Portland’s Time Based Art Festival brings performers from all over the world for 10 days of performances, exhibitions, music and movement. This year the Portland-based musician Erika M. Anderson, who has performed internationally under the name EMA, will present a piece of music, video and storytelling - made in collaboration with artist Tabitha Nikolai - that she hopes will be like nothing audiences have seen before. We talk to Anderson about the piece and about the arc of her career from fronting punk bands in South Dakota to touring giant stadiums to returning to experimental noise.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival is underway right now. It brings artists from all over the world for 10 days of performances, exhibitions, music and movement.
This year, the Portland-based musician Erika M. Anderson is one of the featured performers. Anderson has said that she “grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota but got noise-pilled by Cali.” She’s performed internationally under the name EMA. Her TBA piece, a combination of music, video and storytelling, is called “Memory as a Rock Out of Reach.” There will only be one performance, this Friday at 8 p.m. at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Erika Anderson joins me now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Erika M. Anderson: Yeah, great to be here!
Miller: I love that line from your bio, that you “grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota.” What was on those jukeboxes? Or what was on the radio when you’d drive around as a kid in Sioux Falls?
Anderson: I mean, a lot of classic rock radio. South Dakota in general I realized recently has a lot of bikers, because of Sturgis. So classic rock radio was huge.
Miller: Like Led Zeppelin and The Doors?
Anderson: Like CCR, Guess Who. But I did like The Doors, I went through a Doors phase as a teenager.
Miller: So that’s what you grew up listening to, it was in the air. Then in your career you’ve explored punk, folk, drone and experimental music that we’ll talk about. In the decades since then, how much are those classic rock songs sort of still bouncing around in your head?
Anderson: I mean, I think they imprinted on me a sense of melody, I guess in a sense of riffs I would say. People ask me to describe the style of music I play, and I have a difficult time doing so. But I kind of say I grew up on the jukeboxes of South Dakota, so I love singing and I love songs. But then I came out to the West Coast and been part of this experimental electronic scene, like synthesizers, minimalism. We call it noise, which I should possibly define for the audience.
Miller: That’s that line, that you were “noise-pilled by California.” So what do you mean by noise?
Anderson: So for me, noise kind of refers to a style of music, you would say. And for me, it refers to a lack of traditional structure. So instead of a song structure, verse/chorus/verse/chorus, /first bridge/chorus/chorus/chorus, it’s kind of just structureless, it’s kind of what you make of it. A lot of times the structure will be sort of longer. That’s kind of how I describe it and kind of just like a freedom of approach, I would say. And of course, some distortion, I love distortion.
Miller: Do you remember when you first heard that kind of music and it really spoke to you? It’s so different from the popular music, not even just classic rock, but basically all popular music with a very recognizable structure and songs that are two-and-a-half, or three or four minutes, with a structure that’s been around for 60 years or so. So was there a time when you heard more experimental music and said, “Yeah, this is for me.”
Anderson: Well, first of all, when I was going to school in California, I started hanging out with Amps for Christ, who are kind of like this, to me, legendary folk noise band. In their record, they really had their own sort of sonic signature and their own sort of sonic world. And I just thought that was so interesting. So that was part of it, being like I can combine these things together, these pretty things with these “ugly” things.
But I think in some ways drone just made sense to me from growing up in South Dakota. I realized that the Great Plains, millions of years ago, were at the bottom of a huge inland sea. So to me, drone is like the horizon line. The static is kind of like the static of the radio station coming in from across miles. So drone just made sense to me.
I will say that when I first started going to noise shows, I didn’t totally get it, it wasn’t like it instantly was like, yes!
Miller: “I’ve been waiting for this all my life.”
Anderson: It took a little while, but to me it also means freedom, like freedom from expectations.
Miller: I want to play a song … this is from 2007, when you’re fronting the band Gowns. It’s a song called “White Like Heaven.” Let’s have a listen to it and then we can talk about what this meant to you and your career.
[“White Like Heaven” playing by Gowns]
I was sitting
I was sitting at the table and suddenly I could see it
And it was just like the movies and I couldn’t move
‘Cause I could see the cracks in everything
In every little thing
And it was like the time that we were in your car
I was sick, I was on drugs
You were smoking pot
And we were driving …
[Song ends]
Miller: What did that song mean to you when you put it out in the world?
Anderson: Writing that song really, I think, freed me and just gave me a new sense of what I was capable of and what music was capable of. That was my first big drone piece that I made, it’s eight minutes long, it has layers of synthesizers and has crazy drums. And it’s a story, it’s sort of like this narrative story that happened throughout the song. It kind of symbolized a new direction for me. That was when I, in some ways, left behind more structural type things and went like, “Well, I can do whatever I want.”
Miller: And audiences would respond to it too.
Anderson: They did, yeah. I mean, this was a major part of our show. We would do this, and it would stretch out for longer than that. There was a lot of improvisation as well, which is important to me because it’s fun. That was with Gowns and that was kind of like the first time where I was like, “This is me, this is the sound that I want to make.”
Miller: I want to go forward a little bit in time and listen to a track from your 2014 solo album, The Future’s Void. This is called “3Jane.” Before we listen to some of it, what should we know about this song?
Anderson: This song is about, I guess fame, in a way. I went from being like playing at these DIY, noise circuit type shows, to I had my first record kind of really blew up and really elevated my profile in a way. But it was a difficult transition. I went from playing these shows where I was one of five bands in a concrete room to being like, “Now you have to sound check.” So that was a learning curve.
