Review
Genre and Mood
Emika’s Miracles sits in the electronic pop of her album DREI, a record Piccadilly Records describes in terms of brooding, expansive soundscapes. The song itself is short, dark and haunting: Piccadilly calls it vampish, and the most striking thing about it is that its singer seems to be two people.
Song Summary
Miracles is the fourth track of DREI, released on Emika Records on 4 May 2015, and it runs three minutes and fourteen seconds. It follows Miracles Prelude, a piece of under two minutes, so the album presents the idea twice, first in miniature and then in full. Piccadilly Records and Ibiza Spotlight describe the same central device: Emika pitches her voice down and sings a duet with herself. Emika wrote, produced and mixed the song, and sang every vocal, as she did across the album.
Musical Breakdown
No published review maps Miracles section by section, so this review keeps to the documented outline. The song arrives straight after its prelude; Glamglare heard the Miracles material as split in two parts, with what it took for a real male voice in the first, while Piccadilly Records and Ibiza Spotlight describe a lowered copy of Emika’s own voice. The core of the song is that duet of a voice and its deeper double. Listen for the two voices, the natural and the lowered, and for how soon the song ends, after barely more than three minutes.
Concepts in Focus
An interlude is a short piece between an album’s main songs that sets a mood rather than telling a story. Miracles Prelude works that way for this song: Spectrum Culture heard it as a dissonant trip-hop duet, and a listener on the album’s Bandcamp page singled out the combination of Miracles with its darker prelude. Hear the two as a pair in Emika – Miracles Prelude.
Miracles also exists as an alternate version. In December 2017 Emika released DREI as instrumentals and a cappellas: the instrumental of Miracles runs a little over three minutes, its a cappella only one minute and nineteen seconds. Listening to the voices alone is the clearest way to hear how the pitched-down duet is built.
Artistic Context
Emika is Ema Jolly, born in Milton Keynes in 1986 and based in Berlin, who made two albums for Ninja Tune before founding her own label, Emika Records, in 2014. Ibiza Spotlight noted that she writes, produces, mixes and sings her own material, and Spectrum Culture that she also mastered DREI before distributing it on her label. FACT quoted her calling DREI an album about freedom and coping with it, about the shock of a miracle and the madness of being alone.
Impact and Reception
DREI was Ibiza Spotlight’s album of the week in April 2015. Miracles is the song where Emika’s do-it-alone method becomes audible: one artist, two voices. Play the prelude first, then let Miracles answer it.
