EMA
Exile in the Outer Ring
In the three years since the release of the oppressively dark, yet hauntingly beautiful, The Future's Void, Erika M. Anderson's third album as EMA, a great deal of horrible things have happened: the rise of proto-fascists in Turkey and the Philippines, Brexit, the election of a racist muppet to the Presidency of the United States, and too many cars/vans/trucks running into crowds of people to count. There have been protests against police violence met with police violence, refugees from war-torn countries forced to starve or drown mere feet from salvation, and literal Nazis marching in the streets.
It is against this backdrop that we have Exile in the Outer Ring, an epic tome of our present-day dystopia, brought forward in a glorious wash of digital noise. Anderson uses her nihilistic vision of the world to perfectly match a ghostly, stark emptiness in the music that is as abrasive as a blizzard wind, but as clean as the fresh snow it leaves behind--crystalline purity covering a wind-scoured wasteland.
The "Outer Ring" is defined by Anderson herself as the dying former suburbs surrounding cities now filled with rich gentrifiers; slums with picket fences and pristine lawns. Here, in the outer ring, Anderson meets the characters that inhabit her fourth album, many of them just different sides of herself. On the record's single warm moment, "Down and Out," she sings "They say 'you need a sense of purpose' when you're on the floor / They think that maybe you deserve it if you're poor," which is about as lighthearted as it gets in a world where America is a Russian satellite.
The industrial moments that The Future's Void touched on are made blindingly explicit on the songs "Fire Water Air LSD" and "33 Nihilistic and Female," which use repetitive samples reminiscent of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo score, or early Coil singles. The sound of machines and blaring, bass-driven klaxons fill the air with the same dread as Skynet coming online. Surviving a journey through the Outer Ring is perilous and horrifying, but most of all, it's rare.
With Exile in the Outer Ring, Anderson holds a mirror to the world, and it reflects a portrait that we wish we could banish to the uncanny valley. But we can't, this world is real, it never ends. The reflection shares our face, and only by correcting ourselves can we correct the image we see.
Stream EMA's Exile in the Outer Ring via NPR here.
