ema

EMA ANNOUNCES NEW EP OUTTAKES FROM EXILE Out February 2, 2018 on City Slang via Inertia Music

Listen to ‘MopTops (Twist While The World Stops)‘

Following the release of her powerful statement album Exile In The Outer Ring, released earlier in 2017 on City Slang via Inertia Music, EMA has announced details of a new EP release to coincide with her tour dates supporting Depeche Mode early next year.

Entitled Outtakes From Exile, the EP is just that, and will be released on February 2, 2018 on City Slang via Inertia Music. Today she shares a first track from the EP, ‘MopTops (Twist While The World Stops)‘.

“I made this song two years ago with my friend Severiano Martinez who also worked on Amnesia Haze and Fire Water Air LSD” comments Erika M. Anderson, aka EMA. “He does a lot of art stuff but is also edits video — my demo of this was much slower but he approached like an editor and chopped it all up and made it much faster. It was alchemy. The lyrics were improvised, I was thinking about the 50s and 60s living under the constant threat of nuclear war… People doing the twist in a red light nuclear fallout bomb blast, about the haircuts from then, ‘mop tops’. But now we have these two crazy world leaders with crazy hideous hair threatening to blow each other up!”

In this album cycle, written entirely before the last presidential election, EMA situates herself in what she calls “The Outer Ring”. It’s a zone between the country and the city, both literally and figuratively — a surprisingly diverse world of people united only by poverty and tension, and by the anger that comes from having your story and your struggles erased from the narrative. The vignettes here are less about an actual place than scenes that could be unfolding anywhere in America, including the stories of recent immigrants, defiant feminists, nihilistic mall teens, police shootings, and ex-urbanites who’ve been pushed out of city centres by stagnating wages and rising expense, forced up against resentful rural communities swallowed by sprawl.

EMA is not new to material that speaks truth to power (‘Active Shooter‘, ‘Song For Ghostship‘), and while these songs pull no punches in confronting ugly realities, they never wallow in despair. Exile In The Outer Ring and the accompanying forthcoming Outtakes From Exile are a portrait of resilience that render American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy.

EMA
Outtakes From Exile

1. Dark Shadows
2. MopTops (Twist While The World Stops)
3. I Don’t Treat Anything Good
4. From The Love That We Made
5. Breathalyzer Instrumental (EMA long cut)

Outtakes From Exile by EMA is out February 2, 2018 on City Slang via Inertia Music

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EMA

– Debuts “Fire Water Air LSD” video
– To support Depeche Mode on European tour 
– New album ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’ out now on City Slang

“Blasting the binary arguments that dominate America, Erika M Anderson’s brilliant third album looks into the Outer Ring.” –The Sunday Times Culture
“Each track is dripping with societal reform, documenting identity, poverty, capitalism and feminism through surly and meditated lyrics that reflect the contemporary age” – Aesthetica
“EMA’s powers of empathetic evocations prove potent.” – **** Record Collector
“EMA takes a stand against appropriation in her superb third album.” – ***** FT
“Raw vocals & impassioned delivery draw attention to EMA’s deeply personal and starkly candid lyrics “- The Line of Best Fit
“It’s an album of heavy drones, self-loathing and Erika’s gloriously twisted wit and feels like a sonic monument to the current fucked-up status of America in 2017” – The Quietus
“‘Aryan Nation’ is a noise-laden chronicle of the jilted ‘white trash’ Midwest, stuck in a vicious cycle of crime, poverty and dejection. The title alone is bound to raise a few eyebrows” – Drowned In Sound
 “A diverse palette of sparks & friction applied to a canvas of shifting unease” – 4/5 DORK
“EMA doesn’t preach, she simply draws serious attention to deep-set societal issues. When it’s done in such a striking and powerful way, it’s hard not to take notice” – DIY
“Themes around poverty and alienation have never felt so emotionally compelling” – Electronic Sound
 “Clever, unflinchingly experimental and catchy.” – MOJO
“Anderson has all but perfected a very delicate balance. She presents subjects boldly and forcefully, but also with a great deal of sensitivity and thought-provoking tact” – 4/5 The Skinny, Album of the Month

Having recently been confirmed to support Depeche Mode on their early 2018 European arena tour, EMA has shared her new video for “Fire Water Air LSD”, taken from her recent album ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’. Directed by DaVideo Tape with art direction by Erika M. Anderson (EMA), the clip combines footage of an analog performance utilizing Tachyons and artist tools designed by Logan Owlbeemoth and Omebi Velouria in Florida, with footage of EMA shot at Open Signal Portland Community Media Center.

“I had seen DaVideo Tape around PDX and the media center by my house. He always wore an X-Files hat and made crazy VR.  He liked the reptilian virgin mary t-shirt design I had made for EMA,” says EMA. “I had a week before leaving on tour and I really needed a video made — I discovered he is a rad analog video artist so I asked him to make an EMA vid.  He brought in his own Reptilian mask. I think the footage is fucking hilarious. He opened up a very playful side of me and this is one of the only videos where you will see me dancing and just kind of goofing off. Our inspirations were reptilians and the county fair. I used a lot of lizards and snakes in my own VR project in 2015 — to me they represent layers of hidden meaning and hidden reality, or at least belief in hidden layers of reality. The county fair is just cuz when I wrote this song I wanted it to sound like Guns N Roses coming out of grandstand speakers at a demolition derby.”

