Music tip: The sublevels of Delusion

Jasmine (TEMPERS): It built itself gradually but in a way that felt predetermined, like uncovering something that already existed, rather than inventing it from scratch. I love David Lynch’s idea that when you’re making art, you’re fishing ideas out of a collective field where they are waiting for a channel. Certain images, moods and psychological patterns kept repeating across the songs and started forming undeniable threads. I kept returning to the same states, fantasy, self-mythology, breakdown, repetition, longing.

I don’t separate them, I think construction can allow something emotionally real to emerge safely enough to turn into art. It’s a way to take raw emotional states out of the realm of personal catharsis and elevate them into forms that are more archetypal. It’s the difference between an unhinged diary entry and poetry. When I’m writing, there are sensations that signal when I’ve hit on something – a kind of charge in my veins that tells me the balance of elements has become more than the sum of their parts.

Delusion is built into human limitation, we are all delusional to some degree as our perception is shaped by unreliable things like projection, memory and desire. I think of it as a kind of phantasmagoric go that can be used to inspire imagination when reality feels insufficient or more perilously, as a way to dress your life in a parallel fantasy realm,  that at some point has to crash. You just gotta know when you’re going too far. We also live in an economic system that profits from our dysregulated phantasmagoria, so I think there is a politics to self awareness.

A bit of both, Tempers has always moved through different emotional and sonic states but on this record I wanted the music to feel less contained. The songs started behaving more like scenes from a movie so the production became more fluid too, genres flipping with the emotional movement of each track rather than staying in one fixed lane. I wanted the album to move more like memory, where things can suddenly mutate in tone or scale. I was also excited to make an album that didn’t have any kind of algorithmic coherence, as that felt more punk to me than adding to the slop-ification of culture. 

Jorge and I had a lot of overlapping references and aesthetic instincts, so there was an immediate intuitive understanding. He’s also a painter so he is very visual in the way he thinks about sound, which worked well with how I communicate ideas. I’ll often describe music in terms of texture or color and he immediately understood the translation.

Yes very much so, the visual atmosphere usually arrives before language does. Even when I’m writing lyrics I’m often trying to describe psychological images or emotional landscapes rather than a linear narrative. It can feel a bit like dream interpretation. Melodies sometimes appear as visual patterns that I track through sound. Writing is a very multi-sensory experience.   

I made the black swan collage that ended up on the cover many years ago. While I was writing the album, I found it in a box and hung it on my wall. I kept getting drawn into it – it became a place to dwell while thinking through ideas and eventually it felt natural for it to become the cover. Black swans traditionally represent the shadow side of beauty, a nocturnal outsider that isn’t idealized in the way the white swan is. I was also interested in the idea of a “black swan event”, a catastrophic occurrence that exposes how fragile our systems of self-narration are. We create stories that make reality feel stable and coherent and then something arrives that completely reorganizes perception. That felt deeply connected to the themes running through the album.

When I was a teenager wearing band t-shirts was an essential part of my forming identity. Because music is intangible, it was a way to socially signal that I was into a certain subculture that defined my values. It told a story about what I was passionate about and it was a way for me to embody the music. I haven’t changed at all. I love the idea of an album leaking into physical reality and the body becoming a transmission of the music. 

When I’m writing music I feel out of control and confident that there is a direction at the same time. I go where the intuitive clues take me. I write songs pretty fast, they tend to arrive explosively, which is quite thrilling. Then it can take a long time to craft and refine them into their final state.

I took a course in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which looks at delusion from the perspective that human suffering comes from mistaking projections, attachments and constructed identities for fixed reality. I’ve been very influenced by the idea that the self is something fluid and continually fabricated. That also plays into the themes of the album – illusion and perception, fantasy and survival and the narratives we create in order to function emotionally.

In some ways – my albums feel a bit alien to me once I have released them. They are tied to a specific state of consciousness that I can’t re-enter and they don’t entirely belong to me anymore. I do stay connected to my work via performance though, in that context the songs are alive and mutable and I experience the same song differently every time I sing it.

This album has given me a deeper love for how complicated we are as human beings and clarified that nothing is ever what it seems. Always ask more questions than you think necessary.