Erika interview – “One thing I am always lost in is my own head”
Ectomorph member Erika on the alternate universe of her solo album Anevite Void
Before we start, can you tell us whereabouts you are as you answer these, what you’ve been doing today so far and what have you got planned for later today?
I’m in Detroit today, having a pretty normal business day. First thing I did was feed the cats, make a coffee, and go to an Iyengar yoga class. Then I did a bunch of emails and some logistics work for our upcoming Return to the Source event series, and I am continuing the staring-at-a-screen phase of my day by writing this interview. Later on, I’m headed to the roller rink.
Tell us about your earliest musical memories. What music were you exposed to at home from parents and siblings? What were your first musical loves and when did you start making music yourself?
Music wasn’t a huge part of my household growing up; my parents listened to some music sometimes, but it was never a focus. I went to an elementary school with a small music program, so I got to try flute and violin, and I had piano lessons for a few years but hated all of it and quit when I was eight or so. I couldn’t relate to the music they wanted me to learn, and I hated practicing! (I still hate practicing.)
At that age I had a radio alarm clock to get myself up for school, and preferred using the radio as the alarm, so I would hear something different every morning, not just stupid beeping. (I still hate stupid beeping.) I also listened to the radio at night before going to sleep. I really liked the sliding tuner, so I could sloooowly transition between stations and static, and tune in to the edge of a station, where you could barely hear it reaching out of the static. I found a 1960s battery-operated transistor radio in the basement, and could listen anywhere: outside, in the car, even on road trips to hear radio in other places; it fascinated me how the radio was different everywhere I went, the same numbers on the dial delivering different music or talk or static.
In middle school, I was given a dual cassette deck with a CD player! *and* turntable on top! for my birthday or Christmas or something, and that’s when I started making mix tapes for myself, by recording a tape side’s worth of radio, and then copying only the songs I liked to a second tape, building up a collection of songs I wanted to hear. If I really liked a song, I’d go back and forth bunches of times, to make a whole side out of one song, and hear it degrade over the course of that side, and then be shocked by how clean it sounded after a rewind. I found a cassette of Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise in the dollar bin at a discount shop and begged my mom to buy it for me because I liked the cover (not because I’d actually heard of Art of Noise lol). I proceeded to listen to it 9,999 times. I was up late one night and was both scandalised and impressed by (and therefore obsessed with) a song that I wouldn’t hear again for many many years, it turned out to be (Lil Louis’) ‘French Kiss’.
My obsession with finding music grew through high school, as I met other kids who liked music, and we copied tapes and CDs from each other. I bought Depeche Mode’s Violator when it came out, my first CD purchase (I also listened to that 9,999 times, and hung the long box on my wall). I also started staying up too late all the time (not just sometimes) so I could catch overnight radio shows, which played weirder music than what you got during the day. I continued taping. I knew there were radio shows that were too far to hear, so I would phone and ask them to send playlists in the mail (which actually worked), and I could take these playlists to music shops and try to talk the employees into letting me hear things, if they had them.
By the time I went to university, I only had one goal: become a radio DJ. I mean yeah, get a degree and all of that, sure, but really, the absolute first thing I did when I arrived on campus was join the student radio station. I got really lucky in that this radio station happened to be WCBN-FM, as it was super open minded and all about pushing the boundaries of genre, mixing together ideas and styles and time periods with reckless abandon; it was a very special community of heads. I loved it, and proceeded to almost flunk out of school by spending too much time listening to music and doing radio shows.
This is also where I met BMG, the founder of Interdimensional Transmissions and Ectomorph, with whom I’ve forged a lifelong friendship and creative partnership. He is the person who pushed me to start making music, by inviting me into Ectomorph in 1997.
Did you have a sudden moment when electronic music clicked with you, or was it something you assimilated as you went along?
Not really. Electronics are the backbone of the modern music landscape, and these sounds were fully embedded into what I heard on the radio and in video games from the youngest age. Almost everything we hear is electronic in some fashion: there’s no rock without the electronic transformational power of pedals and amps; there’s no pop music without synthesizers; even the acoustic music we hear is recorded and transformed by mics and some amount of mixing/processing (unmiked live performances aside).
