Introducing: EMA

EMA is South Dakotan native Erika M. Anderson, once of experimental noise-rockers Gowns and the even more abstract Amps For Christ. Last month, she released a truly stunning debut album. Past Life Martyred Saint is a deeply intense piece of music – covering issues such as death, domestic violence and self-harm, delivered over a soundscape melded from Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground and violent guitars. Erika describes her sound as “folk music meets harsh noise” – it is visceral, naked in its honesty and quite, quite brilliant. It is also the work of someone giving it one last chance to make a living out of music.

When The Line Of Best Fit meets with Erika before a gig in Manchester, she cuts an imposing figure. She is six feet tall and of formidable Viking stock. Her blonde bob frames a huge smile and welcoming demeanour. Contrary to how the album may superficially portray her, Erika is not miserable, neurotic or hard work. She is, in fact, a delightfully engaging interviewee; our chat is punctuated by bouts of garrulous laughter and her lascivious potty mouth. Later, her set is 30 minutes of dazzling beauty. The opening song ‘Marked’ is jaw-droppingly raw, while on the trash-talk of ‘California’ she is out into the crowd like an electrified harpy. Anderson has a huge stage presence and she knows it.

Our interview is conducted before the show, which is in a renovated cotton mill. We are on the top floor, which appears to be a disused, and ransacked, storeroom. Debris is strewn across the expanse of floor, and we are sat across a lone table. The windows are smashed and there is a devilish cartoon painting on one of the walls. It is an exhilaratingly creepy place to do an interview. As the sun sets and the shadows lengthen, it seems the perfect place to discuss the making of Past Life Martyred Saints and the enthralling world of EMA.

Your previous band Gowns disbanded last year, what sort of music did they make?

I like to describe some of the music I make as digital Velvet Underground. There was a lot of viola but then also lots of different sorts of electronics and acoustic guitar. A lot of critics have struggled to describe it. Pitchfork said it was like Mountain Goats and Dusted said Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which is funny because one is completely instrumental and the other is completely lyric-based.

How was the break-up – sexy and doomed, or desperate and chaotic?

It was both – you got it exactly right. It was sexy and desperate. It stopped being sexy around about the last UK tour which was 2007, but it remained desperate until about 2010. Maybe someday we’ll write a book about it.

I believe you were thinking of giving up music for good – how close were you to packing it in?

Really close. Gown imploded and I was living in West Oakland, which is a crazy neighbourhood just outside San Francisco. I was substitute teaching and living in this horrible crime-ridden area, loving substitute teaching but it was also absolute hell, getting shit on by kids all day. The band was done and I didn’t see there was a reason for me to be there anymore. It was far away from my family and I felt like I’d exiled myself out there. I was totally done. I felt like I’d failed and it was time to go pack up and go home.

So, what happened? How did EMA, as a solo project, come about?

It was right about then that Krista from Souterrain Transmissions got back hold of me – I hadn’t talked to her for a while. She said ‘do you have any solo stuff that you are working on?’ I didn’t make the decision lightly, I didn’t know if I wanted to go back and do music. It takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of commitment and you have to give up a lot of things in life; a lot of comforts and stability. I was like ‘I think I’m ready to go home and make jalapeño poppers and watch the Super Bowl. I might get a couch and a TV. That sounds nice.’ But, I decided I wanted to give it one more chance.

Why one more chance?

I knew I had it , but the connections were not being made and that felt terrible at the time. Now I know it was just how it was supposed to be. I feel like sometimes you have to give up in order to move forward.

So, when you decided to carry on, had you already written the songs that would make up Past Life Martyred Saints?

Some of them. Songs like ‘Marked’ and ‘Butterfly Knife’ are really old – five or six years old – and that was when I was just learning how to do stuff on the computer. I would record a bunch of stuff and then throw in a bunch of effects in all the wrong ways. People would say ‘you are peaking that buzz wrong’ and I would be like ‘I like it – don’t touch it!’

Did you have an initial vision for how you wanted the album to sound?

I think I have a kind of sonic language in my head that I like to use. It’s not a conscious thing – it’s sort of folk music meets harsh noise. I know what I want.

I’d like to ask you about some specific songs on the album. ‘Marked’ seems amazingly naked and personal, and would appear to be about an abusive relationship. How hard was it to write and record a song like that?

‘Marked’ was done in one take. It was written at the exact moment it was recorded, so what you hear is the first take of guitar and voice. The difficult part of writing any of these songs is not necessarily sitting down and writing out lyrics, it is figuring where they sit subconsciously in your brain and trying to access some of what your base emotions are about things.

Is being honest important to you, even if it reveals a huge amount about your inner psyche?

