Alluvion (2022)
Rooted in a moment of catastrophe, Alluvion is an album about personal and collective grief resulting from the loss of human life and the continued loss of our natural world. We live in a moment of merging traumas, of converging environmental, social, and political crises. These crises are exacerbated by our lack of cultural practices for individual and also shared, public grieving--which is not without consequence. We often find ourselves mired in “disenfranchised grief,” a grieving that cannot be recognized, shared, or named. Emily’s album offers a space to consider where grieving is absent in our world, and where it is deeply necessary. Grief moves in waves and cycles, and through its flood we can build anew. Alluvion: the gradual addition to the land by the wash of water against a shore.
How can we mourn what we cannot know we’ve lost? While living through the “sixth extinction,” we may not always perceive the mass death that surrounds us, even as we sometimes remain unconscious of pervasive violence against women, or racist police violence. And yet, a sense of loss abounds, as Emily writes, “This mourning lives in everyone who has lost someone / Aurora in lightning, the living and the dying.”
Thus, in a moment defined by overlapping crises, our inability to grieve becomes a roadblock, separating us from the journey in which the COVID-19 pandemic would, indeed, be “a portal,” as Arundhati Roy wrote in March 2020. We cannot reach the hope that might be engendered through the changed consciousness that can result from effective grieving. This is where Emily’s new album sets its mark: the work itself is an act of public grieving, grieving as breathing: breathing the space in which we might be able to gather up ourselves and move toward the wake of this disaster, the spark of what is yet to come.
Co-produced and arranged by multi-instrumentalist Anton Patzner (Foxtails Brigade, Judgement Day), Alluvion was written and recorded during the height of the pandemic. Although Nick Ott's drums and John Courage's guitars were recorded in studios with all parties present, most of the instruments were recorded while Emily and Anton were in different locations. Despite the need for social distancing, they were able to develop a consistent workflow using remote methods, binding the recording together with the intimacy of Emily's voice, the meticulous layering of Anton's arrangements, and the outstanding mix by Alex DeGroot.
More so than on any previous release, Emily almost completely eschews folk arrangements and instrumentation. Alluvion edges the borders of shoegaze and electronic pop without losing sight of the light within the gloom, the hope inside the void. The lead single, "Show Me the War," seamlessly blends synthesizer pulses and guitars, deep acoustic toms with drum machines. The somber dirge "Heresy" soars above obscurant dust clouds created by the destruction of women's spaces and cultures, guest vocalist Darkher's operatic lamentations a light that leads the listener out of grief's darkness. Even "Poisoned," the most traditionally Americana-sounding of the tracks, mixes Emily's finger-picked melody with distorted guitar stabs and a wall of synths, her lyrics a guide through these contradictions. In “Hold Them Alive,” Emily confronts the destruction caused by unacknowledged grief directly: “So how do I walk while holding some kind of words that morph from bereaving? Withered is the arch, the moon hangs bleeding. I’ve lived, the dark energy feeding.” - Written by Brooke Lober + Nick Ott
Immanent fire (2019)
Written over a two year period, Emily Jane White’s sixth album recognizes our moment at the precipice of species annihilation, as she guides her listener through the feeling of life on a planet at the brink of destruction: “I watched the wind make the roses bend/does X really mark the end?” In this work, addressing our shared condition, White honors the sacred, the earthly, and all that is deemed feminine, even as these very elements are threatened with the violence of contemporary systems of power: patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism together conspire to ravage and to exploit natural world and its sacred beings, to subordinate women and other gendered people--the vanquishing of both the feminine and nature in and of itself. This is the dominant paradigm of modernity that feminist spiritual philosopher and witch Starhawk has named the “war on immanence.” Speaking directly from the fires incinerating California, White laments the destruction of the sacred feminine and the earth at once: “And she a holy vessel breathes/And you sit and watch her bleed/And you, torched a hole in the sky/And you, watched your earnings fly/And you, sit there as she lies/In blood, right before our eyes.”
Acknowledging these conditions in which we live, White offers what she has been best suited to on all of her albums: an exploration of the internal world. What is the feeling of life in the capitalocene? Here, White offers a compassionate but also raw exposure of the anxiety, addiction and depression that have become normative. At the same time, she produces an alternative path: the revaluation of the feminine, the receptive, the vulnerable, the emotional. A turn toward the center, the appreciation and experience of life itself--a practice which has, in our moment of ubiquitous despair, become a form of resistance.
The album is co-produced by Anton Patzner and Emily Jane White. All of the songs were written by Emily Jane White. Anton Patzner wrote accompanying arrangements and engineered the recording in Emeryville, California.
