Pem releases, ‘milk, blue’, the latest single in the upcoming EP, ‘Other Ways of Landing’, out January 30th on Fascination Street Records.
Pem’s methodological approach to song-writing is organic, tactile and unconscious. It begins in the garden, as ‘pocket sketches’, where she captures phrases, lines and melodies on a handheld recorder, her mind and body wandering in harmony through the natural world. As Simone Weil wrote, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions, reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.” The essence of this is captured in Pem’s methodology and the composition with its analogue crackles, which allows for the unconscious to garner attention over thinking thoughts. Further situating Pem in Weil’s philosophy because as she also quipped, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” For Pem, as Weil, this attention is not a sustained glare but rather a form of perceptive waiting, allowing the gift of knowledge to arise from the patient persistence of attentive care. Only later do the songs become fully realised, but they do not lose their spontaneity or genuine affectivity – blending field recordings with string-based sound designs that intertwine and coalesce to create a world to inhabit, a garden of songs to become a hermit within.
‘milk, blue’ as Pem says, “is about the Moon, I’m very in awe of the moon. My dad passed away on the full moon and wrote about it a lot in his memoirs so it holds a lot of symbolism for me. It’s my ode to feeling nicely small beneath the full moon and the way it punctuates my life.” The openness and vulnerability of the subject-matter is complimented by the vocal vulnerability but together they form an ethereal strength, a hypnotic trance ensues that borders on an occult experience, of bearing witness to something intangible and otherworldly. Pem’s musings on the Moon remind us of James Baldwin’s words in No Name in the Street, “There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the Moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.”
Between the Garden and the Moon, the song functions not to extract but rather insert, to create space to mourn and exist, to pay homage to life and death, of waxing and waning, of appearance and disappearance. For gardens, as Joanna Pottle wrote, “evolve through collective tending and a refusal to be contained… Artists in these spaces nurture not just plants, but speculative futures grounded in reciprocity, renewal, and relational care.” When listening to Pem you hear these brilliant futures arising out of the soil of the song, the possibilities for seedlings to sprout and blossom, that the future comes and we must treat it kindly. Perhaps there is no better song to start the new year with – a reminder, or lesson of how to live with humanity and tenderness.
Photo by Aiden Herron
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