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EMA - ‘Red Star’, from Past Life Martyred Saints (Souterrain Transmissions, 2011)
One of, if not the most, interesting things about EMA is the combination in her music of stability with wavering fidelity. By the first I mean there is a recognisable ‘sound’, despite the diversity of the tracks on Past Life Martyred Saints and on numerous other projects, which I’ll talk about shortly. There’s her voice, obviously, and there’s her guitar - which I won’t pretend to know anything about (although the same should also go for her voice) technically speaking, but definitely belongs in a certain rock tradition involving words beginning with post- and a certain mixture of the sparse and the noisy. The element of fidelity is thus in part just a matter of distortion, but layered on top of that with the style and desired effect of recording. Here on this album, the division first becomes evident on the opener, ‘Grey Ship’, which has an already acknowledged shift in fidelity mid-way through, from something basically ‘lo-fi’ to a richer, deeper sound. But the problem with ‘lo-fi’ as a genre descriptor has always been that while recording quality can have an immediate effect on the listener, it can be crafted at either end into a quite affecting, complex and engaging work (or equally a bland piece of dross). So while the ‘bass drop’ signifies a shift in tone on that song, it’s not a matter of one half being the better one.
Different songs on the album seem to inhabit different styles, which is often something I find rather off-putting about a record, as if it can’t decide what voice to speak to me in (the obvious analogue is the experimental novel, occasionally successful but probably still less common than the eclectic album). ‘California’ skirts close to spoken-word rap, whereas the following ‘Anteroom’ has the slow rise-and-fall strumming of slowcore by Bedhead or Codeine. But consider it less as a matter of arrangement or instrumentation - different as they may be - and rather in terms of the effect of the recording, the final product of modern industrialised music, and the diversity can be seen as a shift - mostly upward from distortion and effects-driven layering, but also downward to a certain aura of simplicity - in fidelity to voice and guitar.
For some reason, the work of her previous band with Ezra Buchla, Gowns, doesn’t do a whole lot for me. Perhaps it’s because it, in contrast with Past Life Martyred Saints, is such a quiet album, without the bombastic leaps in sound and grand gestures of intensity - instead, it crafts its own intense atmosphere and feeling. Oddly, in terms of general style and technical genre (‘noise-folk’), it’s probably closer to the 90s post-hardcore and arid, severe alt-rock that I usually like to listen to: but the beauty of that music is all in the way the sound connects with you, an (almost - philosophical doubt enters here) entirely subjective experience, and sometimes there can be too much aridity or severeness; at least in the way I perceive the band now. Though closer ‘Red Star’, which is very near in name to Gown’s parting full-length Red State, is perhaps the most Gowns-like track on EMA’s album. And it comes in close behind my top favourite, even if I may not wish it to be, on the record, ‘Marked’, which I just discovered also has a previous existence as a track on Broken Bones, Gowns limited-edition Latitudes LP for Southern Records. Where it has quite a different form, or at least it feels to have, but it remains essentially the same song.
In punk rock, rather ironically, stability is valued quite highly in musical terms (for generally valid conceptual reasons, as I’d be quite happy to explain another time) even if the sound itself is designed to be destabilising, at least in the context of more palatable musical styles. One of my favourite bands, loosely, of the genre who explored stability to the extreme are Lungfish, long-time purveyors of emo since-before-it-existed and hypnotic, heavily melodic drone-rock. Their songs don’t change so much by track as by album, and although I’ll admit to having stopped acquiring them and engaging with them as separate entities after the first half-dozen or so, I was close to uncovering a regular oscillation between quiet and loud on their alternating records. In the end, I always seem to cycle back to their first album, Talking Songs for Walking, not because they dis-improved from then on, but because it’s the origin point for what is almost a mathematical function applied to music and the ‘groove’.
On this album, both this song and ‘Milkman’ remind me of Lungfish. The former perhaps only slightly, and of Lungfish on one of their quieter, more meditative records; but for the latter it’s a stronger recollection of the full-on rockers from the first album, best among them being ‘Descender’, which is quite EMA-like in its obsession with physicality - “The tiny cuts in your skin/They let a little fresh air in” (here, the titular ‘Red Star’ turns out, after a soaring, cathartic finish, to also be a “bruised scar”). Or its climactic rush, “You dilate your opening/And when it starts to gush: START TO SING”. Interestingly, Lungfish has diverged recently into dual side projects, by vocalist Daniel Higgs and (as Zomes) guitarist Asa Osborne. The latter’s interest in tape manipulation and releases is mirrored by one of EMA’s first solo projects, Little Sketches on Tape. But rather than being droning layers of guitar and organ/keys (in which Zomes maintains a strong link with the Lungfish canon, and is not too far removed either from elements of Past Life Martyred Saints) her songs are bare-boned acoustic recordings: with the technical twist of being recorded on a voice-activated machine, which in the absence of inputted sound slowed down, giving the music a bizarre lilt.
You can listen to a selection of tracks from the cassette-only release at the link above, or if you do a bit of searching you can find a download. In its entirety, the effect is to remind me of listening to awkwardly - and in terms of fidelity to an ideal quality or standard of recording, ‘poorly’ - recorded bluesmen, like that CD of Leadbelly I bought on the basis of the cover of him on Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. Or, less concretely but more pertinently to the subject at hand, the controversy over whether popular recordings of Robert Johnson are artificially sped-up, as a consequence of different recording and playing speeds in the earlier days of vinyl records. Another of EMA’s earlier previous projects is a (still somewhat conceptual, since not all of the songs appear to be available yet) ‘digital LP’ entitled Some Dark Holler:
“the first solo record from Erika Anderson of the band GOWNS. It is a reconstruction of American folk music, informed by the underground’s vital focus on feedback and drone, but infused with distinct compositional choices and unabashed vocal harmonies. This project seeks to explore/explode genre and technology, and come to terms with the fact that the modern folk song is probably being made on a computer.”
(emphasis in original)
The tracklisting includes the utterly amazing Kind Heart, her 16-minute version of Robert Johnson’s ‘Kind Hearted Woman’, accompanied as a visual element of the ‘digital LP’ by a hand-drawn ‘map’ of the song - “I like to think of it as a music equivalent to the hobo code, although some would refer to it as a graphic score.” ‘Red Star’ goes on something of a similar journey, across its comparatively short six-and-a-half minute length. Here the gender roles are reversed to a more traditional setting, with “A boy, a beautiful, beautiful boy” with “eyes of green” - but I’d forgive you for thinking it was “I scream” or “ice cream”. Throughout the long arc of the song, the long, drawn-out guitar chords, built up from small, almost imperceptible tones and gentle, harmonious picking, carve out a soundscape worthy of the best psychedelic blues. There’s a very bluesy line, too, in the stanza “Got a strange fascination/I been holdin’ on the one/for that straight revelation/I been holdin on too long”. Although it’s clearly about romance, the object of affection could almost be the musical tradition that EMA, like all great white rock’n’rollers, has been channelling. Which makes the superb kiss-off line all the more poignant, or ironic, when it comes to apparently setting her face to the future: “I know nothing lasts for ever/And if you don’t love me/Someone will”.