White recalls her experience recording the record: "Anton was able to create and play arrangements that brought out the dark and the light, the heavy and the sensitive. He is someone who can bring drama while holding onto fragility. The recording and arranging process was spent mostly together in his studio. He intuitively understood the direction I wanted for these songs and was able to profoundly execute it through his engineering and arranging skills."
Ten songs, all written in minor keys, present a deepening storm of melody that offers the hopeful ray of Emily’s voice as the waves of rhythm crash and dance around her. Just before—or perhaps after—the despair seems to overwhelm, her vocals open up and bloom like a lens flare, creating an ecstatically painful emotional brilliance that the listener clings onto with pleasure. Her voice is the listener’s guide, a steady and reassuring presence as they march through eerie landscapes, caverns of reverb, church organs and synthetic arpeggios. The occasional samples of birds, insects, and thunder mix with the blend of electronic and acoustic instruments, a subtle reminder of the necessary link between the fate of our ecology and the moral use of technology. White's new album juxtaposes a heavy melancholy with an intimate touching lightness through her singular alto voice backed by orchestral percussion, soaring strings, heavy guitars, a choir of voices, and an overall cinematic presentation of dynamic songwriting. - Written by Brooke Lober + Nick Ott
They Moved in Shadow All Together (2016)
The title of Emily Jane White’s fifth album, They Moved in Shadow All Together, is a play on the opening line from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Outer Darkwhich hauntingly depicts a group of uncanny travelers descending a hill in the Appalachian mountains. White remembers being struck by the vision of the travelers’ collective movement – fragmented, yet whole – and felt its resonance with her burgeoning record and its thematic exploration of trauma.
The 11 songs on They Moved in Shadow All Together focus conceptually upon the symptomatology of trauma, a pattern of experiences marked by a fragmentation of the self. These songs contend with the impact of trauma on individual and collective identity – the shattered pieces within the psyche left to cope after tragedy, and the dissociative cohabitance of belief and disbelief that results. White wrote “The Black Dove” in support of the antiracist struggle against police violence. In “Womankind,” she mourns the continuing epidemic of violence against women, and the silences that suppress the truths of survivors.
White’s new body of work recounts for us the terrain of her empathic inner world. The breadth and depth of her maturing voice are evident. Her layered vocals effect a sense of camaraderie, a space populated with voices, angelic perhaps, definitively ethereal. She studied classical singing while working on this album, which enabled her to broaden her vocal range. Throughout the recording process, she experimented extensively in the echo chamber at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco. She used the room as her instrument, wherein she gave herself permission to roam free, exploring every capability and constraint. “I began to recognize a hidden concept within my work,” she recalls. “Most of my lead vocals were recorded in a vocal booth, and I chose to record the backing vocals in the echo chamber – but it was all me, and in that process I seemed to be fleshing out a concept of voices and pieces within a whole. I wanted to give a harmonizing quality to the fragmented pieces of self that result from trauma. I wanted to give them life and make them beautiful and real while still occupying an intimately distant and eerie space.” White weaves the many into one within the spaciousness of this record, an acoustic cathedral with myriad candles pouring light, a thousand flickering shadows, and glassdomed ceilings stretching upward to a starlit night beyond. She invites the listener to sit within her chorus and experience melodic hope and cathartic resolve.
White’s polyvocal arrangements mirror her manifold focus, and are the defining stylistic element of the album. Multiinstrumentalist Shawn Alpay’s bass accompaniment firmly supports White’s steady guitar and piano playing by providing subtle rhythmic movement beneath her overlay. His cello sits closely below and curls around the vocals, lending definition to key dramatic moments, while Nick Ott’s visceral and tomheavy drumming assertively mark the ebb and flow of each track. White: “I wanted to make an intimate album that had bombastic moments. The bass and drums helped define that. Cello is my instrument of choice when it comes to strings. It's the instrument most capable of sadness and
melancholy. The cello is the veil, the fog, and at times the guiding light – the drums the heart and blood.” White’s vision was aided by mixing engineer Mark Willsher, whose background in classical music and film score engineering complemented her spatial and stylistic sensibilities.
