News

EMA to support Depeche Mode on tour

• 1st Nov 2017

Having recently been confirmed to support Depeche Mode on their early 2018 European arena tour, EMA has shared her new video for “Fire Water Air LSD”, taken from her recent album ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’. Directed by DaVideo Tape with art direction by Erika M. Anderson (EMA), the clip combines footage of an analogue performance utilizing Tachyons and artist tools designed by Logan Owlbeemoth and Omebi Velouria in Florida, with footage of EMA shot at Open Signal Portland Community Media Center.

“I had seen DaVideo Tape around PDX and the media centre by my house. He always wore an X-Files hat and made crazy VR. He liked the reptilian virgin mary t-shirt design I had made for EMA,” says EMA. “I had a week before leaving on tour and I really needed a video made — I discovered he is a rad analogue video artist so I asked him to make an EMA vid. He brought in his own Reptilian mask. I think the footage is fucking hilarious. He opened up a very playful side of me and this is one of the only videos where you will see me dancing and just kind of goofing off. Our inspirations were reptilians and the county fair. I used a lot of lizards and snakes in my own VR project in 2015 — to me, they represent layers of hidden meaning and hidden reality, or at least belief in hidden layers of reality. The county fair is just cuz when I wrote this song I wanted it to sound like Guns N Roses coming out of grandstand speakers at a demolition derby.”

In this song cycle, written entirely before the last presidential election, EMA situates herself in what she calls “The Outer Ring.” It’s a zone between the country and the city, both literally and figuratively — a surprisingly diverse world of people united only by poverty and tension, and by the anger that comes from having your story and your struggles erased from the narrative. The vignettes here are less about an actual place than scenes that could be unfolding anywhere in America, including the stories of recent immigrants, defiant feminists, nihilistic mall teens, police shootings, and ex-urbanites who’ve been pushed out of city centers by stagnating wages and rising expense, forced up against resentful rural communities swallowed by sprawl.

Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius recently described EMA as a world-builder in an interview with The Quietus, and with ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’, she once again presciently details the complexity of our modern world. But the terrain here is interior as well as exterior. EMA’s greatest strengths have always been honesty and intimacy, and this record fuses the personal with the political landscape at large. Musically, it’s a throwback to (EMA’s previous band) Gowns’ ‘Red State’, a widely influential underground cult classic.

EMA is not new to material that speaks truth to power (“Active Shooter,” “Song For Ghostship”), and while these songs pull no punches in confronting ugly realities, they never wallow in despair. ‘Exile In The Outer Ring’ is a portrait of resilience that renders American poverty and resentment with frightening realism and deep empathy. A personal, confrontational, but ultimately redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her form.

EMA European live dates 2018:
January
17 Berlin, Germany – Mercedes-Benz Arena
19 Berlin, Germany – Mercedes-Benz Arena
21 Nuremberg, Germany – Arena Nürnburger
24 Bordeaux, France – Bordeaux Metropole Arena
27 Milan, Italy – Mediolanum Forum
29 Milan, Italy – Mediolanum Forum
31 Prague, Czech Republic – O2 Arena
February
02 Budapest, Hungary – BSA
04 Vienna, Austria – Stadthalle