MIDORI JAEGER — EXASPERATE

'Exasperate' feels like a heist. It's the way cellist midori jaeger plays her instrument in a syncopated dance of pizzicato swirl, body-popping its way through a what might as well be a tangle of red lasers and tip-toeing through shadows. It's fitting, given that jaeger says the song is centred on the "overpowering urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost." It makes sense that we have this sense of minimal noir jazz, like a break-in, except this is a break-out — from the old and what no longer serves, but to what, and at what cost?

"I’ll leave this door wide open / To remember how you filled my days, oh but now / I want something unfamiliar, unpredictable" she sings, amidst a lyrical labyrinth delivered in jaeger's cool tones and tumbling vocal style.

On a broadly jazz-inflected canvas, the London-based composer paints a bristling blend of organic and artifial, with icy reverb on her woody cello lines and understated synth gently blooping alongside intricate clattering percussion (provided by co-producer Felix Higginbottom). It feels earthy yet augmented, an idiosyncracy that more or less reflects the song's raison d'etre: restlessness, the desire and constant push for newness. Though sonically harmonious, this cocktail of living instruments and the synthetic figuratively creates the tension inherent in an unnatural pairing, a desperation like a tree wanting to uproot and sprint off into the sunset.

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• 🔔 'Exasperate' is taken from (Un)planted (due out 9th March), the result of ten days of recording in Lisbon. It's the first in a pair of upcoming EPs by midori jaeger.
• 🔔 Another track has already been released from the EP, namely 'dark green' — gentler and warmer than 'exasperate', but with a similar minimalism and that same characteristic stamp of living-and-breathing crossed with buttons-and-waveforms.
• 🔔 The EP's confessional cover art (as seen above) is the work of Glasgow-based photographer Inigo Blake.

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bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ instagram

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