Jemma Freeman & The Cosmic Something first caught our eye with a psychedelic performance at last year’s excellent Loud Women Fest, and they’ve been popping on excellent line-ups around London ever since, gradually drawing us into their glitzy art-punk world.
The trio release their new single ‘Keytar (I Was Busy)’ through Trapped Animal and Cargo Records on Friday, a fabulously bright slice of synth-pop, of which Jemma says “The song Keytar is about a frayed childhood and fractured memories, trying to grasp onto the smallest threads to try and navigate the world, my mum died when I had just turned 21 and this song tries communicate across astral planes and ages, switching aspect between mother and child, present and past feelings, making sense of none of them and trying to hold on to it all.”
We’re delighted to bring you the very first look at the track’s accompanying video, which takes the band on a trippy journey through a pedestrian underpass.
“The idea for the video came about after a chance encounter with a cult website dedicated to documenting mysterious discrepancies in space and time that can be located in various locations in London. Portals of London provides witness accounts of these strange incidences and the video originally started with a full days hike to 9 of these different spots.
The Woolwich tunnel seemed to have the greatest hold on our imaginations and so ironically we travelled back to it twice at different times of the year to complete the shoot. In the video we are stuck in two alternate realities, never escaping, never finding a way out into the world, a dark presence haunts us, and passers by are just momentary glimpses, the double exposure of the footage making every step forwards a step back.
Made in collaboration with filmmaker Taylan Mutaf over the course of half a year and edited across continents the video itself serves as a nonsensical time-capsule, Taylan is traditionally a documentary maker so there is an irony that we have made a document to an imaginary time, in a mythical tunnel and shot with deliberate abstraction.”