Emma Bowers is a musician, writer and textile artist currently living in Portland, Oregon. Her written work includes pieces for NPR, Paste, The Alternative, Slumber and NYLON magazine. In addition to work across the music industry, she regularly shares thoughts and curated playlists in her newsletter Blue Hour on Substack.
Music:
Losing Game is the new EP from Emma Bowers, out September 22nd on Bud Tapes.
Written and recorded between September and November 2021, Losing Game catalogs the unraveling of a deeply wound thread of love and hope over the course of five intimate tracks. Presented as a play by play retelling of events, Losing Game is a tender manifesto on the delicate balance between holding on and letting go.
Recorded by Emmet Martin of Portland, Oregon's beloved tape label Bud Tapes, Losing Game is a warm landscape of domestic sounds, tender vocals and and whimsical instrumental performances, worked together into an analog time capsule of candor and vulnerability.
2023 marks the first time since 2018 that Emma has shared a volume of recorded works, not including the release of “to turn on the light,” a long-form composition written and recorded to support her senior thesis at The New School in New York. 2018’s In The Morning was reviewed in the spring 2019 edition of Canvas and Cassette’s print magazine, and was described as “twilled folk that is both cozy and illuminating, possessing a weary melancholy patinated by city living” by Cereal and Sounds.
Emma plays live regularly around her hometown of Portland, OR, including shows at Mississippi Records, Kelly’s Olympian, Turn! Turn! Turn! and Alberta Street Pub.
Music Industry & Journalism:
Emma’s work in the music industry and within music criticism includes written work for NPR, Paste, The Alternative, Slumber and NYLON magazine. In 2020 she was a guest on NPR Music’s All Songs Considered, and went on to write multiple features and song reviews for the outlet. Emma conducts regular interviews with working musicians and creatives for The Creative Independent, a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people, published ad-free by Kickstarter, a public-benefit corporation.
In addition to work across the music industry, she regularly shares thoughts and curated playlists in her newsletter Blue Hour on Substack.
Writing portfolio here.
Other mediums:
In addition to her work across the music industry and in journalism, Emma has a deep interest in history, folk art traditions and handicrafts. This includes working with textiles in sewing and knitting, basket-weaving, woodworking and natural dyes. In 2020 she began making garments out of cutter-quality antique and vintage quilts, and since has worked to learn various traditional sewing and embroidery techniques including hand-smocking. Some of her handmade works can be seen here.
Her interest in handmade objects stems from an urge to connect more deeply with the physical world in an increasingly digital society. This extends to a deep interest in off-grid living, animal husbandry, foraging, homesteading, indigenous culture and plant wisdom, permaculture and more – all worlds that she struggles to connect with working 50-60 hours a week in Portland. She’s a regular volunteer at Island Farm Studios, a woman-owned and run flower farm and community space on Sauvie Island.
In pursuit of those connections, Emma spent a week in May 2023 living partially off-grid in residency Salmon Creek Farm in Albion, California, and wrote about it in her newsletter, Blue Hour.