Avalon Emerson has spent the past decade crafting techno that is as intricate as it is restorative: jewel-toned synth melodies and pastoral epics that feel better suited to forest bathing than nightclubs. The Arizona native is particularly acclaimed for her audaciously yet intuitively genre-spanning DJ sets, in which industrial legends Coil might rub up against Two Shell’s winking hyperpop, and Cocteau Twins find common cause with Italo disco. She loves thundering breakbeats, thoughtfully placed samples, and the occasional eyebrow-raising curveball.
But with her new project, Avalon Emerson & the Charm, she has pivoted from eclectic club music to a singer-songwriter style so idiosyncratic she’s not quite sure what to call it. “I feel like ‘pop’ is a lazy umbrella term, but it’s also generic enough to be accurate,” she tells me over Zoom from Notting Hill, London, where she’s rehearsing with her band. The breezy, sun-kissed textures of her forthcoming debut have a warm, Balearic tinge courtesy of London’s Bullion (Nathan Jenkins), the leftfield-pop savant who executive produced the album; the record’s slinky, not-quite-retro feel is similar to his work for Westerman and Nilüfer Yanya.
Emerson had been wanting to stretch beyond dance music for a while—though she’s also well aware of the risk she takes as a DJ picking up the mic for the first time. (“That’s so cringe, right?” she laughs.) When she and her wife, Hunter Lombard, moved to Los Angeles in 2019, she envisioned a new phase of her career, working behind the scenes for other musicians. Her first two sessions were with Romy, of the xx. “The sweetest angel,” says Emerson. “We worked in a nice studio, and it was fine that I didn’t know what I was doing. That was late February of 2020. I remember having conversations, like, ‘There’s this weird thing I’ve been reading about on Reddit, it seems pretty serious.’”
For Emerson, the realization, “Oh my god, my job is over,” became, “Do I even like my job?” during the pandemic. Lockdown forced her to jump off the hamster wheel of late nights and international flights and instead dedicate her attention to writing songs. She pored over chord changes and dissected verse/chorus/verse structures; just as importantly, she sought the “creative stillness” to allow her newfound skills to take root and bear fruit. The record came together in fits and starts, first at home with Lombard and then with Bullion in his London studio, assisted by collaborators like multi-instrumentalist Keivon Hobeheidar and guitarist Joe Newman. Emerson was almost dismissive about some of her sketches. “It’s truly not a song, just some crazy little fucking plunk-around beats,” Emerson recalls telling Bullion. But with her friends’ input, even the most fragmentary ideas took shape. “Knowing that it’s OK to bring in little fragments was a revelation,” she says.
When I speak with Emerson in mid-March, she’s throwing herself into learning another essential skill: the art of performing with a band. “I don’t know how to sing live or anything,” she admits. “We don’t really have the ramp-up period that a lot of artists do, where they can get their sea legs doing live shows, so we’re soft launching it.” At their first night of a month-long residency at a London members’ club, doing closed-doors shows every Wednesday, there were about five people in the audience, counting her manager and a few close friends; that was the first time she’d ever sung in public. “I now have infinitely, infinitely, infinitely more respect for bands,” she says, “because it’s a whole different arena.”
Avalon Emerson: I’ve never been the kind of person to listen to dance music in my free time. I always wanted to make something that could be played, unplugged-style, on an acoustic guitar or piano and still hold up. In high school, I made folky guitar music and then when I moved to San Francisco, I started making dance music and DJing. I ended up being pretty good at it, so that was the focus of my music career for the past decade. I don’t want to say that my desire to make pop music came out of any negative sense, like, “I don’t like dance music anymore.” I still love it, and I still get inspired by it. Admittedly, that happens less and less nowadays, but it’s still a part of me.
It was a black-box mystery to me. I was going on Wikipedia and looking at different song structures, dissecting all these songs that I like. Teaching myself a little bit of music theory, learning about chord progressions. There were a lot of times I felt myself banging my head against the wall, feeling like this is not the way to get there. I had worked with a few other producers and songwriters, but it didn’t click until I started working with Nathan.
