Avalon Emerson & the Charm

Avalon Emerson has never been one to settle comfortably into a single sound. Emerging from the warehouse scene of her hometown, San Francisco, she moved to Berlin in 2013, earned herself a Berghain residency, and from there established a global reputation as an unpredictable DJ who resists routine, embraces experimentation, and knows how to generate euphoria. Her sets continually reassemble house, techno, new wave, disco, and obscure rave tracks, weaving older dancefloor promises into contemporary approaches. Emerson insists on fluidity as a deliberate artistic refusal of stagnation. She rejects every form of pigeonholing – her sonic and personal dramaturgy remains as free as possible.

That same openness extends beyond DJing. In 2023, she founded her own band, Avalon Emerson & the Charm. While the self-titled debut still carried a sense of gently testing the waters of her own voice within a sound shifting between indie and electronica, this year’s follow-up »Written into Changes«, released on her own label Another Dove (which she runs together with Nic Tasker of AD 93), reveals an artist who has fully found her voice. Much like her DJ sets, the now New York-based musician shares both abrasive dancefloor moments and radically reduced, almost stripped-back songs.

»Written into Changes« feels perfectly attuned to our genre-fluid present. You can hear that songwriting now comes to Emerson as naturally as DJing – it has become part of her DNA.

As the artist herself put it about the new album: »I’m blessed enough to have this life on Earth, and so I should go for it.«