The musician Emma Geiger’s voice has the clean, timeless quality of a sound readymade for vinyl. Slow and assured, with a hint of warble, her voice cleaves emotionally to its subjects—in the case of the single “Flock,” premiering today on the INDY website, feelings of loss, as the world changes beneath your feet. 

“I started writing Flock at four in the morning,” writes Geiger, who moved during the pandemic from LA to Durham for grad school. “I had woken up and felt a quiet lucidity around all that I was trying to comprehend the loss of. I felt a physical sensation of all of it leaving, and wrote down the first verse of the song. I was imagining the way a flock of birds leaves altogether, and how their wings would catch the light. I stayed up until sunrise and wrote the second verse, calling upon early memories of the relationship I was mourning.”

The release is the first song Geiger recorded on her forthcoming EP, Haven, which features Zach Kardon (Indigo de Souza) and which will release on Ghost Mountain Records on April 1. Upcoming shows include a March 26 performance at Shadowbox Studios, an EP release at the Fruit on April 15, and a May 15 performance at Down Yonder Farm, supporting Palmyra. 

“I was fighting with the idea of my own attachment and my own resistance to letting go—I wondered what entitled me to remembering, to replaying, and holding on to the expression of another as though it were mine?” she says about “Flock.” “All four songs on the EP speak in some way to this dilemma of holding on versus letting go.”

Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

Follow Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to sedwards@indyweek.com.