Jaya Bremer makes sense of chaos with electro art-pop single and video
Based in Victoria, British Columbia, electro-pop artist Jaya Bremer has been a part of the Victoria music scene for nearly a decade — fronting and managing a gypsy jazz quintet, a Patsy Cline tribute band, an indie-rock band called Wise Child, and launching her own solo project with the release of her 2020 album, Everybody’s Getting Married.
Following her recent singles “Apartment 4” and “Our Potential”, Bremer shares the final single, “My Expectations,” from her forthcoming sophomore album, due out in Spring 2024.
Nestled between the electro-art-pop landscape of Imogen Heap and the driving indie-rock of Metric, “My Expectations” truly takes its listener on a journey. Opening with a minimalist instrumentation of a single arpeggiated synth under Bremer’s effected vocals, the just over four-minute track finds the listener spellbound in a dance-rock jam by the song’s outro.
Running parallel to that journey is Bremer’s raw lyrics, with the opening line “I get the feeling you don’t like me, except for when you talk about me to your friends”, drawing the listener into what feels like a personal letter you weren’t meant to read. Bremer shares:
“The evolution the song goes through from start to finish captures the essence of what the song is about. The gradual shift in belief systems and foundations of truth that took place during the pandemic, and struggling to find previous points of connection. I was observing and navigating a slow and steady shift in people close to me and feeling powerless to alter the trajectory they were on.
Writing this song was an opportunity to make sense of the chaos I felt trying to maintain these relationships. It was a channel for my sadness and anger, and ultimately a lesson in acceptance that we can’t change people, and have to accept them as they are if it’s important enough to keep them in our lives.This song is everything I wanted to say face-to-face but didn’t know how to.”
The message and journey of “My Expectations” is further is elevated and defined by a visually impactful music video, self-directed by Bremer herself, and filmed and edited by Trevor Bennet (Kingtide Films). Bremer shares:
“I had such a clear vision for this music video. I wanted it to be raw and intense. It’s; centered around profile shots to provide an unflinching emotional quality, delivered directly to the viewer. where there is no room to hide. The video captures the chaos experienced during the pandemic as well as the influx of information, uncertainty, and fear. It depicts losing your grip on reality and truth, and draws on the paranoia people experienced. The strobing effect is uncomfortable, gritty and chaotic; spliced through by moments of intense clarity.”