Avalon Emerson’s DJ units have at all times been full of unreleased productions and bespoke edits that render Shazam ineffective. Now, together with her new venture Perpetual Emotion Machine, she’s making a few of these unique tracks out there to the world. The ongoing collection of singles marks a return to her membership roots after reinventing herself as a songwriter and bandleader together with her final album, 2023’s & the Charm.
Emerson’s edits have ranged extensively over time, taking in Dusty Springfield, the Sugarcubes, even Kathleen Hanna’s Julie Ruin. With “On It Goes,” she turns her gaze to accommodate music’s latest previous. The supply is “It Goes On,” a soulfully minimalist vocal home jam from Metro Area’s Morgan Geist in his Storm Queen guise. But the place the New York disco revivalist tended to look to many years previous for inspiration—the 2011 anthem may simply have been made 20 years earlier than—Emerson has a playfully futuristic contact. She pitches up Storm Queen singer Damon C. Scott’s gospelly bellow into an insistent chirp, which she pairs with a rubbery bass ostinato, stonking drum groove, and little flecks of funk that scatter like mild off a disco ball. Every nook of the observe is full of shimmying, stepping, shapes-throwing particulars; the temper verges on antic, however the dedication to transferring our bodies couldn’t be extra critical. It’s a spirited show of Emerson’s perception within the DJ as a conduit of vitality between previous, future, and proper fucking now.