Emmy The Great has released her latest album, April/月音, a masterclass in duality. Out today (October 9) via Bella Union, April/月音 explores Emmy The Great (real name, Emma-Lee Moss)’s British and Hong Kong identities and the point at which they meet. It is whimsical and thought-provoking in equal measure. Classic, Laura Marling-style indie pop meets a discernibly East Asian influence to create the most delightful and unique outpouring. It is available everywhere now.
April/月音 has a poetic origin. Moss had returned to Hong Kong for the Mid-Autumn festival, inexplicably “called back”. In a press release, she spoke about how she “returned in time for the full moon – Chang-E’s moon – at a time of year when the heat breaks and the city seems alive with possibility.” This particular setting influences to ‘Chang-E’, with its wonderful opening lines, “there’s more to life than New York City / as I climbed a thousand steps up to the temple”.
It contains the refrain “you once told me about the moon and the first man to walk on her / how they saw the view of the oceans without water”. There is not much to say except that it’s beautiful, and that Moss and I share the same fascination with the moon (Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut, features in her glossary of April/月音 concepts). Moss considers ‘Chang-E’ a centre-point of April/月音; it feels like this is where all her conflicted thinking comes together.
Nonetheless, April/月音 has just as much to do with how Hong Kong cannot be considered unequivocally ‘home’. Recently, Moss told the New Statesman, “I always stand at the perimeter. In the music industry, every time I’ve tried to go towards the mainstream, I’ve naturally recoiled. I think it’s because I feel more comfortable in the shadows.” We hear this everywhere, right down to the slashes that occupy the titles of five of the songs, indicating that Moss is simultaneously on two trains of thought at once. And it always works.
April/月音 was actually recorded in February 2018, following her time in Hong Kong during the autumn of 2017. Moss told the New Statesman about how she has been learning about the Yuanfen, a Buddhist concept which she describes in the following way: “a karma thing, kinda like destiny, kinda like serendipity, but a bit more specific: it’s the force that brings people together.” The New Statesman writes that, “from that time onwards, she began noticing … she was bumping into people at just the right time and feeling as though every decision she made was leading her on her true path.”
It feels just a little like the same concept was at work for the album’s release, on this bright, fresh, autumn morning, more than two years after it was recorded. Like everything has fallen into place for April/月音.
I couldn’t have gotten through this year without other people’s art and I’m thrilled to be a piece of someone’s unfrazzling this week https://t.co/WMowR3oJrx
— Emmy the Great (@emmy_the_great) October 7, 2020
Furthermore, it’s so nice to listen to a piece of art that is concerned with different joys and experiences and anxieties, to the set of stock experiences and anxieties that we’re all always having these days. We are likely to be entering a phase of creative output that will be exclusively about the pandemic, and that will surely be exciting in a number of ways. But turning to April/月音 is discernibly like opening a time capsule.
(Since recording April/月音, Moss has lived through a period of restrictions in Hong Kong, followed almost immediately by the coronavirus lockdown once she relocated to the UK with her family. In some ways, all this makes it seem even more like the stars aligned for the conception of April/月音– but maybe that is the Emmy The Great poetry shining through.)
The whole album comes together beautifully, with the lightest touch and Moss’ lovely voice shining through. It combines acoustic guitar with samples from all over, whispers of Cantonese, the streets of Ubud. As Autumn fades, which it will eventually, I have just discovered that Emmy The Great and Tim Wheeler collaborated on a Christmas album in 2011, so it’s safe to say she will be able to see us all the way through the end of this “wonky” year. But for these last, bright, slow mornings of the year, there is no better soundtrack than April/月音, and the Hong Kong of October 2017.
