Seven years on from her celebrated debut Blue Gardens, acclaimed UK composer E.M.M.A. returns with her second album Indigo Dream.
Since debuting in 2012, E.M.M.A. has quietly established herself as an immensely respected figure in UK electronic music, both through her released music, her work as a soundtracker and her behind-the-scenes work as the founder of Producergirls, the UK’s first free-to-attend beginners’ electronic music production workshops for women.
Founded in 2016, Producergirls has been a leading light in the UK’s music scene for the last half-decade, providing workshops, advice and free equipment for budding female and non-binary artists looking to take up electronic music production. Since launching in London, Producergirls has naturally developed into a wider project that includes workshops in Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol and the Tate Modern.
As a soundtracker, E.M.M.A. has collaborated with Gucci on the soundtrack to 2018’s Timepieces jewellery collection by Tippi Hedren, and soundtracked short films such as That Girl, Peugeot (2020, dir. Rebecca Coley) and Liberty (2019, dir. Sophie Davies). And although her non-soundtrack releases come once in a blue moon, she's long proved herself one of the best around — with essential singles landing on Astral Plane, Coyote and her own Pastel Prism label in recent years.
On Indigo Dream, some of which dates back to demos made in 2015, E.M.M.A. pushes the synth-led melodies that have characterised her work since the start to their emotional extremes, exploring “the fluid nature of a dream” across nine beautiful tracks. “Dreams help us understand our personal truths and reveal our real worries and wants”, E.M.M.A. explains, “but they also flip reality on its head. I wanted to explore many intertwined streams of unconsciousness, which swirl in and out across the album’s ‘tracks’. It is a form of escape but also non-fiction.”