Someone is the work of Dutch/British musician, producer, and visual artist Tessa Rose Jackson, a purveyor of abstract stage visuals and psychedelic pop music, with a soul and voice as light as Air, as fragile as Feist, as deep as Nick Drake and as future-psych as Tame Impala.
Strange World is the first single to be taken from Someone’s velvet lined, cinematic debut album Shapeshifter (coming late 2021), a record that is intimate and immersive but also richly layered and uplifting. Written during lockdown it conveys the strange often surreal feeling of a life suspended.
Strange World, the alluring dream-state beauty that is the album’s first single, explores the paralyzing realisation that we cannot control life, nor predict an outcome. Born as a simple bass melody with a melancholy that conjured up a sadness of time passed; the song grew to touch on the bitter-sweet escapism of daydreams where the warm security of nostalgia contrasts with our uncertain future. As Someone explains:
“I couldn’t stop playing it and in my mind the image started to form of a vast outstretched beach. Deserted, but for one person. This is her place; this is where she keeps returning to. But it’s not real. And so the story started to take shape. The song is about stepping back into an old, fond memory. And though it welcomes you in every time, the more you revisit it, the more you begin to realize how much things have changed. It becomes a reminder that nothing is constant, not even you.”
Strange World’s video was shot in London during lockdown by director David Spearing alongside Someone who joined the crew via video call. Inspired by their mutual love of musicals, the video uses dance to subtly reference our current isolation. As Someone explains:
“The idea was to create a video about a young woman who uses her imagination to evoke magic in the world around her in a situation that could very easily become numbing.”
Strange World is visually and sonically an exploration of the human mind’s ability to imagine and transport itself out of a bleak present and, ultimately, it’s about the importance of “staying positive and staying playful.”
Tessa Rose Jackson has been releasing music and visual art under the mantle Someone since 2017. Most recently 2020’s long-player Orbit II (released via PIAS), which combined her previous EPs, 2018’s Chain Reaction and 2019’s Orbit with four new songs. Orbit II was accompanied by geometric 70s science fiction inspired and “imagination triggering” artwork created by Someone, designed to be viewed through an augmented reality app. Someone has also released the Airspace EP (2019), a collection of reimagined Air covers played with acoustic instruments.
Someone has performed at various European festivals throughout 2019-2020 including Eurosonic which saw the NME hail her as “the psych-pop find of 2019” and Reeperbahn.
Strange World was written, recorded and produced by Someone at her home studio in Amsterdam. It is released today as a digital single with new album Shapeshifter following late 2021 via Tiny Tiger Records (Warner/ADA).
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