They Moved in Shadow All Togetherwas recorded at Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco, CA, and New and Improved studio in Oakland, CA, between December 2013 and September 2015. Emily Jane White is a musician, songwriter, and poet from Oakland, CA. She began performing under her own name in name in 2003 and released her first album Dark Undercoat in 2007, with Victorian America, Ode to Sentience, and Blood/Lines following. White has cultivated a dedicated audience in Europe and North America. - Written by Frances Marigold
Blood / Lines (2013)
After releasing three albums in three years (“Dark Undercoat“, 2008; “Victorian America“, 2009; “Ode To Sentience“, 2010), Emily Jane White wrote over 100 sketches between January 2011 and October 2012. Her new album “Blood / Lines” is a selected compilation of these songs. Recorded in a secluded studio in Sonoma County, California, the quiet environment provided Emily a place to explore new directions and avenues with artistic integrity and creative control.
She layered synthesizer, electric guitar and multiple tracks of vocals into ten heavily reverbed scenes shaped by rural surroundings and city living. With the help of friends and collaborators, Emily's worlds were diversified with strings, backing vocals, and heavy drums. Blood/Lines displays loyalty to dark and somber atmospheres through bright sounds, rhythmic drive, and pop sensibility. Love, anger, and violence move through each vignette. Kinship generates complex intimacies. Love can entrap the unwary and betray the devoted. Written by Nick Ott + Julie Cohen
Ode to sentience (2012)
There’s a rare confidence to Emily Jane White’s songwriting: it’s at once generous and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work shares some elements with folk music, but the term does not do justice to her ambitious songwriting and robust arrangements. White possesses a singular voice inspired by the raveled threads of the uncanny in American culture, including depression-era blues and classic works of gothic literature such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Her indelible sound has earned White a devoted European following, prompting her to regularly tour France, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands in recent years.
Raised in Fort Bragg, California, a seaside town nestled in the misty, secluded woodland of the Mendocino Coast, it could be said that optimistic melancholy and isolation don’t only suffuse White’s songwriting, but are in her bones. While attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, White researched gender studies and nurtured an acute social conscience. Her passion for social justice informs her songwriting, evidenced by her previous releases Dark Undercoat, which garnered raves from the likes of Spin and Rolling Stone, and Victorian America, which contended with the state of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Ode to Sentience is equally engaged as White’s previous works, but delves deeper into the fundamental dynamics of injustice, achieving a sympathetic and universal investigation of the personal as political.
- Written by Paul M. Davis
Victorian America (2009)
Emily Jane White was raised in Fort Bragg, California, a seaside town nestled in the misty, secluded woodland of the Mendocino Coast where old men tell storiesabout logging and young girls dream of San Francisco. Time moves slow in Fort Bragg, where in place of big-city sharp shocks of excitement there stretches one drawn-out, stable truth, quiet and unflinching. You will live, Fort Bragg says, and then you will also assuredly die.
Though Emily Jane White’s newest album, Victorian America, was written largely in San Francisco and Oakland, the gait of this upbringing permeates her songs, directly in step with the malaise of her forefathers. A direct descendant of Nathaniel Currier, of the famed 19th-Century printmaking house Currier & Ives—whose most successful lithograph was titled Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington in Long Island Sound on Monday January 13th, 1840, by which Melancholy Occurrence Over 100 Persons Perished—White has nopatience with light fare. “I don’t write happy music. I’m drawn to writing sad songs,” she says. “Reflective, contemplative songs. I truly believe that that’s my job. It’s not my job to create happy music. I’m okay with that.”
This pensive track was established with White’s first album, Dark Undercoat, which critics and fans alike called a masterpiece; White herself is more inclined to call it a bare set of sketches. Conversely, Victorian America fills in the blank lines from Dark Undercoat with color, dynamics, orchestrations and a richer sense of poetics, the product of three years’ work. “I pushed myself a little bit further in terms of songwriting,” White notes, “and the arrangements were more of a collaboration between everyone involved in the band. Fortunately this groupof people allowed for a lot of experimentation. It was an incredibly organic and enjoyable process.”
That easy majesty from some of the Bay Area’s best players is evident from the first track, “Never Dead,” on into the unconventional song structure of “Stairs.” White’s ethereal conjuring glides the listener through bright lights and high waters of the title track, a lament for lost hopes backed by a sublime string arrangement, and White holds poetically to the Poe tradition with the seven- minute opus “The Ravens.”
Lyrically, White’s themes act like a devil on both shoulders who long ago killed off the angel. “There’s a lot of references in the record to political issues, death and dying,” she explains, “there’s not a lot of literal narrative. I strive to create scenes in my writing that allow for abstract rather than literal interpretation.” With positive coverage in Spin and Rolling Stone and with a large European fanbase—the reward of near-constant touring—Emily Jane White is the newcomer to watch this year. Victorian America, like the country it is named for, is not an album that rests easy, nor does it exist for the sake of existing. From beginning to end, this is new mystic American songwriting at its finest. Written by Gabe Meline