Erika M. Anderson: "I don’t consider EMA to be predestined for greatness; I worry every time that I’m going to totally fuck up and fail"

I was going to come in with the big guns, throw Kate Losse’s article about life as a woman at Facebook at Erika M Anderson and see what she thought. We’d get right into it, discuss the big points and come to epic conclusions…but the internet conspired against me, that article appeared and EMA responds to it alongside dropping newest track from her brilliant new album The Future’s Void, “3Jane”, and all of a sudden my angle is destroyed in flames of all shapes and sizes.

But, as I explain this over Skype to Anderson, she’s delighted to hear it: “No, that’s good!” she exclaims. “Lemme talk for a little bit, I can’t tell if I’m in the mood to talk about the internet, I feel like I’ve been talking about the internet a lot! [laughs]. It’s like, today, I wanna tweet ‘okay, there are other things on the record, other songs on the record besides all that. Some people are almost not reviewing the second half; there’s mellower things that don’t talk about being online and stuff!”

Alright then, let’s find another angle, I say…

“No, let me just preface this by saying I really didn’t set out to make a record that was about the internet,” explains Anderson. “All these weird things are happening….like the thing I’m wearing on the front cover…” The Oculus VR? “Yeah, it’s just been bought by Facebook! That’s just….fuckin’ weird! It completes the meaning of the cover, y’know? It almost didn’t quite make sense before, and now this real life event has made it so that the cover makes sense….”

The curious thing about The Future’s Void is how prescient it is itself, never mind the sci-fi of William Gibson that has a pervading influence almost throughout. Anderson reveals that even the most obviously internet/surveillance themed track wasn’t actually written with some foresight about the NSA and Edward Snowden: “It’s really weird; it’s not like while I was writing this record I was even on the internet a lot,” she says. “I was kinda just at home trying to be mellow and hang out with friends. I mean, I’ve been writing basically since I got off the road - the middle of 2012 or something - so I’m wondering how I picked up on this stuff; how did this come together? A lot of things right now feel very topical but I’m trying to figure out how that happened. Even the “Satellites” thing, it was written before the NSA thing, before Snowden.” Is it really about the Cold War, Reagan and Star Wars, I suggest? “It was actually written about the Eastern Bloc….and then Snowden comes out and absconds to Russia! But I was reading sci-fi, and I guess that you end up channelling people who are trying to predict things…”

We chat for a while about the second half of the album and in particular about the mellow, West Coast-influenced songs like “When She Comes”, when Anderson reveals that those sun-drenched Californian songs came at a time when the South Dakotan decided to move upstate to Portland: “I moved from West Oakland to Portland, Oregon,” she begins, which is kind of like the show [Portlandia]…but I don’t get involved with the canning and pickling! I had some friends and family here. I don’t know what you know about West Oakland but it kinda gets really wearying to live there after a while. There’s a lot of crime, a lot of drugs…but there’s also a lot of amazing things about it! People are really friendly and the sun shines every day, it’s beautiful, there are all these decaying Victorian homes….but I remember once there were two drive-by shootings on the lot where I was working in the studio in one week so I was like ‘okay, I don’t really like the idea of bullets coming through the wall when I’m trying to do a vocal take!”

Was it a necessary move for Anderson, then? “I have mixed feelings about moving,” she admits, “but I kinda had to just flee Oakland, and I was thinking about moving back home to South Dakota with my parents. I had made up my mind to move and to go and try and re-figure out my life”. I interrupt, asking if that means Anderson was thinking about quitting EMA, quitting music? “Yeah, yeah! Before the last record [Past Life Martyred Saints] came out I was like ‘okay, I’ve failed at this’ and I was going to come home and reconsider a different life strategy or something. I’m not really part of the music scene here [in Portland] so much – that’s not because I don’t like it, there’s lots of really cool people up here. I was really just shy and singular when I moved up here, I didn’t want to bust in and say ‘hey, I’m here, on the scene everybody!’ I wanted to be low profile…and it’s turned out really well. I don’t feel part of a scene but I do have really good friends and that gives me a lot of comfort, I think.”

