EMA

EMA performs under the solo name EMA as guitarist and vocalist Erika M. Anderson, whose distinctive experimental approach to singing and playing emerged during stints in two respected underground groups prior to her independent career. Having relocated from South Dakota to Los Angeles at age eighteen, Anderson contributed guitar to the folk-noise ensemble Amps for Christ across the late 1990s and early 2000s, then co-founded the psych-folk outfit Gowns in 2004 alongside Ezra Buchla, previously of Mae Shi. Gowns issued three albums before dissolving in early 2010, at which point Anderson turned to solo work that first surfaced that year via the Night People cassette Little Sketches on Tape. Roughly twelve months afterward came the single Grey Ship, whose extended seventeen-minute reinterpretation of Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman” transformed the composition radically yet preserved its essential character. Mid-2011 saw the arrival of her debut full-length Past Life Martyred Saints on Souterrain Transmissions; the record earned broad critical acclaim and, with little promotional push, secured headlining tours throughout North America and Europe. In 2012 Anderson commenced sessions for her next album in Portland, Oregon, alongside musician Leif Shackelford. Issued on Matador Records in April 2014, The Future’s Void prompted further exploration of its themes of virtual reality, consumerism, and identity through the Oculus Rift–based installation I Wanna Destroy (Sacred Objects from Suburban Homes), presented at MoMA PS1 in New York and the Barbican in London. At the close of 2015 Anderson and Shackelford supplied the soundtrack to the cyberbullying feature #Horror. In 2017 she collaborated with co-producer Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra on Exile in the Outer Ring, an album reflecting conditions of nationalism, poverty, and alienation across the American Midwest.