UMFANG | RIVEN

Alison Amos

Emma Burgess-Olson, better known as UMFANG, released her fourth album March 10th on her simultaneously launched new label, ‘Thank You For Enlightening Me’. The eight tracks, titled ‘RIVEN’, are the first we’ve seen produced from the Discwoman co-founder since her 2017 album ‘Symbolic Use Of Light’.

She pairs them with poems written by Mayra Rodríguez Castro and Erika Ceruzzi, and we don’t get the sense that she needs any other explanation beyond that. Trying to describe UMFANG’s work with words generally fails to accurately evoke the breadth of the experience in reality. RIVEN is deliberately stripped; deconstructed and abstracted far, far beyond her sets at the club and even further than her already restrained previous albums.

Each of the tracks have hints of recognizable elements - a bassline, hi hats, metallic rhythms - but UMFANG continuously dodges predictability and patterns. The title track is probably the closest thing to an easily palatable example. Other times, those recognizable elements are blended with the unrecognizable, like in ‘Regenerate’. The songs progress, and sporadically build like fractals, but she rarely allows more than a few components at a time. They take shape as no more than ambient waves, like in ‘Rubber’, or with adrenaline-inducing tempo, like in ‘Floating Pieces Attract’.

Her manipulation of space is as impressive as what she accomplishes in the presence and absence of sound alike. It is at once challenging and calming, mechanical and biotic. This morphing, organic body of music reverberates, clangs, and echoes on a cellular level with the paradoxical energy of a marriage between a flowing stream and stainless steel. 

UMFANG is influenced by older and contemporary hip-hop and trip-hop, which she finds to be stellar examples of simple beats doing the heavy lifting, like in ‘Baby Blue’. She loves to prove that you can make music with whatever gear you have, as evidenced by her use of non-standard, inexpensive equipment.

Beyond her music, UMFANG has been an outspoken activist in the NYC scene. She feels that she has no other choice but to address the shortcomings she comes across: by bringing awareness to the forgotten history and the racist roots of electronic music, by raising money for music education programs through Discwoman’s events, and by showcasing underrepresented talent amidst the typically white, male-dominated techno world.

UMFANG is still performing often on live streams, an unsurprising fact when you consider how regular her gigs in NYC and beyond usually are. In the meantime, you can find RIVEN here: https://umfang.bandcamp.com/album/riven