I mention that a lot has been made of Anderson apparently not being welcomed as part of California’s noise scene, despite her wonderful work with Gowns and Amps for Christ, but Anderson baulks at the thought of this, and this sets the tone for the rest of the interview. It’s time to set the record straight and clear a few things up, and Anderson does this in the most wonderful and engaging way, just in case you think that she’s getting annoyed. She explains more: “That’s another thing I’d like to clear up! I was definitely welcomed in the noise scene at some point; I had a lot of respect in that scene for doing stuff as Gowns. There was just a certain faction of people who were like [laughs] ‘who the fuck is this chick?’ Because I came in with a lot of big ideas and I wanted to do this, and this….but it wasn’t like everyone hated me in the scene, I had a lot of friends there, and I threw a lot of shows…it was just a couple of people, but they had their own vested interests in keeping the status quo of which they reigned supreme!”

Eventually, we return to the sound of The Future’s Void. I say that it sounds like she’s taken two of the elements of Past Life – the noise and the pop – and pushed them further in those directions, so what prompted the overall sound of the album? “There were actually other songs and demos that were more kind of either riot grrrl influenced, or straight-up punk guitar that just didn’t end up quite fitting,” reveals the tall Dakotan. “Even if you’re gonna write a punk song, in the classic punk sense, you kinda have to decide if you’re going to straight up try and make it sound like classic punk songs are, which is kinda like trying to manufacture fake antique or something, or printing a brand new Crass t-shirt…just getting that trick of production. It just didn’t work; some of the songs I really liked but I just couldn’t get the production to be….interesting.” Anderson then goes on to reveal what the next EMA record might just sound like: “I’m already working on this weird little acoustic punk album – that’s what I want to be doing right now! I want to be in a trailer, in the desert…but I can’t, I’m in rainy Portland!” So does doing things like interviews and promo frustrate Anderson, or is it just a case of that it kind of gets in the way of creation? “Yeaaah,” she tentatively begins, “in the past week I’ve been going through this creative tear where I’ve taken a bunch of pictures, I wrote some stuff and I have all these new ideas and I’m kinda…..oh, you know I wish I could just take some time and do that real quick. “

Portrait by Gaelle Beri.

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We continue to talk about interviews, and Erika explains that she actually finds doing this sort of thing an enlightening experience at times: “One of things I like about making music and art is that I do like being part of a conversation, you know? Like a cultural conversation, an aesthetic conversation…so in some ways I like interviews.” So it’s not an experience that you completely dislike? “No! It’s not like when I’m having an interview I’m like ‘oh I don’t like this person, I don’t like this experience’,” she says, “it’s more just…wow, there are only so many hours in the day. But part of the creative cycle is not having anything to do, or going out and being inspired by things…and you can’t be inspired by things when you’re sitting in talking about yourself! But I will say that sometimes really great insights will come from these conversations and will help me understand what I’m doing in whole different way. So it’s not like I hate it, it’s just a timing thing. You kind of say yes to shit before you have time to consider the fact you only have…like we have a week to get ready before this trip to New York where we’re doing this show. I should be practising all day, every day with the band but I’m not! I can’t do that for various reasons.”

Anderson is suddenly apologetic, explaining: “I’m trying to give you something new that I’ve not said over the past few days so I think it’s good to get the chance to clear up a couple of things.” I’m finding Anderson’s approach to interviews incredibly refreshing. I have to say that I’ve been lucky enough not to have had a bad interview experience but you can sometimes tell when an artist is going through the motions and listing their latest album’s influences and recording processes, kind of on autopilot. So to have a rambling conversation about various things feels like the right thing to do when Anderson is a musician with so many ideas and opinions pouring out of her. So, I take the chance to talk sci-fi, naturally. I explain that I first read Gibson as a teenager and read it purely for the story and none of the prescience or subtext. I ask when Anderson first read his work, and what did she take from it? She reveals it was around seven years ago: “I was a substitute teacher in Oakland and Berkley and one of the perks of that is that they let you take a free class over the summer,” she begins. “So I took a class in new media, not for credit, just because I wanted to learn about it and everyone was talking about Neuromancer. I was like, what is this shit? What is this thing that these nerds are all about?”

However it wasn’t Neuromancer that Anderson read first: “I actually first picked up Mona Lisa Overdrive; it was in the van or somewhere and I liked the title…and I was just floored! To me, the prescience of his stuff is amazing but his whole writing style is just so fucking cool. It’s kind of like Raymond Chandler.” Yeah it’s very noir, isn’t it? “Oh my god, yeah! The other thing I like…have you read Chandler? You kind of don’t know exactly what happened in The Big Sleep but you’re left with a feeling and impression of this world. The thing that really bugs me in books sometimes is that some have this idea that the hero is this ‘chosen one’…I was thinking about Dune and why I just didn’t totally vibe with it and it was because of that ‘you are a prince of sacred blood and you’re special’ and it’s kind of the same with the Harry Potter thing…and that just doesn’t appeal to me. I like the fact that Gibson’s characters are kinda fuck-ups, kinda random. They have these gifts but they’re not preordained for greatness.” I mention that it’s the same in Chandler’s work; that characters are morally flawed and it, thankfully, doesn’t take a black-and-white look at the world. Erika agrees: “Yeah, what’s the guy’s name in the Chandler one [Philip Marlowe]? He’s a drunk…but y’know he’s smart but he’s always getting hit over the head with shit ‘cause he doesn’t know what’s going on…”

