Ema Jolly - aka Emika - couldn't afford to record a symphony, so she crowdfunded one. Though classically trained, the British-born, Berlin-based DJ had almost abandoned the genre. "I didn't like the pressure to play Beethoven perfectly and fit in at snobby events," she says. So she moved into something more accessible, releasing a series of atmospheric electronic albums.
"Working electronically you are free to make any sound you want," explains Jolly, 30. From dubstep to techno, she embraced everything electric. But she remained a classical enthusiast, self-releasing a piano suite album, Klavirni, in 2015.
Melanfonie, out in January, was composed on a laptop "with really horrible cheap-sounding orchestra sample libraries programmed together with my mouse," she says. And after raising €25,000 (£22,250) from Kickstarter, Jolly could afford to hire a 50-piece orchestra and spend eight hours recording them in a former Communist Party studio in Prague.
To give the music more of a dance feel, Jolly physically rearranged the orchestra. Usually the basses and violins sit on opposite sides of the pit to separate the high and low notes. But Jolly put all the basses in the middle, with a group of violins on both sides, to replicate the widespread high notes and central bassline of a Timbaland-produced track. "I tried to compose everything to be exactly how it would sound in the room so it can be performed live," she says.
After Melanfonie was recorded, Jolly's biggest priority was making the music louder. "We compared it to Beyoncé and Rihanna, so you can put it in a playlist with anything and it's not going to feel like the music has disappeared," she says.
Jolly hopes her six-track symphony will be just as at home in a concert hall as it would be mixed into one of her techno sets. "I'm trying to create an alternative image for classical music," she says. "Without the tuxedos."
Melanfonie is out on January 31 through Emika Records.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
