Like most children, Emmalee's first experience of making music was with a plastic recorder and a number of other ill-advised toy whistles and trumpets. It was from here that she followed a not unpredictable but quite successful progression to the oboe, clarinet, and English and French horns. She studied (and is a great lover of) Romantic and Modern classical music, with a particular fondness for Debussy.
Perhaps the most important twist in this so far dull history involves Emmalee's other fascination: electronics. Being adept at dismantling all manner of gadgets from an early age, she naturally developed a secondary musical affinity for analog synthesizers and other voltage-driven trinkets of noisemaking. Today, she is equally at home with a soldering iron as a woodwind, and is a great believer in circuit-bending*.
Today, Emmalee blends strings, woodwinds, horns and analog synthesizers with found sounds and bent circuits to create ambient, orchestral drone music. Her debut album Crux is the first realization of the wash of sounds in her mind.
Emmalee Crane was born in Toronto in 1983. She now lives in San Francisco with an unruly collection of instruments and her dog, Bash.
* as long as you don't mention the time she totally wrecked a Juno 106
Read more...