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Emika

What's the Cure

The fifth track of DREI, Emika's self-produced 2015 album, where the record turns towards seductive R&B pop; a critic heard its blissful decay as familiar to fans of The xx, and a remix 12-inch later turned it into dubby techno.

By korczis 3 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Emika’s What’s the Cure is electronic music bending towards R&B and electro-pop. Ibiza Spotlight heard the second half of DREI nudge towards seductive R&B pop with this track, Without Expression and Serious Trouble, and Spectrum Culture heard a blissful decay in it. Those two phrases are where the feelings here come from: alluring, and bittersweet.

Song Summary

The song is the fifth of eleven tracks on DREI and runs four minutes and fifteen seconds. Its title is a question, and the album around it answers to Emika’s own statement that DREI is about freedom: coping with it, limitations against it, the perils of a limitless creative mind. She wrote, produced and mixed the record herself and released it on her own label.

Musical Breakdown

The reviews describe the track’s mood and its place on the album, not its sections, so this breakdown stays short and leaves the detail to your ears.

Intro

No source describes the opening. Listen for whether the voice or the electronics set the mood first.

Main Section

This is where the reviews meet: the seductive R&B pop Ibiza Spotlight named and the blissful decay Spectrum Culture compared to The xx. Listen for what decays, the sounds fading or the feeling, and what keeps it seductive.

Outro

No source describes the ending either. Notice how it hands over to Without Expression, the next track.

Concepts in Focus

What’s the Cure is a lesson in the remix, because its remixes go so far from it. On the 12-inch that took this track and Battles further, Cyclic Defrost heard CNCPT turn it into a spacious, dubby techno wander, where a pumping four-on-the-floor kick locks in halfway against hypnotic looped samples, like a ghostly echo of a warehouse rave. CNCPT removed the vocal entirely, and Emika told Ibiza Spotlight she found the track totally transformed into his production, and wicked for it. Eomac kept only smeared remnants of the voice under spectral pads and strings. Emika also remixed it herself with Borai, an old friend from Bristol, by jamming in her studio.

That last version is closer to an alternate version: the artist reworking her own song, as she did again with the instrumental released in 2017. And because Emika did the mixing of DREI herself, the balance of voice and electronics in the original is hers too.

Artistic Context

Emika is Ema Jolly, born in Milton Keynes to a Czech mother and based in Berlin. After two albums on Ninja Tune she founded Emika Records, which released DREI on 4 May 2015. The album opens with Emika – Battles, and the next track is Emika – Without Expression.

Impact and Reception

Spectrum Culture placed the song among Emika’s emotive electronica contemporaries and named The xx – Crystalised as its kin. Play the original first, then a remix, and ask what is left of the cure.

Learn from this track

Intermediate

What you will learn

  • Describe how an electronic producer can steer an album towards R&B pop without leaving her own sound.
  • Compare an original song with remixes that keep, smear or remove its vocal, and say what each keeps of the song.
  • Explain what it means that the singer also produced and mixed the record herself.

Listening guide

  1. the whole track What Spectrum Culture called its blissful decay, a mood the reviewer found immediately familiar to fans of The xx.
  2. the vocal The seductive R&B pop that Ibiza Spotlight heard the second half of DREI nudging towards, starting here.
  3. the vocal line Hear it whole: in the Eomac remix only smeared remnants of it survive, and the CNCPT remix removes it entirely.

Concepts in this track

alternate version

58 tracks

A second finished recording of the same song by the same artist, with a different arrangement, tempo or sound rather than a reworking by another producer. Comparing two versions shows how much of a song's mood comes from production rather than from melody and words.

mixing

31 tracks

The stage of making a record where all the recorded parts are balanced into one finished stereo track: their levels, placement, tone and effects. Mixing comes after recording and before mastering, and is often done by a specialist rather than by the producer.

remix

164 tracks

A new version of a recording made by reworking its parts: changing the beat, harmony, tempo or structure, often by another producer. A remix can turn a ballad into a club track.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. A remix that removes the singer's voice entirely: is it still her song? Emika answered that it was totally transformed into the remixer's production, and that she liked it. Do you agree?
  2. Spectrum Culture compared the track to The xx. What does a comparison like that tell a reader, and what does it hide?
  3. Why might an album about freedom move from hard beats to seductive R&B in its second half?

References

  1. Ibiza Spotlight. Album of the week: Emika 'DREI' (2015). Review
  2. Spectrum Culture. Emika: DREI (2015). Review
  3. Ibiza Spotlight. Emika new music + interview (2015). Interview
  4. Cyclic Defrost. Emika – Drei Remixes (Emika Records) (2015). Review
  5. Emika (Bandcamp). DREI (2015). Artist
  6. Wikipedia. Emika. Encyclopedia
  7. MusicBrainz. Drei (Instrumentals & A Capellas). Database
  8. Emika Records. EMIKA - What's The Cure ? (2015). Video

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