Multidisciplinary New York artist Jasmine Golestaneh primarily creates collages, so it’s reasonable to assume that she takes a similar approach to her musical identity as Tempers. But Golestenah’s sound cosmos doesn’t seem stuck together; rather, she has a knack for melodies and textures.
“I explore the border between self-creation and self-extinction,” she says, and so on her fourth album DELUSION her lyrical self goes through a nebulous journey through wide-screen, flickering synth-pop that never remains pure synth-pop. She packs a lot into her song constructs; noise, distortion, shrill samples, even strings create cinematographic effects. It’s better to have too much than too little for the album opener “Sublevel”, an electronic fever dream that she immerses in a Gothic sound bath using brutalist sound design and trance pieces.
The artist draws from all eras of electronic music, from industrial to disco, the latter of which is expressed in the stomper “Who Says,” in which she haunts Italo disco with a night-shaded Vicky LeGrand (Beach House) voice. In the accompanying video, the protagonist finds the artist as a kind of garbage maiden in the garbage can, and she immediately licks the ashtray empty at his house. So Golestaneh does have a sense of humor. Only one thing is completely missing here: lightness.
