“I’ve got to be authentic. I’ve got to present myself vocally and compositionally as authentically as I can. Express myself, in my fullness, and part of that authenticity is acknowledging where I am in my life. That I’m in middle age, that I’m a single parent, that I’m a first-generation African raised in South East London,” ESKA is telling me about her latest album, The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman. It sounds like she is in her full power, embracing her alter ego, The Magic Woman.
She is stretching the limits of her sonic environment underpinned by primal beats. It’s an unflinching, raw and vibrant exploration of her last decade of motherhood, artistry, and the juxtaposition between the rhythms of life and her creative transcendence.
“It’s the impact that my environment has had on me, my past and present, that I’ve lost both my parents now, my daughter’s ten now, basically art isn’t made in a vacuum, it works with the resistances that life brings us,” she confesses.
“Ageing has distilled what truly matters—this need to create feels more urgent and focused now. There’s little time for navel-gazing whilst the world is on fire,” she offers.
The result is her most diverse, experimental, and best work yet. Whilst her self-titled 2015 record might have been nominated for the Mercury Prize, she has spent time collaborating and experimenting with the boundaries of noise and her voice. She sounds fully in her power and as happy in her skin freewheeling, embracing her wholeself, and pushing her artform as far as she can.
ESKA has sculpted her sound, pushing the boundaries of Afrofuturism, industrial pop, alternative rock, soul, RNB, and jazz. Its narrative examines dual lives, of women as mothers and providers, and the delicate dance between daily rhythms and creative transcendence. She has shaped a sonic tapestry that’s abrasive, challenging and arresting all at once. “This project gave me the freedom to push my ‘voice painting’ approach further,” she explains. “I don’t have a single voice or style. Each song became its own canvas, shaping my vocal and production choices in unique ways.”
“It’s like sonic sculpting. There’s a song that already exists, and then you have to chip away until it takes form. You chip away until it emerges and it appears, and then you accept it for what it is. The mainstay is my voice. So that will have to act as the glue. I just have to trust that. I have to believe my voice will glue it together, even though at times when I think more “Oh God, you’ve gone sort of from mock Baroque to suddenly you’re in psychedelia.” How does that work? But then I’ll always manage it, because my musical appetite is so vast and wide,”
“There’s my world of voice work, live voice work and working as a choral director. I am doing a lot of voice work, solo as well as ensemble work and in being involved in quite esoteric experimental voice work,” she explains. “When I came down to recording my voice on this record thinking there was a moment, but it is a song called ‘All The Way Down’, which ends with just voice noise.”
The last 10 years has seen Eska in huge demand – collaborating with artists such as Shabaka Hutchings, Dave Okumu, and Grace Jones; a Royal Opera House commission, navigating motherhood, playing a multitude of live shows such as Meltdown festival and supporting Moses Sumney, scoring commissions for TV, film and radio, composing on campaigns for fashion brands Hermes and Tommy Hilfiger at London and Paris Fashion week, and acting co-composing for Kae Tempest‘s ‘Paradise’ at the National Theatre.
The project goes beyond audio too, as ESKA describes her music as “voice paintings,” with further adventures into art through interpretive writings reflected in accompanying videos and other visual mediums.
“So one thing that I felt would be key would be instrumental in bringing clarity to myself as an artist was making sure that I’d get the visual narrative right, because if you see ESKA and she’s performing with the Cinematic Orchestra at the Barbican or you see Eska and she’s performing with Zero 7 that’s their aesthetic, that’s their world, those are their worlds,” she explains, “But people should be able to land online and see my visual aesthetic, my artistry come to life visually. And that was with my creative director, Dan Canyon. Once we understood what I was trying to convey, it was easy to put the visuals together.”
‘Down Here’ is both striking and raw, consuming elements of jazz, blues, classical, Afrobeat and experimentalism. ESKA ‘s elastic and reverberating vocal digs deep amongst a primal beat, handclaps and dappling synths; it’s the sound of frustration being given human voice.
“It’s voice noise, and it’s going to be surprising, and it might be a little bit off, but that’s exactly the feeling that I want at that moment in the composition. Where you ask ‘what is she saying? Ooh, she sounds quite menacing,” she details. “All the things that I believe about voice and voice work, the voice expands beyond lyrics, beyond text. And we say, and we all know that, you know, we say much more with just a moan and a groan and a sigh, we can say so much with the voice.”
