Avalon Emerson’s DJ sets have always been filled with unreleased productions and bespoke edits that render Shazam useless. Now, with her new project Perpetual Emotion Machine, she’s making some of those exclusive tracks available to the world. The ongoing series of singles marks a return to her club roots after reinventing herself as a songwriter and bandleader with her last album, 2023’s & the Charm.
Emerson’s edits have ranged widely over the years, taking in Dusty Springfield, the Sugarcubes, even Kathleen Hanna’s Julie Ruin. With “On It Goes,” she turns her gaze to house music’s recent past. The source is “It Goes On,” a soulfully minimalist vocal house jam from Metro Area’s Morgan Geist in his Storm Queen guise. But where the New York disco revivalist tended to look to decades past for inspiration—the 2011 anthem could easily have been made 20 years before—Emerson has a playfully futuristic touch. 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 light off a disco ball. Every corner of the track is filled with shimmying, stepping, shapes-throwing details; the mood verges on antic, but the commitment to moving bodies couldn’t be more serious. It’s a spirited display of Emerson’s belief in the DJ as a conduit of energy between past, future, and right fucking now.
