If you have not heard of the English singer and composer Emika, you are going to thank me for introducing her. I am surprised and then again not surprised that she is not better known in North America. She is a bit serious for our tastes. Emika is something of a star in Europe. Her career demonstrates a few things about how different pop music is now from what it was even 20 years ago, both in its sound and in its economics.
She has had one hit in the United States: a cover of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game that NBC used in a TV show, but still her name does not resonate here. If you don't know Emika as a pop singer, perhaps it's best to come to her through the more serious side of her work, as a classical composer. This year, she released the album Melanfonia, a six-part composition for orchestra and voice, performed by the Prague Metropolitan Orchestra and sung by the astonishing Michaela Srumova, a Czech soprano of great range and sensitivity. The music is of the rhythmic minimalist tradition (as in Arvo Part and Philip Glass; it is also reminiscent of the tragic simplicity of Henryk Gorecki), and it is sad, powerful and beautiful.
How does one get a famous European orchestra to perform one's work? Simple: One hires them. Emika raised the money to pay the 50-person orchestra through crowd-sourcing on Kickstarter. This in itself is an unusual approach in both classical and popular scenes. But Emika, who is 31 and whose real name is Ema Jolly (her mother is Czech and she calls herself Anglo-Czech), seems to have engineered her entire career almost singlehandedly.
Emika studied classical music and started releasing pop songs – that she composes, records with electronic instruments and computers, and sings – in 2010, with the label Ninja Tunes. After some success, she founded her own label, Emika Records, apparently just to release her own records. This kind of self-publishing in pop parallels a similar movement in literature; it reflects the astounding rise of the artist/entrepreneur.
She now lives in Berlin, as does everyone else serious about electronic music. (Berlin for a dance music producer is akin to Los Angeles for a screenwriter.) Her pop/club background is actually on display in her unusual approach to classical orchestration: For the Prague recording, she used twice as many double basses as usual in an orchestra, and arranged them close to the microphones, to simulate the deep bass of electronic music.
I came to her sound through club culture: her tracks are available on the DJ music site Beatport, because she is also known as a techno DJ. Her musical tastes seem very wide; they straddle the sentimental and the avant-gardist. Emika's pop songs – most notably the hit single Battles – are lush and emotional, with melodies. Her single 3 Hours is a disturbing account of domestic abuse ("Hit me where you want it and I'll take the blame/ Hit me and I guarantee you'll feel the same").
And yet her Beatport charts – the lists of her favourite pieces for DJ-ing at any given moment – are frequently made up almost entirely of underground noise and drone and hammering; they seem like the music that Japanese extremists in black clothing would choose.
Europeans are on the whole better than North Americans are at taking themselves seriously. U.S. pop has to be fun and charming; the last thing anyone wants to be called is pretentious. But everyone in Berlin making dance music is also aware of what the highbrow chamber and experimental musicians are doing; there is more crossover. The whole electronic music enterprise is easily mocked for its seriousness, and perhaps its obsession with darkness, with industry and melancholy, with black-and-white videos of brutalist buildings, does veer into pretentiousness from time to time. Well, we are looking at the city that produced Einsturzende Neubauten here.
That kind of person – the Japanese or German noise artist – is of course most frequently male, and this is where Emika is so pleasantly daring. In her live shows she is unapologetically feminine in a rather clichéd way: She wears revealing clothing and throws her hair around and emotes a lot as she sings. But when she DJs she spins cold metallic beats. Even when she DJs she dresses as if for a cocktail party – in contrast to the usual strict dress code of the techno DJ, who by techno law must be extremely skinny and wear a loose black T-shirt. There have been many more women in minimal techno in recent years (Nina Kraviz , Charlotte De Witte, Helena Hauff, Lena Willikens are some of my recent favourites), but the black-box club is still a fundamentally masculine atmosphere.
There is a half-hour video on YouTube of Emika in her recording studio, showing how she creates music with samples and synthesizers on her computer. (It is part of a series of such interviews done by Future Music magazine.) Her lecture is highly technical, with lots of screenshots of complicated software. Emika worked briefly at Native Instruments, the German high-tech company that produces music software and hardware. She knows her way around a sequencer. And still the YouTube comments on this fascinating insight into creation and technology, by male tech-heads, are in large part derisive. She doesn't know what she's doing, they jeer – I have the same set-up in my basement, I could show her a thing or two about compression … It's hysterical and nonsensical, and written by guys sitting in basements without recording contracts, let alone a record label of their own. They are barely restraining themselves from wailing, "It's not right! It's not fair! She's a girl!"