That’s what I kind of want to do; I want to do things quickly but portray things honestly. Sometimes I cannot write about things until years after they have happened. A lot of times when I first write something, I won’t let it out. With ‘Marked’ and ‘Butterfly Knife’ , I was worried that they were way to weird and that they were too controversial and evocative. I think that some things sound too bizarre and too revealing. I have to give them a little space.

There is a sense of when such songs are released, they are ‘out there’ for public consumption. How do you feel about people creating their own impression of you from their interpretation of the songs?

It is terrifying – at first I didn’t want to release some of these things. I got frustrated with the demise of Gowns and that things had failed, and I’m only strong enough now and grounded enough now to let some of this stuff out and not be too worried about it, or terrified of what people might think of me, or say about me on the internet. It has taken a little while before I was ready. Maybe it will still drive me crazy, we will have to see.

On a lighter note – if a song about a Viking funeral can be described that way – tell me about the track ‘Grey Ship’ which I believe was inspired by your Nordic ancestors.

With ‘Grey Ship’, I first wanted to write a hippy song and as I was playing it, I was getting an image of this big Viking funeral boat. I realised I was thinking a lot about my ancestors, especially my great-great-grandparents who emigrated from Sweden and Norway to settle in the middle of nowhere, in these barren, frozen wastelands of middle America, living in sod huts. So, thinking back to them and their homesteading, was me figuring out about my own leaving home.

There is a family story that my great-great-grandmother had a boarding house in Nebraska, which the Norwegian writer Ole Rolvaag stayed at. He wrote a book called ‘Giants In The Earth’ which is about these settlers that come over from Norway to South Dakota and all the women go insane. There is this character of a woman who goes insane on a prairie which was based on my great-great-grandmother. I was thinking about that – her sacrifices and going crazy.

That’s an amazing story. Without being disrespectful to your home state, my perception of present-day South Dakota is that it is still a pretty desolate place?

Absolutely, it feels to me a very arbitrary place. There are so many places in the world that feel special, that have myths about themselves – like LA and New York, and the South and Seattle. South Dakota is, like, ‘why did they settle there?’ There are some falls and a river, but beyond that it feels a supremely arbitrary place.

That must be a really weird concept to grapple with when you are growing up there?

The arbitrariness of the place really fucks with people. People are really confused about what the fuck the meaning of life is. It’s crazy, but it also makes people very creative with their time. There is a Zen nihilism type of thing; going out and getting totally smashed, but then living poetically even though there is nothing around you that is poetic.

So, you moved from South Dakota to Los Angeles. Is it true you chose LA because you liked ‘Welcome To The Jungle’ by Guns N’ Roses?

I liked that and ‘LA Woman’ by The Doors. That was arbitrary as well. I was like ‘where am I gonna go?’ I almost thought of just throwing a dart into a map.

But with your love of The Velvet Underground, why didn’t you go to New York?

I did listen to The Velvet Underground a lot, so it should have been New York. The thing is that when you are from a small town in the Mid West, to go to California is crazy but to even consider going to New York would be ‘why would you ever move there? You will end up dead in a ditch, eaten by cockroaches and mugged, with a dirty needle hanging out of your arm – instantly, as soon as you get off the plane’.

Well, it all seems to be working out. The initial reviews have been amazing for Past Life Martyred Saint, including a five star write-up in the fusty ol’ Sunday Times. Do you feel vindicated in some way?

It’s strange; I almost don’t let myself react. I don’t look at what’s right in front of me at the time. It is so silly; perhaps I should let myself celebrate more. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in. Something like The Sunday Times was a real surprise because it is such a weird album to be introduced to the masses like that. That’s seems really exciting.

And the masses might be intrigued to find out that you don’t seem miserable and intense – quite the opposite in fact.

Yeah, a lot of interviewers have said ‘you’re smiling and talking’, but to me the album isn’t dark; it feels personal and honest but that doesn’t have to be synonymous with darkness.

Okay, prove how un-dark you are. Tell me a joke.

I do know one. Shit. I’m totally forgetting it. What did…. I can’t remember it. Er, what did the alien high-quality mattress salesman use as his…. Fuck. What did the alien high-quality mattress salesman use as his slogan – or something?

I don’t know – what did the alien high-quality mattress salesman use as his slogan?

ET own foam.

Ha ha.

Thanks for laughing.

Moving swiftly on. My final question – have you an idea as to what the second EMA album might sound like?

The second EMA album will be a novel, perhaps.

What, do you mean like a book?

It’ll be in book form, maybe.

But, hopefully not a joke book.

I think you can safely say that it won’t be a joke book.

EMA – Milkman

Past Life Martyred Saints is out now on Souterrain Transmissions