Emika

Emika produces electronic music built from enchanting atmospheric melodies and glitch-infused beats. Raised in Bristol, U.K., she completed a music technology degree in Bath that led to a month-long internship at Ninja Tune’s London offices. She later moved to Berlin and joined Native Instruments as a sound designer. In spare hours she developed her singularly haunting style on a laptop, absorbing influences from the dancefloor energy at the notorious Berghain/Panoramabar club. Ninja Tune personnel, who had earlier rejected her rough demos, responded favorably to the darker downtempo/dubstep direction and placed the single “Drop the Other” on the label’s 20th anniversary box set, followed by the release of her self-titled debut album in October 2011. DVA, whose title is the Czech word for “two,” arrived in 2013; fans who pre-ordered it directly from Ninja Tune received a free copy of the classically inflected EP Klavírní. The EP appeared independently in 2015, the same year Emika issued her third studio album, Drei. Melanfonie (2017) employed a full orchestra and was funded through a crowdfunding campaign. With 2018’s Falling in Love with Sadness she returned to electronic production; although the record addressed coping with depression, its synths and arrangements were noticeably brighter than those on her preceding releases. A four-track remix EP drawn from the album surfaced in 2019.