Erika M. Anderson's new album, The Future's Void, takes a sledgehammer to our digital obsessions. On her second outing as EMA, the former Gowns member has crafted an album spread across many genres, like industrial synth pop and '90s "metagrunge," set in a world where satellites watch our lives ceaselessly, social media apps file away our personal information on some server in Sweden and corporations track our every keystroke in order to sell us more stuff. Here, Anderson tells us what she loves and hates about the Information Age. Love: I love Pro Tools. I feel like that has opened up production for me and artists like me. I was watching the documentary Sound City, and I was like, "Cool...," but then they had like pin-ups and tittie pictures in the room. Maybe there's something to be said about digital studios being a feminist space.
Hate: I hate automated phone services. I hate when you can't talk to a human. It makes me want to throw the phone across the room.
Love: I really love the idea of a "daily meme." I forgot the Internet could be fun, and then I started looking at all these weird, funny memes on there, and I was like, "Oh yeah, there is funny stuff on the Internet too!"
Hate: I don't know if I hate this, but I don't like Instagram very much. It feels a little braggy.
I feel very comfortable in musical mediums to say what I want and play with genres and commercial sounds while also sounding very discordant. But the visual medium is so much trickier to create something that doesn't look like an advertisement.
The Future's Void drops on April 8