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Pem Bio-2025Multidisciplinary artist, songwriter and gardener Pem’s practice blends the organic and the stylised. Earthy yet elusive songwriting is paired with analogue crackles, synth and string-based sound design and field recordings. Psychology, choreography and myth-making form as much of the Pem musical landscape as the music itself, which at its core, is a kind of ethereal alt-balladry, drawing on soul and folk influences. But where the raw form of singer-songwriter compositions—guitar or piano and voice—form the bedrock of her work, Pem’s hauntingly rare vocal technique—a precise, hypnotic tremolo—points towards something more esoteric, uncanny even.

It is in the long days spent attending the natural world, grown things, the changing seasons, that the foundations of Pem’s songs are crafted. ‘Pocket sketches’; mumbled snippets and unconscious melodies are captured by a handheld recorder while gardening, while the mind is wandering and later formed into fully fledged compositions.

A mesmeric and arresting live performer, there’s a depth under the thinly veiled surface, as thin as the fabric that serves as a constant theme in Pem’s lyricism and self-made costume design. Where the contemporary singer-songwriter is so often a vessel for introspection, bearing emotional depths to the audience, there is a powerful sense of detachment to Pem’s delivery. In her stratospherically high vocal performances, stylised intonation and thousand-yard stage presence, we see and hear serenity on the brink of emotional collapse.

In Pem’s lyricism, we hear the kind of esotericism that can be charted through an eclectic range of music from the past half-century and beyond, from Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan to the Cocteau Twins and Björk. Cyclicism, the planets and personal mythology coalesce in Pem’s musical landscape; ever changing with the seasons drawing both on her actual experience of the natural world as a gardener and something more formally occult.

In 2024Pem unveiledcloud work, a layered and unflinching meditation on grief written in the wake of her father’s passing. Its depth and vulnerability resonated deeply, drawing over 1.6 million streams and swift critical acclaim. Named “One to Watch” by the Guardian and The Observer, Pem’s music was played on NickGrimshaw’s 6Music breakfast show, championed by Emily Pilbeam’s Huw Are You? and featured in RollingStone UK, Dork, NME and So Young magazines, amidst many others. She also appeared in New Music Friday UK & US as well as on the covers of editorial playlists Fresh Finds Folk, Melomania and Juniper.

Hailing from a small town outside of Basingstoke, now based in Bristol, a sense of place, or lack there of arrives in Pem’s latest work. Variously composed inBristol, London, and more accurately, smaller towns outside these major cities, there’s a sense of suburban detachment. More often than not, Pem’s sense of place is liminal: such as her latest 2025 release M4 Windy, named after the motorway between London and The West Country,an in-between corridor, like Pem’s ever-changing states between rootedness and anemophily (being taken bythe wind). This latest work has pushed the textural, world-building sound-design aspect of her project, bringing its uncanny and ethereal tones to the forefront of her live set.

In a literal sense, however, Pem has been embraced by the alternative musical community in both Bristol and London securing slots amongst The New Eves, Mary and the Junkyard, Honeyglaze as well as June Mcdoom, Jacob Alon and The Last Dinner Party.