Pem

Multidisciplinary artist, songwriter and gardener Pem’s practice blends the organic and the stylised. Earthy yet elusive songwriting is paired with analogue crackles, synth and string based sound design and field recordings. Psychology, choreography and myth-making form as much of the Pem musical landscape as the music itself, which at its core, is a kind of ethereal alt-balladry, drawing on soul and folk influences. But where the raw form of singer-songwriter compositions — guitar or piano and voice — form the bedrock of her work, Pem’s hauntingly rare vocal technique — a precise, hypnotic tremolo — points towards something more esoteric, uncanny even.

It is in the long days spent attending the natural world, grown things, the changing seasons, that the foundations of Pem’s songs are crafted. ‘Pocket sketches’; mumbled snippets and unconscious melodies are captured by a handheld recorder while gardening, while the mind is wandering and later formed into fully fledged compositions.

A mesmeric and arresting live performer,  there’s a depth under the thinly veiled surface, as thin as the fabric that serves as a constant theme in Pem’s lyricism and self-made costume design. Where the contemporary singer-songwriter is so often a vessel for introspection, bearing emotional depths to the audience, there is a powerful sense of detachment to Pem’s delivery. In her stratospherically high vocal performances, stylised intonation and thousand-yard stage presence, we see and hear serenity on the brink of emotional collapse.

In Pem’s lyricism we hear the kind of esotericism that can be charted through an eclectic range of music from the past half-century and beyond, from Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan to the Cocteau Twins and Björk. Cyclicism, the planets and personal mythology coalesce in Pem’s musical landscape; ever changing with the seasons drawing both on her actual experience of the natural world as a gardener and something more formally occult.