Unsurprisingly, this aesthetic leads all the way back to Nathan's NES-lit eighties childhood. "I remember my parents limiting me to 2 hours a day and it seemed impossible! How was I going to beat Metroid on two hours a day?" Captivated by artists squeezing the last possible detail out of a decidedly low-fi palette, Nathan never lost his obsession with the eight-bit look and sound and its resulting digital artifacts, which contributes to both the sound and the look of Emulsion. "There is something so inspiring about getting the most out of limited resources. I'm so intimidated by the infinite possibilities of sound design my computer offers me, and how easy it's all become."
This love of early digital media led him to spend a year as a lead Game Boy tester in San Francisco. With dozens of testers clamoring to experience new 3D technology, he stuck with his faithful 8-bit platform. "It's really a pity the games themselves were terrible, but I was so fascinated by the development process." This process was the "lone wolf" designer single-handedly striving to create a game with limited resources. "It made me take solo electronic musicians much more seriously, and inspired me to work on my own."
Drawn to darker, edgier music as a teenager during the mid-nineties, Nathan spent years in thrall to the Industrial music scene. In and out of bands, all the while dabbling in dark electronic music, Nathan was eventually led to Chicago in February 2001. Pulling down a job at Industrial music pillar Invisible Records, Nathan conceived of Emulsion and began making waves in the Midwest. "I moved to Chicago in love with music that alienated people. Noise, experimental, and dark ambient are minority tastes at best, and that scene was very insular." Oddly Emulsion's biggest obstacle was his love of melody. "Compared to noise, my stuff sounded like pop music."
But perhaps there is more of a connection than we think. "I realized that the attention to texture and melody that got me interested in Coil and Skinny Puppy as a teenager is still here, albeit in a quiet, often gentle form." Present in artists as disparate as cLOUDDEAD, Casino versus Japan, and Ulrich Schnauss, discovering this music felt like a Renaissance to Nathan after years of post-Autechre beeps, pops, and clicks - the return of melody and even (gasp!) songwriting to electronic music.
Releasing "The Death of the Author EP" in Fall of 2003, Emulsion had surprising success with niche press and college radio, charting with dark electronic contemporaries like Gridlock and Converter. It was on the heels of this promotion that Emulsion hit the road, touring extensively over the course of a year and gigging with acts like Pigface, Attrition, the [law rah] collective, and Minneapolis dark trip-hop act High Blue Star. "This was an exhausting year. There's nothing like playing to 15 goth kids in rural Georgia to test your resolve to keep touring!"
Getting back to his home studio in late 2004, Nathan realized the next album wouldn't come so easily. "There was no way I could return to dark music, but with no new coherent sound in my head, I was stumped." It took months of writing and throwing away material, all the while shuffling through record bins looking for something to get him excited about making music again. That record was Casino versus Japan's Whole Numbers Play The Basics. "I had a gig in Indianapolis and was killing time before the show. I was astounded to discover more inspiring music in that record store than I had found in all of Chicago up to that point."
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