Los Angeles artist Jordi Up Late weaves a tantalizing web of bedroom pop intimacy and electro-pop theatricality, al tied together through a kaleidoscopic melodic perspective. Everything can change, and everything does change — that’s the mindset Jordan Tager has maintained throughout her years making music. If a sound isn’t working, tear it apart, adapt it, embellish it until it is exactly what you want. Whether reveling in reverb-soaked guitar lines or luxuriating in groovy synth hooks, she masterfully shapes her work so that it digs down equally into the crevasses of your heart and your head.
Entangled with her love of music is an adoration of the visual arts, born from long nights painting when she was younger and blossoming further while she attended the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles, where she took on jobs as a freelance artist, including work in design, illustration, mixed media animated music videos, and stop motion spots. She also continues to paint and is a practicing ceramicist.
Over the years, she has developed an aesthetic that gleefully blends the complimentary aural and visual spectrums of her creativity, drawing from influences like James Blake, Daft Punk, and Gorillaz — all artists whose overt genre blurring tendencies speak to her likeminded desire for artistic autonomy free of tradition or rote characterization.
She recently signed with WRKSHP, a new music-based lifestyle company led by Grammy-winning producer Che Pope and entrepreneur Dan Gilbert, and is currently working on new music to be released later this year. She has plans for an EP later this year and an LP to follow in 2023. In the lead up to those collections, she has now shared “HOAX”, a pop song with ambitions far larger than any single genre can define. Clacking percussion and squelching synths swirl around in the background while her voice casually makes it way through this electro-pop paradise. It’s a fascinating blur of bleary-eyed club drama, all florescent hues and conjoined bodily movements leading us on until the early morning hours.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly sweet or bubbly person,” says Tager of the song’s origins. “I get moody and I get annoyed and I need space. So when I found myself in a relationship with a happy go lucky type, the personality imbalance created a creeping disillusionment. The tension festered over time into my feeling he was either fake or emotionally one dimensional. Either way the relationship became a ‘hoax’ and disintegration was inevitable.”
She continues: “The lyrics and concept flowed easily after I created the synth riff and the backbone of the song. After producing the rest of the track, I brought on BRUX, an electronic powerhouse, to co-produce and bring it home. Then I passed it on to Amy Dragon to master. From conception to finish, ‘HOAX’ is a female-engineered single.”
The accompanying video is a candy-coated smear of various animation techniques, dripping with unbridled creativity and disorienting visuals. It provides the perfect landscape through which the music cavorts and wildly explores a host of psychedelic impulses.
Watch the video below.
