Immersive one-man project inspired by Elton John. Kinda.
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 multiinstrumentalist 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.”
The Sunken Garden is an immersive experience with all manner of strange instrumentation and sonic curveballs, like the strong whiff of dub reggae emanating from the spiky opener Tomtom. Almost entirely performed by Tormey alone, sprawling centrepiece The Ballad Of Dill Dandin and the woozily melancholy Big Tree have a spontaneous feel to them.
“The album was recorded in my dad’s old studio, which has a mixture of old and new equipment. He passed away the year before I made it and grieving was the driving force. 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