So why did the Gibson stuff make it on to the record? “I was just trying to figure out how to talk about sci-fi ‘cause it really turns people off,” says Anderson, “so I was a little bit nervous to talk about that. Some of my nightmares as I was writing it were ‘oh my god, people are going to call this a cyberpunk record’ and I was gonna cringe…but you know [laughs] it IS kind of a cyberpunk record! So what am I gonna do about it?” We stick with the sci-fi theme for the moment: “Yeah, let’s just talk sci-fi! I didn’t really like the Matrix; all that ‘Neo, you are the one’. I find that less appealing than someone being a flawed character –“ Star Wars too, I ask? “Yeah! That’s another one where it’s ‘our only hope is you!’ and that means you know they’re not gonna fail because the universe has said that Luke Skywalker is the shit, so….whatever.” Somehow, in Anderson’s eternally fascinating mind, she’s managed to tie our conversation about preordination – despite my rambling explanation of predestination, Presbyterianism and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Erika’s reaction: “no fucking way!”) – back to EMA and The Future’s Void. Here she goes: “So I think….I don’t wanna write records just for the heroes, or the predestined. I don’t consider EMA to be predestined to greatness; I worry every time that I’m going to totally fuck up and fail.”

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I don’t want to leave the subject of sci-fi, so I ask Anderson about Gibson’s work and recent developments in the world of technology and the internet, particularly with reference to the Oculus Rift: “It’s funny, in these books there’s this narrative of two elites,” she explains. “It’s either this genetic elite or some sort of other, at war with a corporate interest or something, but in reality corporate interests do have this hereditary nature where things get passed, there’s a dark network….so a lot of people have said about the record ‘themes of paranoia!’ and I’m like, okay but Facebook did just buy Oculus, and if you read his statement he’s outlining this future where everyone has one of those headsets on and billions of people are using them and I’m like - ‘yo dude, my shit is small potatoes compared to that’. That’s the holder of the most information in the free world telling you that is what his ultimate plan is.” Can Anderson see a future for the VR? “That’s going to be really interesting - the guy who made it, he was a teenager when he created it and he’s only 21 now. Who the fuck knows what happened; some people are speculating that an activist investor got in there because they raised a lot of money really quick. I mean, it’s a cool product but it’s also possible that somebody came in there, bought a large stake and then had ties to Facebook…..I dunno! Do I sound paranoid yet?”

Despite our best efforts, we can’t keep away from the subject of the internet in the end, and as our time runs out we do indeed end on that very topic: “I’m not totally anti-internet,” explains Anderson. “I think there’s a lot of fun, cool stuff going on as far as creativity and social justice goes, and then just entertainment and fun shit.” I say that’s actually what I took from The Future’s Void - that it’s a blueprint for interacting positively with technology and the internet, rather than retreating away from it…”Yeah!” exclaims Erika. “That’s kind of my thought and what I’d been doing for a little bit after the record [Past Life] came out but then shit got weird. But I think if you’re scared and you think something has a power over you…then that’s not good.”

And so, finally, Anderson brings things to a close with an explanation of what led her to interacting positively: “I was talking about being a woman on the internet; I did feel weird about having photos on there and things that were represented by myself, and I kept talking about it and thought, fuck it! I’ve been working the past week, week and a half on new images…what am I gonna do? I can either sit here and complain about it, ‘cause I do think it’s a problem, or…I mean, I worked my ass off trying to make these images that came out with “3Jane”, the void images, the cube images…all this stuff, and I feel good about that. I was complaining about this problem, I was scared of this thing, so all you can do is get in front of it and do something about it, y’know? You can – it’s not that hard!”

That’s the key; do you run away from it and concede defeat to Facebook, the online abusers and bullies, the people who try to secretly survey us? No. We can’t – we have to follow the example of EMA and confront it, do something and be positive. It’s still in our hands to choose.

The brilliant latest record, The Future’s Void, is out now on City Slang. Read out 8.5/10 review here.