“We put it together with a drum machine which is really, really nice. But I knew with the doodles that I wanted to have a live feel, I wanted to have humans in the mix,” she recalls. “So we spent a day in the studio with three musicians, Dave Okumu on guitar, Robin Mullarkey on bass and Alex Thomas on drums. And that wasn’t the original beat that I told him to play. I said “oh, do you know what?” I think to him the beat that I’ve got in mind, which was quite bold, is quite a bold beat. And then we had a really genius idea. Dave runs the drums through his guitar pedal, so they thought you’ve got this flanger effect you got, you know, it just turns into this unbelievable kind of alien drum, a really big, bold drum sound that I then went away and edited. Then it was just let me take everything out and let just the voice and drums breathe to begin with. Again, there is that voice going, ‘no one’s going to listen to this!’ It’s just voice and drums. This is mad. It’s a bit bold.’ But when everything kicks in, it’s going to really kick in, you know, and I wanted it to be really like a big contrast.”
ESKA wanted the accompanying videos to also be part of the record’s world.“We got a series of images out of that shoot, and we called the concept perpetual motion,” she recalls, “It came from a conversation that I was having with my creative director and just saying, you know what, Dan, I’m the kind of artist that I don’t make sense on paper. There’s no point trying to read about me. I have to be in motion.“
“I have to be like a moving train. And then people will jump on board or not. But people are more likely to jump on board, I’ve just got to keep them, keep it moving,. That’s the road less travelled and that’s not for the faint-hearted, but that’s just the reality of how it’s worked out for me. As long as I keep it moving, then people will come on board.”
As well as movement, ESKA’s words are centre stage with each visual piece that accompanies the songs “We will call them lyric pieces and put the lyrics at centre stage. I hand typed them to make it about the lyricism. Then we find the visuals from the things that we’ve filmed to best illustrate and support the lyricism. We made the lyrics the centrepiece of all the videos that we’ve done.”
‘Human’ comes at you from all angles, with echoes of Prince and Grace Jones this is a fearless stretching of what the voice can do, bracing music that uses the voice to paint a wide vista. “The voice being my principal instrument, I thought, God, yeah, actually, do you know what? If she needs to scream, if she needs to do that instead of whatever, that’s what she’s going to do. This isn’t about being, sounding pretty,” she reveals. “It’s rubbing up against the expectations of a female singer that the expectations, and presentation, that one should have that’s orderly, which is not what life is. My life has been far from orderly in the last year. What I’m going to just sound pretty big and I’m thankful to have some flexibility and agility with my voice and technical prowess and all of these things. But alongside that is the belief that the voice can bring the emotion out; that’s a different thing. That’s what excited me about the process of the vocal work on this record. I was just throwing caution to the wind,” she laughs.
A lot has happened in ESKA’s life since her last record and all of this has informed the process.“I veer away from saying break-up album because, you know, that relationship with my daughter’s dad is pretty complex,” she tells me. “When the record felt ready, when I was also ready in a good emotional place. So there’s all of that going on, in terms of the personal was that I did a lot of doodling, like musical doodle together. And actually, he said, it’s a bit like a musical divorce. Cause like he got some tracks and then he went off and did a record. And then I got some tracks and then I went off and did a record. So it’s a funny sort of musical divorce kind of record.”
“So it’s quite poignant to me,” she continues “I think at the time there were all these vignettes that were created over the last 10 years, but then sort of the amalgam being this body of work and selecting it to be this body of work, it could have easily been a completely different bunch of tunes, but you know, it was very much part of that part of the journey is that defiant resistance. There’s a lot of resistance and resilience, whatever has gone on in the last 10 years, the losses, and the reclamation of my creativity. I think it was, it was important.”