In this song cycle, written entirely before the last presidential election, EMA situates herself in what she calls “The Outer Ring.” It’s a zone between the country and the city, both literally and figuratively — a surprisingly diverse world of people united only by poverty and tension, and by the anger that comes from having your story and your struggles erased from the narrative. The vignettes here are less about an actual place than scenes that could be unfolding anywhere in America, including the stories of recent immigrants, defiant feminists, nihilistic mall teens, police shootings, and ex-urbanites who’ve been pushed out of city centers by stagnating wages and rising expense, forced up against resentful rural communities swallowed by sprawl.

Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius recently described EMA as a world-builder in an interview with The Quietus, and with ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’, she once again presciently details the complexity of our modern world. But the terrain here is interior as well as exterior.  EMA’s greatest strengths have always been honesty and intimacy, and this record fuses the personal with the political landscape at large. Musically, it’s a throwback to (EMA’s previous band) Gowns’ ‘Red State’, a widely influential underground cult classic.

EMA is not new to material that speaks truth to power (“Active Shooter,” “Song For Ghostship”), and while these songs pull no punches in confronting ugly realities, they never wallow in despair. ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’ is a portrait of resilience that renders American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy. A personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form.

EMA European live dates 2018:
January
17 Berlin, Germany – Mercedes-Benz Arena
19 Berlin, Germany – Mercedes-Benz Arena
21 Nuremberg, Germany – Arena Nürnburger
24 Bordeaux, France – Bordeaux Metropole Arena
27 Milan, Italy – Mediolanum Forum
29 Milan, Italy – Mediolanum Forum
31 Prague, Czech Republic – O2 Arena
February
02 Budapest, Hungary – BSA
04 Vienna, Austria – Stadthalle

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https://cityslang.com/

New album Exile In The Outer Ring out August 25 on City Slang via Inertia Music

Following last month’s bold anti-nationalist opening statement “Aryan Nation”, taken from her forthcoming album third album, Exile In The Outer Ring out Friday August 25 on City Slang via Inertia Music, EMA has shared a second track and video for “Breathalyzer”.
“Breathalyzer”, is a Gowns-style seven-minute noise epic, extending modular synth solos over a simple, almost chant-like melody, until the tale of one woman’s “heroic dose” in the backseat of a car turns into an exercise in suspense.
“The story in ‘Breathalyzer’ is very much an Outer Ring story” explains Erika M. Anderson. “It’s about kids getting fucked up in the back of a mid level sedan and driving through suburban landscapes.  I especially wanted to present a non-moralising view of a woman deciding to take drugs. In most media representations, if a woman decides to take a substance she usually loses control and something bad happens. She is punished for her choices. I wanted to acknowledge that possibility of danger, but in the end she is her own judge as she confronts herself in the mirror while tripping heavily.”

Director Alicia Gordon adds: “By utilizing vague human interactions, sexual nuances and subversive body language the rest of the narrative is left to individual viewers’ devices. It was important to me to maintain a fairly high level of in-camera purity with lighting and lenses rather than rely on excessive filters and post production. Thus illustrating one woman’s chosen escape from reality and how it existentially functions beyond her experience.“

After the success of 2011’s Past Life Martyred Saints and 2014’s prophetic The Future’s Void, EMA retreated to a basement in Portland, Oregon – a generic apartment complex in a non-trendy neighbourhood, with beige carpeting and cheap slat blinds. Now, she returns, with a portrait of The Outer Ring: A pitch-black world of dark night highways, American flags hung over basement windows, jails and revival meetings and casinos and rage. In a year dominated by white workingclass alienation and anger, EMA – a Midwesterner who never lost her thousand-yard stare — has delivered an album that renders Middle American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy.

In the first glimpse at the new record, “Aryan Nation”, feminist alienation becomes working-class alienation (“if you can’t see yourself in a “famous man,” is it because he’s a man, or because he’s famous?”) just as one person’s abuser becomes the systemic abuse of a nation. It’s an expansive vision that brings together concerns from every corner of our present moment — and themes that have recurred throughout EMA’s career, from the brutality of late capitalism to the collapsing boundaries between private and public — into one dark portrait of what it means to be American in 2017.

Exile In The Outer Ring, co-produced with Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is a return to EMA’s roots in the noise-folk outfit Gowns, whose 2007 album Red State prefigured many of Exile’s core themes, along with its mix of stripped-back folk (“Always Bleeds”, originally a Gowns song), spoken word (“Where the Darkness Began”) and noise epics (“Breathalyzer”).

The album is unique in its mingling of gender politics with American working-class anxiety. The voices we hear in these songs — druggy, surly societal outcasts; Byronic nihilists bringing down fire — speak to a kind of rebellion that’s typically reserved for men, and the archetype of the “dirtbag teenage boy” dominates the album. Yet EMA claims some of that same dirtbag alienation for women — “a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole,” asEMA puts it – and uses it to interrogate both her own vulnerability and how male violence shapes the world.

The result is a deeply personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form.

EMA
Exile In The Outer Ring
1. 7 Years
2. Breathalyzer
3. I Wanna Destroy
4. Blood and Chalk
5. Down and Out
6. Fire Water Air LSD
7. Aryan Nation
8. Nihilistic and Female
9. Receive Love
10. Always Bleeds
11. Where The Darkness Began

Exile In The Outer Ring by EMA is out Friday August 25
on City Slang via Inertia Music
Get it here: https://Inertia.lnk.to/ExileInTheOuterRing
For media enquiries contact yingdi@inertiamusic.com

For more information:
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www.twitter.com/the_EMA_
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