Over reliant on supervisors? I'm at the stage of my project whereby I need to perform some task that I have 0% background on originally. Hence I need to read papers and books to understand what I need to do.

So after burying myself in manuscripts, I got horribly confused and decided to email my supervisor some questions to help me understand. He has done the analysis before and is quite well versed in it. 

Can this be seen as a bad thing? meaning I'm not independent? In the meantime, I'm worried that I understood wrong thing prior to start of the analysis and end up completely screwing things up and wasting time.
Email your supervisor. This is perfectly fine, it's one of the reasons you have a supervisor.

Having to perform a task that you have no background in happens all the time in PhDs - it is a brilliant way to acquire more knowledge. But it is not useful or enjoyable to get stuck in one task for too long. So you want to figure out the quickest way to learn about this analysis.

For some people, learning about something new means immediately reading lots of literature on it. For other people (such as me and, by the sound of it, you), learning about something new means asking other people how they've done that. This could be your supervisor, it could be another student, or you can start by searching examples of that analysis on the internet.

Whenever I have to do a new task, I immediately search for people who already have experience with that. If that exact problem has already been solved, then I'd very much like to know since there is no sense in reinventing the wheel. Usually, however, they can help me a little bit but cannot solve the full problem for me. Finding the rest of the solution is how I show I can work independently.