Yemrot

Lavish, adventurous and unashamedly weird, Yemrot’s first album //The Sunken Garden// is one, as we used to say, for the heads. The brainchild of Margate-based multi-instrumentalist Jimi Tormey, it has occasional echoes of psych forebears like Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt, but Yemrot’s musical world is far stranger than that. Partly based around the escapades of the mysterious Dill Dandin and what happens when he dives into a giant sinkhole, //The Sunken Garden// has a mischievous twinkle in its eye.

“I recorded this album during the first few months of Covid,” says Tormey. “During the recording I saw Elton John performing //I’m Still Standing// for a Covid relief thing on the BBC. He’d dragged a piano outside, in front of a basketball hoop, and sang //‘I’m Dill Dandin!’// repeatedly. The cruel part of me that I try to keep in check found it very funny. Dill became a mascot or a vehicle for my woes at the time.”

Not a concept album in the traditional sense, //The Sunken Garden// is still an immersive experience, with all manner of strange instrumentation and frequent sonic curveballs, like the strong whiff of dub reggae emanating from spiky opening track //Tomtom//. Almost entirely performed by Tormey alone, songs like sprawling centrepiece //The Ballad Of Dill Dandin// and the woozily melancholy //Big Tree// have a delighted, spontaneous feel to them. 

“The album was recorded in my Dad’s old studio which was a mixture of old and new equipment. He passed away the year before I made the album and grieving was the driving force in making the album. The recording process was unusual because I had these ideas for songs but nobody to play them with, so I played everything myself, except the violin and viola which my mum helped with. I relied on the computer in a big way. It was lots of hitting ‘record’ on the computer and running to an instrument to play a part, over and over.”

Audibly blessed with a febrile imagination, Tormey comes across like an oblique ancestor of Syd Barrett or Robert Wyatt: creative forces that didn’t so much disregard genre boundaries as completely fail to acknowledge them in the first place. Not unreasonably, the Yemrot mastermind is not keen to define himself or his music.

“Each time somebody asks me what kind of music I make I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he notes. “Probably because I’ve no idea how to describe it without sounding pretentious. Overall, I am more interested in trying to defy genre limitations. I want to /play/, in the childlike sense of the word, to experiment and have fun. I like all sorts of music. It’s all tension and release at the end of the day and despite my best intentions I am indeed pretentious.”

Currently working on new Yemrot music “with a bunch of pals”, Tormey clearly has more ideas than he knows what to do with, and a unique and endearingly eccentric way of bringing them to life. But despite superficial appearances, //The Sunken Garden// is definitely not the product of some wild, hallucinatory drug experience on Margate seafront. Probably.

“My first psychedelic experience was the result of a pint of pure Ribena at the age of 6 or 7. I’ve circled a few voids as well as surfing a few sunbeams, and that’s probably impacted Yemrot through my mental well-being, but I don’t consider the music to be psychedelia. I’m more interested in the /surreal/. Margate is /confused/. It isn’t psychedelic, but it is home.”

LINE-UP

Jimi Tormey (all instruments/vocals)

SOUNDS LIKE

Singer/songwriter surrealism with a symphonic prog mindset

CURRENT RELEASE

The Sunken Garden is out now

WEBSITE

yemrot.bandcamp.com

– Dom Lawson