How and when did you hook up with Ectomorph? Were you already making music at that point or was it your first ‘gig’?
So, to continue… I met BMG at WCBN, we worked alongside each other there for some years, and then he invited me to be part of some upcoming Ectomorph shows. Those shows were my first gigs, so he taught me how to be a synth tech for these performances (I think about this time period as “Ectomorph Boot Camp” lol). I learned how to program a Pro-One and 101 to make certain sounds and sequences, and how to hook everything up. I wasn’t writing music yet, I was playing back parts of songs that were already written. I stayed involved in the project, and began to write parts here and there for new shows and new records, eventually growing into being a full creative partner.
If we’ve got this right – please correct us if not – you started out as part of the Ectomorph live set up, but in later years you’ve been involved in recordings too… But this is your first solo album for 10 years – if it’s not a rude question, why so long?
Well… I made Hexagon Cloud in 2013, and from there began to play out and travel, with my first solo trip to Europe that autumn. I was writing new music all the time for live shows, but was also holding down a full-time office job while helping to run Interdimensional Transmissions, so my ability to focus on recording and finishing things in the studio was basically nonexistent.
I quit the job in the middle of 2018, and focused on getting an Ectomorph album out that autumn. Then I was able to work on turning the ideas in my Erika live sets into actual songs, and recorded and compiled Anevite Void.
It was just about ready when lockdown threw me into into a heavy lol-nothing-matters zone… I really, deeply lost my connection to techno and dance music, and had very little motivation to jam or record. I wasn’t ready to do the finishing touches and get this album out until the middle of 2022.
What about the album title Anevite Void – what does it mean? We understand it deals with matters of astronomy, physics and cosmology… There’s even a quote about “the irregular life cycles created by three suns circling over a planetary organism that presents two major biomes: rocky crystalline desert, and deep layered forest, each of which exists above and/or below ground, depending on what phase the suns are in” – tell us more!
One thing I am always lost in is my own head, and it’s absorbed a LOT of fantasy and science fiction over the years. I have always been a voracious reader, and I gravitate towards F&SF because I love world building, and how it allows for the exploration of life, culture, society, and technology in ways that a story set in Our Same Old Earth simply can’t. We presently perceive and understand only the tiniest fraction of what reality is, and world building is an imaginative extrapolation of how something different could function.
By defining a star system (stars? planets? dust clouds? comets? moons?) and a planet’s geology (heating? cooling? metallic? sandy? acidic? arid? oceanic?), you can then imagine what its biology might be (energy sources? mobility? reproduction?), and from that, how those lifeforms interact with each other, and what their culture and drama is.
I’ve always liked to write and draw, and waaaay back when (like, when you had to telnet into a group server, and the game was text only), I was into building out areas of MUSHes and MUDs. When I lost my connection to making music during lockdown, I returned to this, and escaped into a world building exercise of my own. Anevite Void is a node in my universe, a planet in a trinary system where the shape of life is dictated by the radiation emitted by each of its three suns. Because of the extreme variation in the radiation that reaches the surface, much life exists only underground, but all life requires nutrients derived from radiation of each of the three suns. When all suns are out, the surface is almost uninhabitable; when all are set, everyone can be free outside and have fresh air, a brief escape from the underground world is possible.
The track ‘Star Line Down’ is about this specific moment, as imagined and directed by Andrew Charles Edman in this music video:
I was thinking about this a lot when I was finally putting the album together last year, and started to feel strongly that the music and this particular piece of the universe fit together perfectly, so the album became an expression of this place.
What’s next for Erika? DJ/live dates? More releases? Anything else?
All of the above! The most immediate next thing is Return to the Source, happening over Memorial Day weekend in Detroit, which is our three-day weekender including No Way Back, and events in collaboration with Tresor, Hot Mass, and The Bunker NY. Then I’m off to Europe for some Ectomorph shows and some Erika dates. I’ve also got a ton of new music in my sequencer that I’m recording to make the next series of releases… and there’s new Ectomorph coming later this year as well.
Ben Willmott