Artist of the Month: Avalon Emerson

When Beatportal catches up with Avalon Emerson, the San Francisco-born Berlin-based artist has spent the morning doing DIY in her bedroom following a weekend off. With dust in her hair, it’s a rare break at home for the revered DJ and producer who has been playing the world’s most renowned clubs for the past decade and, post-lockdown, formed a band. “That truly was a crazy year,” she reflects of the release of their critically-acclaimed debut album, & the Charm, in April 2023. “It was one of the most challenging learning experiences I’ve had in years and years,” she says of its creation and the months afterwards, adding that this period of time was “full of firsts”. 

While becoming the centre of a touring party was new for Emerson, the technical aspect of “getting everything to work” involved her building a rig multiple times, and learning to sing – on her records and on stage, neither of which she had done before. “It was all very intense,” Emerson considers. Though she had always been drawn to lyrical music, developing a different kind of focus and listening for lyrics became key for her artistic development. “I found a special type of pleasure from listening to amazing lyricists,” she recalls, citing Stephin Merritt, Paddy McAloon from Prefab Sprout, Alanis Morissette and Morrissey. 

“Spending so much time learning about this different kind of songwriting definitely helped for the songs that I sing on,” Emerson recalls. “It felt like my pie chart for everything expanded.” With influences away from the dance scene and a newfound confidence to explore her own voice, Emerson said to herself ‘okay, now it's my turn to try’. “I hadn't really had a go at that before, so it was really fun.” Although broaching such uncharted territory was daunting, she found it “really exciting, and part of a continual learning process. There's this energy that comes with being a novice at something”, she considers. Crucially, embracing new things felt “fulfilling” for Emerson, who continued DJng alongside playing live shows with her band. “I feel like my brain grew a lot that year,” she reflects. 

While all this “reinvigorated some creativity for my dance music stuff”, it was when Emerson found herself alone in her Berlin apartment - at the end of 2023, ahead of a set at Panorama Bar for Sylvester’s New Year's party - that she began feeling inspired to make music in that world again. “It was something that I hadn't done for a little while”, she says, adding that she then “cranked out” five tracks and ideas over the course of a long weekend. While these were made with DJing in mind, she says “there’s still a lot of crossover”, adding that she would internally debate whether a song would suit a DJ set or if it was more for listening, a stage or a collaboration with other instrumentalists. 

Nonetheless, testing these demos out during her 2024 DJ sets helped her to realise the need for any tweaks. Consequently, she spent much of her time finishing songs like "Don’t Be Seen With Me" and "Treat Mode" while on the road. All of this, Emerson says, “became the core” of the Perpetual Emotion Machine, which is the concept and title behind her current series of singles. Conceptually an ever-evolving project that weaves together different genres and styles, she says “it’s an embodiment of how I like to DJ and interact with the dance floor in general”. 

It’s also a reflection of how Emerson digs for music: “there’s so much out there and if you start to look - especially in the past - and take things in different contexts and remix them, or play them next to each other in a different way, it doesn't have to be…” she pauses, taking a moment to thoughtfully consider how the point she’s making relates to her. “I‘ve always had a hard time with genre,” she ponders. “When I was first starting out, I didn't really know where I fit in. I just kept going and then it ended up being positive for me, because I developed my own little lane,” she adds.

This idea of following a singular path has never wavered. Perpetual Emotion Machine, then, is a continuation of her journey, once again free from restrictions. “It’s not tied into the hyper-contemporary,” she suggests. “I think a lot of dance music can get caught up in that. Especially with how fast things move, it somehow seems to still even be accelerating, which is so dizzying sometimes… there are still so many emotional things to pull from,” she says, referencing previous eras, places and genres. “Re-contextualising them on a dance floor today, that's what it’s about.” 

The creation of the first single from the Perpetual Emotion Machine series was inspired by this. “‘Don’t Be Seen With Me’ is a cover of Oppenheimer Analysis that I have been obsessed with since forever,” she says. In fact, it was one of the edits she made at the start of her career. “With all of this new confidence and skills about making music where I'm singing, I decided to incorporate it into this kind of thing,” she says of the final version. 

Now, Emerson feels that she is in “a great spot creatively, because I have these two centres of music that I like and make, and music that I DJ, and they feed into one another. It’s very satisfying to do something that you're very good at and you know is gonna kick ass, and you just do it,” she suggests. “But, unless there's an aspect to it that is pushing the limits of what I've done before and developing different skills… that's what I find most exciting.”

Having achieved critical success with her and the band’s 2023 album - “I definitely have been working very hard on more of that stuff”, she teases - Emerson has an interesting outlook as to why her current releases are coming out as a series of singles as opposed to an LP. “I think the album format is still supreme with listening music,” she considers. “And my band stuff… I really loved making that album and working in the context of saying ‘okay, I’m going to make 10 songs and they’re all going to be from this period, and they're gonna have this goal’.” 

When it comes to dance music, however, Emerson “doesn’t think it really works like that. The glue for dance music is not always an album, but more of a DJ set, and there are these piecemeal puzzle pieces that other people can play in their own times and places and mixes at different clubs and festivals, so I thought a single series made more sense.”

When Beatportal suggests that the new singles sit in a similar world to her early releases on underground label Whities, Emerson seems pleased with the implied correlation. “It’s nice to maintain at least enough truth to what I like and my taste that I can develop and grow and have it be an entirely new time, but there's still that kernel of recognisability.” 

The new collection, she adds, is “meant to bring people together”, going on suggest that “the IRL context of music experience is what is really special about dance music in general”. While Emerson believes that helping people to connect has always been important, it’s crucial now more than ever. “Everyone has their hobbies, but things that bring people together in the real world are always important,” she says.

Emerson’s international party series 9000 Dreams have achieved this for several years now; for her day to night show at New York’s Knockdown Center in October 2023, she welcomed musclecars, PLO Man, Fcukers, Elissa Suckdog, Strange Ranger, Tony Rainwater and Yu Su. “I can have a little bit more control, and it’s more of a successful expression of a vision”, she ponders. ”Because if it's a festival, it’s often somebody else's vision, or when I’m playing Club Nacht at Berghain, I’m one of many great artists. It's this institution that I get to be a part of, but I did my own Friday event there, at Panorama Bar in February this year, and it was fantastic.” Equally, she’s enjoyed taking her curated events to smaller and newer clubs, like Horst in Brussels; “that was really cool, to do a weekender there”. 

Beyond putting her own stamp on things, as she always has done, Emerson wanted “to give some shine to artists who I think are fucking great.” This ethos is not only reflective of a creative who does things on her own terms - whether that’s making the type of music that she wants to without worrying about following trends, or her hard-working journey to this point in her career - but proof that Avalon Emerson remains one of the dance scene’s most treasured talents.
 

Listen to Avalon Emerson's 'Artist of the Month' chart below or check it out on Beatport.