Miller: “Now you’re gonna open for Depeche Mode.”
Anderson: I did, yeah.
I think it was seeing what I would call a mediated version of myself, seeing who I was versus all this press, all these images and all these numbers that people put on your albums to rate them, and just feeling really alienated by it, feeling like there was another, almost like a doppelganger or an entity made up of this press, this algorithmic self. And I found it really alienating.
Miller: Let’s have a listen. This is “3Jane.”
[“3Jane” playing by EMA]
Can you believe all they say?
It doesn’t seem like it was only yesterday
When you wandered out on
Superhighway
There should be a law about it
When they can take videos of you
Of you, of you, of you, of you
Feel like I blew my soul out …
[Song ends]
Miller: How did you handle that? How did you handle getting success, critical success, popular success, big shows, and then feeling alienated by … almost like you were saying, that there was another version of you that you didn’t have control over that was out there in the world, the famous version of you. How did you handle it?
Anderson: It was hard. It was really hard. It kind of caused me a mental splitting or a mental overload. I kind of was like, do I wanna be famous? Like what does that mean? And at that time too, like I said, I’d been doing these noise tours where I would go and you’d stay at people’s houses, so you met 25 people across your tour in the U.S. And then these other sort of club tours where you don’t really meet anybody. It’s just you and the van, and you’re very kind of disconnected from your community.
Miller: And the meeting people, that was a benefit. You liked that. Because these were people, this was your tribe?
Anderson: They would set up your shows and then you’d crash at their house. You kind of had this feeling of this nationwide community of weirdos. I ended up feeling very lonely and very alienated when it was just me. And I have problems trying to sell myself, I have problems trying to take images of myself that sell a product.
Miller: What you’ve just described seems like a necessary component of the way most careers work in this business. You have to hustle, you have to sell yourself and you have to create not just one but recurring versions of yourself, “now this is a new image of me,” and put it out there in the world. That seems like that’s how the music business thrives.
Anderson: It is, especially now. Honestly, I’m afraid of the way that the world treats famous women. I think we’re terrible to them and I was afraid of that. I had a real fear of that.
So yeah, it was difficult on me. I kind of made myself keep going. At this point, there’s managers and like, “Here’s your next step, here’s your next step.” But I realized I don’t know if I wanted that as much. It was just kind of thought of as the next step. So I kind of stuck it out for another couple records. But if you don’t want something, you can show up, but you’re not really showing up. It was a difficult time, to be honest, because everyone’s looking at you being like, “Oh, wow, you get this, you get that, that’s great.” And then you’re worried that your friends are envious of you, which makes you feel even more alienated and alone.
It’s a weird one. And I think people now are gonna start seeing how it feels to have that sort of version of yourself made. Years ago, it was only people that were in the news. But now, everyone has a weird digital doppelganger. And to me, I was just sensitive to it. I’m like, this makes me feel crazy.
Miller: Can you tell us about “Memory as a Rock Out of Reach,” the TBA show that’s gonna be this coming Friday?
Anderson: Yeah, come on out to the show on Friday! I should figure out how to explain it. So it is me, I’m playing modular synth and I’m kind of doing this sort of prose type narration. And then it’s paired with visuals that my collaborator made using video game engines. The technology that people use to create video games, we are using that to create these sort of psychogeographies that then get soundtracked by me.
Miller: Let me play an excerpt from this piece. Let’s have a listen.
[“Memory as a Rock Out of Reach” by EMA and Tabitha Nikolai playing. Synth noise and spoken word]
The boyfriend’s old car was a gray Buick. At one time we accidentally drove it into the center of the universe.
The exact spot where the galaxy was expanding out of.
Which turned out to be in the same neighborhood as my old middle school.
Big trees, afternoon sun.
We were driving around and got stuck as the world expanded around us.
The sidewalks stretching, the trees reaching up.
The blades of grass under the lawn mower duplicating themselves, regenerating.
The sound waves created by a dog bark, replicating, echoing, traveling, so the sound carried on forever.
There is always a trap door hidden in the prosaic, if you know how to look.
[Recording ends]
Miller: I should say this is a kind of DIY direct rehearsal that you recorded last night, it’s not from a live performance. One of the things I love about it is that it’s dreamy and drone-y, but it’s also funny – the spot where the galaxy is expanding happens to be the site of your old middle school. How do you think about humor in the context of your work?
Anderson: Humor is so important to me. And people either get it, or they don’t. I deal with things that are dark, I deal with things that are kind of serious. But I always want to make it funny, or at least playful.
Miller: Given what you’ve experienced and what you’re saying before about the challenges you felt in your version of fame and success, what advice would you give to musicians today, young musicians?
Anderson: I’m gonna say your community is the most important thing for you at this point in time. All of your opportunities are gonna come through your community. And we also need, in this time in the world, to support each other, show up and support each other.
And then be yourself, man! Do exactly what you want to do because there’s not necessarily money at the end of your musical journey. So make somethin’ you love.
Miller: Erika, thanks very much.
Anderson: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Erika Anderson, or EMA, is going to be performing this coming Friday night at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts as part of PICA’s TBA – Time-Based Art – Festival. We’re gonna go out with some of the music from the new piece of music, like what you might hear when you go on Friday.
[Drone music playing in the background]
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