Following her audio visual live band show at Sonar this year, 7G Home Additions EP and Home album releases Perera Elsewhere gives us a peep into her abstract and surreal musical world with this bizarre video CONVERSATION ELSEWHERE, released today. It plays out with an enthusiastic interviewer persona that converses with what appear to be the various selves of Perera Elsewhere, who respond in multiple languages. Heavily inspired by David Lynch, and the type of nonsensical highbrow work he produces, Perera Elsewhere introduces us to the themes of her full-length album Home with tongue in cheek style.
Discussing the themes of the album freely in mismatched dialects, the plurality of home and identity becomes clear. Each persona that features is apparently a fragment of Perera Elsewhere’s psyche. Of the five characters, besides the over-enthusiastic interviewer, every one of them is edgy and intelligent. One is bathing fully dressed, one is surrounded by a trumpet, wires, pots and pans in a sort of transparent apron as if ready to cook up some new music, another has her curls severely scraped back so that you might think she’d buzzed her hair, there is a Perera who speaks in a tongue I don’t recognise with a blue moving set layered in front of her and the english speaking self who wears a net top and sits comfortably on a sofa. Multiple characters, or sides of the psyche, make for plural identities. Perera Elsewhere is the ultimate collage artist and the conversation cuts and pastes the perspectives of each self fluidly. She shifts between sounds and dialects seamlessly, with an inspiring background music driving through the piece. The characters presents the reality within all of us - that no-one is one set thing. Particularly for those who identify as diasporic, like Perera.
Perera Elsewhere’s conversation digs into ideas of what is home, what is elsewhere and whether they stand in contradiction to one another. Explaining this she theorises, if someone is taking a register at school and when it gets to Perera she is not present, she’s elsewhere, somewhere you choose to be. Places she’d choose to be are London and Berlin - but isolated from their actual countries, acting as their own standalone states, amongst likeminded people. Where she actually finds herself is Berlin. Finally, towards the end of the video we watch a break-down of connection on the pictured zoom call that leaves Perera Elsewhere’s characters in a suspended sort of non-place, their reality on screen turned to an error message. It leaves us thinking perhaps Perera is in a perpetual state of elsewhere even when on a zoom call from home. Where is more void of place than the internet itself?
Perera Elsewhere’s conversation digs into ideas of what is home, what is elsewhere and whether they stand in contradiction to one another. Explaining this she theorises, if someone is taking a register at school and when it gets to Perera she is not present, she’s elsewhere, somewhere you choose to be. Places she’d choose to be are London and Berlin - but isolated from their actual countries, acting as their own standalone states, amongst likeminded people. Where she actually finds herself is Berlin. Finally, towards the end of the video we watch a break-down of connection on the pictured zoom call that leaves Perera Elsewhere’s characters in a suspended sort of non-place, their reality on screen turned to an error message. It leaves us thinking perhaps Perera is in a perpetual state of elsewhere even when on a zoom call from home. Where is more void of place than the internet itself?