“I think, as probably in more recent years, I have explored a bit more noise music. People like Aaron Dilloway produce really exceptional noise music, and how he utilises his voice. I was sent a live performance of his. I hadn’t been shaken by a voice like that in years, like shaken. I thought this is so relevant the way to articulate the angst, the anxiety, the frustration, all of that, of the world. I don’t know if anyone has vocalized it better, you know, for me, and in that sense when I think of my kid’s memory. I remember seeing Johnny Lydon and remembering the kid in me being a little bit scared, his look and also how he sounded”
“I’m interested in the extended techniques of the voice and what the voice can say with or without words. Do you know what I mean? And so bit of that in here and feeling like I’ve given myself permission to just, you know, experiment and leave my mark and go, I was here. This was my vocalizing, of being in the world and trying and be true, as true to that as I can be is all I think that we should should be doing with music making the artist.“
“So I find, and I create sonic environment that induces the singer in me. Here’s something that’s ignited by this landscape. Then I’ll do what I call a yoghurt track, where I’m just making up stuff and actually, sometimes in doing that, a line will come. I remember when my daughter’s dad, he’d done this little loop on the OB six, which became Daddy long legs,” she recalls of the creative process for the freewheeling track, brimming with playful and bluesy blasts and an earworm vocal, featuring jazzy horns and the contributions of Laura Groves and Soweto Kinch .
” I just was in love instantly, it was just the OB six doing what it does in Daddy long legs. I love the sound of this, this space I love, putting it on the grid and in logic and and trying to give it some shape. Then when I came to just throwing the yoghurt and the top line down, I was kind of like the hook, “daddy daddy long legs” That was the first thing that came out and the melody, I really like how Daddy Long Legs sits in the mouth from a vocal point of view. It’s like, Daddy Long feels right. But I’m like ‘Eska, I don’t really want to write about spiders.’ So I was challenged.So I did a search on Google. And then I bump into one definition, which might have been the urban dictionary or something like that, that, apparently it’s a sexual position,” she laughs.
“So in many ways, the song, the melody, and the lyrical hook tells you what it wants to be, and you just you go in pursuit of that. And then if you follow through, you will eventually carve out something, whether it be a wonderful monster or a mausoleum or whatever kind of sculpture, we allow ourselves to just go on that wonderful, sometimes painful journey with sound,” she adds.
“My voice is just a sound and so I paint with it. And then eventually, you know, that painting will come to life. It may get lyrics put on flesh with lyrics. It might be just a groan and a moan, at the end of ‘All The Way Down’ where I’m snarling and putting on, you know, I’m adding quite a serious amount of distortion over the voice. So it very much depends on what story I want to tell. It does feel like, you know, yeah, like a fine art process.”
ESKA also has a moniker called The Magic Woman that allows her to expand and break out of the boxes of what is expected of her. “When I came to finish the album and I thought it was bit braggadocious and a bit crazy. Then I thought, Yeah, but why not own it? Just own it. Call yourself the magic woman, you know. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Being this Sonic Alchemist, but also someone who’s a mother, and who’s all these things, a sister, who’s a daughter, and it’s about celebrating all the many people, that many voices that I use, many roles that I play as a label owner, this is an independent release. It’s only the third, third thing that I’ve put out on my own record label, so that story encapsulated in the moniker The Magic Woman and it tickles me. It also makes me laugh. “
It would be nice to see the magic woman pop up in different ways. But I when I’ve when I’m thinking, okay, the magic she’s just gonna do. She’s never going to a bit like in the song, when she when she comes alive. You don’t know when she comes live at night. You don’t know who she’s going to be because I don’t know who I’m going to get. The magic woman is the part of me that, like Beyonce with Shasha Fierce. It gives full licence to the full spectrum of creativity, of ESKA, the full spectrum. There is something nice psychologically, when you do that, when you’re able to give yourself a space or an environment where you say ‘okay, no holds barred here, I’ll be whoever and sound like whatever I want.’ Everyone should have that.”
Recently, in a parliamentary enquiry, a member of Wolf Alice warned that music was becoming the sport of the middle classes. ESKA had some reflections on this. “I was born at an incredible time, you know, and to learn music in the ’80s was really why I was so fortunate, because I played violin for 50p a term, right? It was heavily subsidized, by Red Ken (Livingstone) and inner city schools were given so many string instruments,” she remembers.
