The Diver: On Electronica and Women in Music by Emma O’Keefe
(A photo of Emma taken by @raajasvi on Instagram)
Emma DeLaRosa has been making music since she was a kid. She’s classically trained on piano, self-taught on guitar and bass, and has been in multiple bands since moving to Boston for college. After graduating from Boston University last year, Emma has started her new project, The Diver. A solo act, The Diver creates ambient electronic music, a great divergence from the rock music DeLaRosa has played for years in groups like videodays and jimrat. I had the opportunity to talk to her about this new solo project and what it's like to become a solo female artist after years of playing in bands.
While Emma has always written her own songs, and wrote collaboratively in the now disbanded Corporeal, for the past few years she’s been mainly focused on playing bass in videodays as well as guitar, vocals, and occasionally synth in jimrat. She’s not the lead of either group but The Diver is where she has full artistic control. “I’ve been really satisfied with that, supporting my friends, working on their music with them, and enjoying the collaborative process of that but there was a lot that I wanted to do on my own that I wanted to explore. It was time for me to write my own music and I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t have as much input from anyone else, I wanted something that was wholly myself.”
While DeLaRosa makes rock music, namely shoegaze, in her current bands and in the former Corporeal, she’s been equally drawn to electronic music. “Every band I’ve been in has been some variation of rock and shoegaze music and I really love that but this satisfied a different itch for me.” Emma mainly plays traditional instruments in her group projects, but immersing herself in the synth, even the accordion, are essential parts of The Diver’s sound that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to fully explore. “There’s a whole other world you tap into with electronic music that’s really different from what you get with a typical band setup with guitar, bass, drums, and whatnot. I really wanted to explore the sounds of it, see what I can do, how I can experiment with those sounds.”
The Diver is all about experimentation. To anyone who hasn’t heard The Diver before, DeLaRosa would describe the music as “dark, ambient, electronica, moodiness.” The name comes from a Stina Nordenstam song of the same name filled with muffled vocals and eerie, spaced out instrumentation. The electronic pop singer is one of Emma’s biggest inspirations for The Diver. “Her whole sound and the whole universe her songs create… I don’t hear a lot that sounds like that.” Nordenstam’s sound isn’t the only inspiration for The Diver. She states that “another reason why I wanted to start The Diver is because I have such an immense respect for solo female artists and she’s one of my favorite solo female artists.” She credits Bjork as another major influence and notes Portishead and Goldfrapp as the biggest electronic groups with an impact on her sound.
While The Diver is all about Emma relishing in her own creative freedom, collaboration is still a part of her process and always will be. “I wanted to start something that was totally my own but I really don’t think I could ever create music without the people I’ve collaborated with for so long. I’ve been in the same bands with the same people for a couple of years now. Their input and their help with things is really important to me.” Her collaboration with members of videodays and jimrat as well as Marcy the Baptist will be released on her upcoming album.
Being a solo artist comes with the benefits of full creative direction but being a solo female artist also comes with the sexism and flippant attitudes of male audiences that DeLaRosa has experienced since promoting The Diver on social media. “Especially online I feel like I don't get taken very seriously a lot of the time and that's something that tends to bother me when I just want to be seen and heard for the music I’m putting out and not for whatever gross things an incel has to say to me.” The dismissive attitude female artists face is nothing new to Emma or other women in the music industry but it’s not something that she had to face as prominently while playing in male dominated groups. “It’s not something I've really had to deal with as much as being in the other bands because it's a band of several people and a lot of them are men. It's me being singled out as a solo female musician.” While these reactions are disheartening, she appreciates more than ever the support she’s received from listeners who care about the music she’s putting out.
The Diver continues on despite any comments from incels on the internet and DeLaRosa doesn’t stop at just music, she’s working on her second play titled Pretense; Meditation at the moment and hopes to use sounds from The Diver as interludes for this multimedia project. “I’ve written a play before (Caved In) and my friend Sam (jimrat) wrote a lot of the music that went along with that. So I kind of want to do something like that where I’m blending the writing that I do and the music that I do to a kind of comprehensive thing.” In addition to the play, an EP will be out soon featuring The Diver’s latest work and collaborations.
You can keep up with The Diver on Spotify and Apple music and her visual content on Instagram @_thediver and on Tumblr @thediverrr. Her website exhausts all of her work.
Emma O'Keefe is an Emerson College student studying Writing, Literature, and Publishing. At Emerson she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Five Cent Sound Magazine where she writes and edits all things music. Readers can find more of her work on Substack @emmaokeefe.
Update: Audio was recorded with the typo ‘DeleRosa’ instead of ‘DeLaRosa’. The text has been edited and corrected, but the audio has not.
