EMA - #HORROR OST

Pitchfork 64

Horror has always been deeply embedded into Erika M. Anderson’s music—not the lurid B-movie scares of lurking bogeymen or masked slashers, but a trauma more rooted in the quotidian and everyday, of neuroses roaming in a fog of prescription medication and of self-inflicted scars hidden beneath long sleeves. First as part of Los Angeles group Gowns, and now in her solo incarnation as EMA, Anderson has pursued a raw, husky lo-fi music that feels intensely personal, the sort that you either feel and empathize with on a deep and profound level, or listen to uncomfortably, like an intruder. On #HORROR, though, we find Anderson not airing personal demons, but writing to commission, as she scores the debut feature film by the actress, fashion designer, and socialite Tara Subkoff.

As the hashtag implies, this is a calculatedly millennial take on the genre, a tale of pre-teen girls, inherited privilege, and cyberbullying that takes an inevitable dark twist. On paper, Anderson is a good fit for the subject matter—not just for the fraught emotions that crackle in her music, but for her digital nativity. While EMA’s early output was firmly rooted in a DIY punk idiom, Anderson’s work has increasingly expanded into virtual and connected spaces, from the song-portraits of technological malaise found on her 2014 LP The Future’s Void to her recent exhibition "I Wanna Destroy (Sacred Objects From Suburban Homes)" at New York's MoMA PS1 and London’s Barbican, which employed Oculus Rift virtual reality technology to memorialize or consecrate banal or defunct artefacts of consumer culture. Now on #HORROR—recorded with long-time collaborator Leif Shackelford—we find Anderson again working at the boundary line between the real and the virtual, taking up vocals, strings, and electronics to soundtrack a sinister online realm unrolling its tendrils into our own.

Certainly, Anderson and Shackelford have done their homework. These 18 tracks add up to an hour of music, gesturing out to horror score landmarks past and present. "Running Danger" and "Dr White in the House" channel the analogue synth work of John Carpenter, unfurling throbbing electronic tones around which Shackelford twines long, melancholy violin strokes. "Locust Strings" recalls the sinister orchestral clamor of György Ligeti—or, if you want a more contemporary antecedent, the wasp’s nest hum of strings Mica Levi wove throughout Under the Skin. And while many of the album’s tracks feel fleeting, working with shadowy atmospherics, one fully-fledged song emerges in the shape of "Amnesia Haze". Taking its cues from the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, it’s a diaphanous synthpop confection of twinkling arpeggios and soft-strummed guitar that recalls Chromatics in its minor-key yearning and opiated pacing. "You were just a child," repeats Anderson, and the results are striking, if a touch more pristine than the raw angst with which EMA made her name.

#HORROR often feels like a slick thing, with few of the rough edges that have defined Anderson’s work. But the above zig-zag of reference points here perhaps gestures at the real reason #HORROR doesn’t entirely come off. It feels a little too surface and referential, lost amidst legacies. You might argue a horror film soundtrack can never be anything other than a genre exercise: the process, after all, comes with certain demands and strictures—the tension of suspense, the release of the scare. But such is the genre-skipping on show that it’s hard to grasp what dark truth about Subkoff’s film #HORROR is trying to express.

Perhaps we get closest on a handful of tracks that feel like they play off the aesthetics of the web itself: "Horror #2", with its coldly impassive choral voices and buzzing tones that evoke jagged waveforms; or "Harshmallow World", a twinkly fantasia of pizzicato strings and tolling bells recalling the sumptuous, exotic darkness of Italian maestros like Bruno Nicolai, but presented with a bright, hyperreal glaze. With John Carpenter off on tour and labels like Death Waltz and Waxwork Records resurrecting dusty old scores as luxury consumer products, the vintage horror soundtrack has never been more sung. But at times like this we need someone to advance the form, and #HORROR doesn’t quite have the strength of conviction. Next time, perhaps, more guts.