“There was woodwind where you had to pay a lot more than my parents could afford. But 50p per term we could just about manage that, because my parents always said that there were three of us. So, you know, if one person wanted to do something, they needed to provide for all three of us. So it was important that it was affordable for them.”
“I was loaned a violin from the age of nine right up until I was 18. That opened incredible doors for me in terms of being in youth orchestras, getting to play classical music, and my music teachers, as well as my dad. You know, the echoes between them was so phenomenal. We’re not only going to just do whatever is in current and in trend. You know, Mozart is yours. Handel is yours. Bach is yours. Purcell is yours. All of it is yours. You can do whatever you like with it. This is your music. This is for you,” she enthuses.
“That message had been given to me as a young, first-generation African immigrant walking up and down the road with my violin, being welcomed in muscial groups and playing my recorder, alongside learning Bob Marley repertoire or whatever. That openness was also mirrored by my dad and his vnyl collection, that was really the making of me. I would not be a musician had it not been for subsidising like that. But you know, my daughter, who’s 10, yeah, you know, you go to a music school now, and it’s the demographic is, you know, it’s a particular demographic,. l’ll be honest with you, because if I were a 10 year old now, and no matter how gifted and talented you are, are you going to get a place in a music school on them? Children’s Programme?
“That opportunity isn’t there for parents who are in comprehensive schools; they aren’t necessarily going to be sending their kids to do auditions in these places. There isn’t the funding to subsidise working-class families, parents who might, or kids who might have a passion and an interest,” she bemoans.
“Do you know, I remember when, because I come from a teaching background, You come across that uber-gifted kid, and you’re like, ‘flipping hell. Man, like, geez. Man, like, you could make music! You could change your world!’ I could sit over you, and then you’re ringing up on their behalf or you might start having conversations with parents who are not really that interested. You’re like ‘Okay, I’ve got to try and do something for this kid’. And then you look online, or you try and get, find what, what pathway could they go through? Let me tell you, there’s hardly anything out there so that that gifted and talented, working-class kid, creative? Please, someone show me that the path!”
“If there’s no way that I can’t see how I would have become a musician, were not for the fact that I’m a musician, my daughter’s dad’s a musician. We are, you know, encouraging her creativity. I’ve made certain choices and certain sacrifices with knowledge. I just think with music now, being as you call it, the sport of the elite.”
“You know theatre, drama, all of these things, where there is a lack of youth clubs, and just thinking, What privilege you know? To do something that is real so good for the soul and what is needed in every home and or access for every young person,” she tells me passionately.
“I’ve seen it as an educator, where you know you I remember this would happen. Occasionally if I were teaching music, and I’ve got a class, and we have a great session. Then I meet their class teacher, and they’ll say, Oh, how was so and so? and I’m like, who didn’t, you know? Like, wow, wouldn’t they be well behaved? Like, I don’t even know who you’re talking about. Then you realise the moment music is completely transforming a child’s behaviour. They’re singing their heart out, and it’s the only moment in the week when they’re not getting told off. We know this is not rocket science; we know how it can transform behaviour and mental health.”
ESKA hopes this album further carves out her own place following a decade of collaborations. “I have 300 release, a lot of remixes and reworks there, but thinking like, you know, it’s not like I’ve been work shy. but because of that, the overwhelming majority of that is writing with or with others for performing., I’ll go on my, DSPs and the top tunes are tunes that I’ve done with other people,” she notes about how the algorithms work in the streaming age.
“That’s the one thing that upsets me just because of how algorithms work. I really wish my front page, was more of my solo work,” she confides.
“It’s awful because it’s out of my control. That’s just how those algorithms work. It made me think what success would look like for me. What success would look like for me, is knowing that if someone’s going to look me up, whether they be wherever they look me up, that it’s going to be a lot clearer in terms of the audio and visual narrative to find out who this artist is that I feel this record does. If it’s got the Marmite effect, then I’m so happy.“
“I decided success would be if I’m better understood as an artist and my artistic intention too because most of my history has been in collaboration. That has tended to swamp and almost drown out my personal artistic voice, just because there’s been so much that I’ve done in collaboration,” she details.
“If any way this record gets me closer to feeling like my aesthetic is understood and my artistry is understood, I’m so happy. I’ve won.”
Photo credit: Brian David Stevens
