When Avalon Emerson and her girlfriend made a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York this summer, they shot a set of impromptu videos that neatly encapsulate Emerson's musical choices and mixing style: kinetic, evocative, and deeply personal. The terrain is both ever changing and continuous; speed is its own reward. Rarely veering away from 132 BPM, Emerson constantly blurs the line between the ecstatic and the anxious.
In recent years, Emerson has been more active as a DJ than a producer, but her DJ-Kicks set slots in four new tracks from her (as well as a remix of Austra), swiftly roving between breakbeats, abstract techno, electro, and leftfield pop, and even detouring into sweaty dance punk. For those familiar with her run of breathtaking techno tracks, the opening selection is the equivalent of screeching brakes. “I’m not a vibeman,” Emerson has said about her DJ style, and the startlingly faithful cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Long Forgotten Fairytale” that she kicks off with dares to infuriate techno purists while speaking to Emerson’s ear and sense of craft. No matter how wild and abstract her productions can get, there’s always a melodic thread that holds it all together. Those diametrically opposed yet sympathetic elements are evident as the arpeggios of “Long Forgotten Fairytale” morph into the anthemic swirls and stretched putty of another new production, “Wastelands & Oases.” The chopped blips and snares of Waveforms’ “Breakers in Space” recall classic breakcore, but with a dreamy synth line undulating just beneath the hectic surface. So when the mix opens into the broad vistas of Emerson’s own “Rotting Hills,” the effect is especially lush, like clouds breaking to reveal a sunny day.
Throughout, Emerson gravitates toward synth textures that can feel crystalline and lucid one moment, barbed and abrasive the next, as when a glassy background turns gnarled as the Knife member Olof Dreijer’s techno side project Oni Ayhun lurches to life. Distorted, dark, and jumbled, it just as quickly veers right back into the sleek, SOPHIE-like pop of Oklou’s “Just Level 5 Cause It’s Cute.” Pulled from the artist’s Soundcloud page, it’s a giddy early highlight; Emerson reaches this plateau without any kick, her ascent powered by delirious arpeggios alone.
Sweet little lyrical snatches give off a feeling of contentment, as when the sped-up vocal lifted from S.O.S. Band’s “The Finest” hammers home the admission: “Time flies when you’re with me.” But just as often, what would otherwise sound heart-quickening intensifies into something anxious: The distorted disco strings of Smith & Hack and Soundstream are ratcheted up until their high frequencies trigger bouts of vertigo.
Release comes in the form of the two scruffy dance-punk cuts that pay tribute to two crucial dance-music scenes. Considered one of the founding tracks of Detroit techno, A Number of Names’ “Sharevari” gets a loving, sweaty, spot-on cover from the Dirtbombs, right down to Mick Collins’ European-by-way-of-Dracula delivery. Emerson blends that into !!!’s psychedelic “Hello? Is This Thing On?” A song by the Sacramento band remixed by a former member of San Francisco’s Wicked crew (though dating from when both parties had decamped for early-’00s NYC), it’s a claustrophobic highlight that gives way to another Emerson original. Burbling and bright, “Poodle Power” suggests she may have been spending time with Mort Garson’s early synthesizer experiments like Plantasia.
Emerson’s remix of Austra’s “Anywayz” winds down the set. Much like the Oklou track at the mix’s midway point, it favors a nearless beatless atmosphere, giving way to Katie Stelmanis’s Enya-like vocals and the ambient sound of rain. Though the set rarely lets up, Emerson finally takes her foot off the gas at the end, giving us a moment to breathe deep and take in the landscape. Only then can you see how far and fast her DJ-Kicks set has really traveled.
