On her new album, Delusion, Tempers – the musical alias of New York–based artist Jasmine Golestaneh – embarks on a non-linear exploration of healing and becoming. Across ten tracks, she navigates a fever dream of storm clouds and sunburst, examining delusion as a series of survival strategies shaped by desire, distraction, and cultural pressure.
Drawing on poetic lyricism and broad, synth-driven musical palettes, Tempers weaves a rich web of storytelling that is as cinematic as it is elemental. The album moves fluidly across genres, from synth pop to techno, and metal cues, with strings and balladic moments seeded throughout. The track sequencing shifts between unpredictable narrative journeys and discordant emotional states, symbolizing recursive behavioral patterns, emotional flux, and the disorienting process of awakening.
I’m very interested in your conceptual exploration of “delusion” on this album. Delusional states are usually assigned a negative connotation, but do you think that, in this present time of constant existential uncertainties, living in some state of delusion is necessary, or even unavoidable? If some degree of delusion is relied upon to get through the day, can it also be positively harnessed to inspire imagination and creativity?
I think delusion is built into our psychological makeup, we are all delusional to some degree – we rely on interpretation, projection, memory, desire. I see it as a kind of fantasy plasma, something fluid that can either soften life’s edges and open imagination, or a monster that distorts and overrides agency. It depends on how you harness the plasma. We definitely live in times that compel us to exaggerate this tendency in both directions for relief and escape. I am, of course, not talking about clinical delusion, which exists in a different category and requires medical attention.
The album’s cover features a collage by you that was inspired by “black swan events,” impactful and unpredictable occurrences that are often misinterpreted to be foreseeable in hindsight. How does this concept tie into the overall exploration of delusion on this album?
It illustrates that moment when another reality approaches false perception, when something unpredictable breaks through the story you constructed.
In our 2022 interview, you said, “Sometimes a collage comes before a song – it’s an uncanny process.” This time around, how did this cover’s collage emerge for you in connection with the music?
The collage came long before the album. I made this artwork over ten years ago, and while I was recording the album I found it in a box and hung it on my wall. I kept getting lured into it, until I realized it was speaking to the themes of the album, and was vying to be the cover.
You’ve said you’re lyrically “exploring the line between self-invention and self-erasure.” That often seems like a very fine line, especially for artists. What makes exploring this hazy borderline zone especially tantalizing and expressively rich for you? What are some of the risks and the rewards of exploring this line?
I think it’s a line where things feel very alive, both in generative and self-destructive forms. It provides the comfort of a sense of purpose, even if it is partly illusory. The reward can be escape, hope, invention – a heightened way of seeing and living. The risk is going too far, crashing out and losing yourself in something that doesn’t touch reality. I think this is also a common way we move through the world, projecting fantasy, overriding reality, and then trying to find our way back again.
You’ve teamed up with music producer and visual artist Jorge Elbrecht on this album. What’s the collaborative chemistry like between you, especially since he’s also a visual artist? What has he brought to this production that adds new sonic elements and emotional textures to the Tempers sound?
It was a very intuitive connection. We share a lot of the same influences, so many basic aesthetic assumptions were already in place without needing to talk about it. When I’m working with people I tend to describe my ideas as images, so it’s helpful when a producer is also visual and they can understand what I mean if I say something like “make the synth tone more purple,” Jorge would nail this kind of adjustment no question.
We also have very eclectic tastes in music and could easily pivot from a black metal reference to something like chamber music. I indulged this aspect of the connection because I wanted to make an album that was musically episodic and non-algorithmic, genres flipping with the emotional drives of each track.
Multidisciplinary collaboration seems elemental to Tempers. This time, you’ve worked with writer Estelle Hoy, who reinterpreted songs from Delusion in her own words as part of a “Remixed” lyric book, artist Sandra Mujinga contributes a remix of “Rise and Fall Fetish,” and the release of “Sublevel” coincided with the launch of a capsule collection of 20 bespoke T-shirts created with visual artist Camille Henrot. We’re so often fed this idea of a singular visionary with art, so how do these collaborations alter your view of “self” as an artist, especially in the sense of subverting traditional ideas of “ownership” of the work?
I probably lean away from the idea of the singular visionary. I relate more to something like David Lynch’s thought, that you’re not inventing things from scratch, you’re kind of fishing them out of a collective field where they already exist in some form. To me, those ideas don’t belong to one person, and they have these associative threads swimming in the same current, which others can express in their own unique way. So collaboration becomes less about handing over ownership, and more about letting those threads extend and mutate through other people’s sensibilities. I’m just trying to create an interesting conversation between fish!
Tempers music videos are always visually rich, and the video for “Who Says” doesn’t disappoint. In it, you play the role of “hybrid creature, a fallen garbage mermaid.” The film nerd in me immediately thought of the “garbage monster” from Mulholland Drive, and I also picked up on elements of Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin. Were either of these inspirations for the video, or what was the conceptual genesis of this? How did you come to work with director Fabiànne Thérèse Gstöttenmayr, and what did she bring to the production that synthesized your vision for the video?
Yes, those were references for sure! Jorge introduced me to Fabiànne, they’re friends. The video started with a vision I had of a mermaid in a pile of garbage wearing a hoodie, vaping, looking dejected. I described this to Fabiànne, and she told me she had already written a short film about a mermaid who lived in garbage – we somehow shared this very specific motif before even meeting.
It made sense for the video to then take the path of her short film, so that’s why it has a more narrative framework than a conventional music video. To make it even more uncanny, the male actor in the film is Chris Candy, son of the late John Candy. We only realized this after, but John Candy was in Splash – the iconic mermaid film.
Tempers will be touring in May. Click here for tickets.
May 6 Lodge Room, Los Angeles w/ Touching Ice, Galán (Jorge Elbrecht)
May 11 Gretchen, Berlin w/ Kris Baha, The Lunacy Of Flowers
May 12 ICA, London w/ Baba Ali, Emmeline
May 15 Blind, Istanbul w/ DJ Sanna
May 28 TV Eye, New York w/ Anastasia Coope, DJ Sanna
Be the first to comment