When I was living in Berlin, my friend Nathan Micay came over and was like, “Dude, you have to listen to this song.” He goes on YouTube and pulls up “Blue Pedro,” and we’re both just like, “Yo, I love this fucking jam.” So when I started “Long-Forgotten Fairytale,” for DJ-Kicks, I was like, “I want to do this cover, and who’s the best at producing amazing covers? Bullion.” So that’s when we started working together. He has this beautiful alchemy of hard and soft skills. He’s not overly technical, and he’s not too overbearing. I would sometimes have to tease it out of him, like, “Is this a good lyric? Does this make sense?” He’d be like, “These words scan weird—when you sing it this way, it sounds kind of clumsy. Maybe we can find something else.” It was so comfortable.
Since I’ve been involved in dance music, there’s been this arms race toward harder and faster, and it’s not really something that I identify with. This cathartic release that people seek when they go out clubbing, I get it and I respect it, and I participate in it as a DJ. But when I’m listening to music, my idea of a perfect record is a Cocteau Twins record, things that are soft and beautiful. I wanted to make this a soft, pretty record, but lyrically, the things on my mind are dark and sad, and very black-pilled at times. That juxtaposition is important, because something beautiful can also be coming from a place of pain. I think that’s where most good art lies, to be honest.
For sure. It’s a financial risk. I have new respect for bands. DJing is definitely money for nothing, man. I just hop on a plane, me and my USB stick. In the club world, you can fill a venue with hundreds of people every night fairly reliably without them knowing the artist. I don’t know how many people at this club in Belgium I just DJed knew who I was, really. They come to a club to have fun with their friends and dance, not because they’re obsessed with my last EP.
It’s really hard to make money playing live. The shows that we’re doing, it’s like, OK, we can run at a loss for a little while, because there’s this optimistic plan that in the future we can make money at other shows or festivals. But it’s a big risk in general. Are people going to come? We have to sell these tickets, or there’s not going to be people there.
I feel like DJing is one of those skills that you just get better at as you get older. When I was first going clubbing in San Francisco, all my favorite DJs were basically old guys like François K and DJ Harvey, people who have heard a lot of songs and know how to play them. Me being 19, hearing Valerie Dore’s “Get Closer” the first time, I’m like, “What is this song?” But Harvey’s been playing it forever—since it came out, probably.
In the past couple of years I’ve become more of an archivist. In the first phase of my DJ career, I was trying to seek out songs that I could play that weekend, like, “I’m going to play Panorama Bar, I’ve got to go find some good bangers.” But nowadays, it’s more like “This song is important and I should have it in my Rekordbox, even if there’s a good chance I will never play it.”
Actually, the last time I played at Nowadays, this six-hour thing, I had an hour playing all these late-’90s, early-2000s, tongue-in-cheek indie sleaze things. Part of me thinks that this indie-sleaze-is-back vibe is a bunch of millennials my age and a little bit older who were constantly shamed by Gen Z: “Your side part is not cool, your skinny jeans are not cool, your music is not cool, the way you like bacon is not cool.” We’re constantly told that we’re old, we’re not cool. So once the “indie sleaze is back” thesis came around, all these millennials were like, “I was fucking cool once, and you agree, you fucking Gen Z guys.”
I’m actually a little bit too young to have a personal memory of some of those songs—I graduated high school in 2007, so I was more into the later 2000s Ed Banger and stuff. But all that stuff holds up: I played the Still Going remix of Austra’s “The Beat and the Pulse,” the Morgan Geist version of “House of Jealous Lovers,” LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah (Crass Version).” Then at the end you’ve got to play something modern—it’s important to have a dialogue between the present and the past, so it’s not just 100 percent retro, like, “Back in my day it was better.” So I played “Girls,” by The Dare, and it fit right in
I’m sorry, I know! But hey, it does bang.
