’t exactly plan it,” she said at one point. Shackelford has become her main artistic foil, and his skills complement hers. Quiet and efficient, he is an app creator, programmer, and all-around modifying agent. In their carpeted living room last March, Shackelford was working on programmable, swivelling L.E.D. screens for her “The Future’s Void” tour which will stand onstage behind Anderson and display patterns.
Anderson’s début as EMA, “Past Life Martyred Saints” (2011), was an indie sensation. While she was still collaborating with others, changing the band name to her initials allowed Anderson to seem as if she were releasing her first album. She is pictured on the album art, as she is on “The Future’s Void,” but here her eyes are obscured simply by her blond bangs. There is a sense of appearing in the world, but with an emotional asterisk. The record’s biggest hit was “California.” “Fuck California, you made me boring” is how she opens the song, talk-singing through a narrative that feels as ad-libbed as “White Like Heaven.” Her voice is clear, surrounded by synths, viola, and percussion that follows the cadence of her singing rather than any specific tempo. “I’m just twenty-two” is the closest the song has to a chorus, a small melodic motif that is followed by Anderson completing her own thought, while echoing Bo Diddley: “I don’t mind dying.”
There are some precedents for this kind of sprechstimme in rock: Lou Reed (whom Anderson cited as an influence) and Kim Gordon (who, she told me, wasn’t). What makes “California” work is the contrast between Anderson’s brief, sharp images—“I saw Grandma carrying a gun”—and the rootless, nameless wash of sound, closer to experimental electronic music or free improvisation than to any song-based style.
“The Future’s Void” is populated by drum machines, but nothing in the digital grid constrains Anderson’s ability to retain the unkempt quality of improvisation. The album is a delight, because it exhibits so few pretensions and has so many raw ideas flying through it. Though there is no genre name for her music, anything with enough guitar playing will be labelled rock. Anderson’s version of rock is a hairy, occasionally digital beast that’s designed not to get things right but, rather, to highlight tensions.
The song that Anderson calls the album’s emotional and lyrical centerpiece, “3Jane,” is a meditation on living on the Internet, which, the album notes assert, “came out in a flood.” The track is built around Anderson’s piano chords, played on steady eighth notes, as the drummer Billy Sandness plays a slow version of the Phil Spector beat, most easily recognized in “Be My Baby.” The song is spare, a variant of a ballad, and it is bathed in reverb. Anderson sings a line that hews more closely to a specific melody than most of her songs, alternating between singing out and dropping into her breathy hybrid whisper. “Like an American superpower, turn on the spotlight, and nobody cowers,” she sings, one of several variations on what seem to be descriptions of the Internet. Though she characterizes herself as “not anti-Internet,” the closing lyrics of the song are fairly dystopian: “I don’t want to put myself out and turn it into a refrain. It’s all just a big advertising campaign when everybody’s looking. It’s supposed to be a dream but disassociation, I guess, it’s just a modern disease.”
The album has a gauzy, banged-up feeling, like karaoke versions of songs you dimly remember, processed until they sound like songs you definitely don’t know. But there are moments of completely normal rock that just make the rest of the album stranger. “So Blonde” is played entirely on traditional rock instruments, and, by Anderson’s admission, its drumbeat is a paraphrasing of the one on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “Since I did the video in Venice Beach, everyone thinks it’s about California again, but it’s actually more about Seattle and my conflicting feelings on the Kurt-and-Courtney narrative,” she told me. The lyrics are about a boy and a girl, both described as “so blonde,” though Anderson sings “blonde” in a phonetic knot that doesn’t sound like a word in English. She sings, “So lemme tell you ’bout this boy I know, he’s so blonde, he’s got a real junkie tattoo, he’s so blonde, he’s gonna act like he’s a feminist, he’s so blonde, but leave it up to you to prove,” giving us an unmistakable image of Cobain. ♦
