Jemima Coulter is a multi-disciplinary artist, songwriter and producer based in Bristol, UK.
Their debut solo album Grace After a Party was released in 2022.
Jem is also known for their collaborative project Hailaker, with Ed Tullett.
To exist in the world requires finding ways to cope with what is often so much disappointment. Communication fails. Lovers leave. For multi-hyphenate artist Jemima Coulter, stories offer one such way to cope. The songs on their debut solo album Grace After a Party exist in an impressionistic reverie, somewhere between a hallucination and the waking world. Populated by stories of body-swapping and clowns, Coulter’s music takes us beyond the personal, traveling from London to Perugia, to the circus and the sea.
But for Coulter, stories aren’t simply an escape route, a way out of a painful reality; they offer a resting place for the weary traveler — a glimpse of real magic in a portrait of the surreal.Throughout the record, we hear Coulter reaching beyond themselves toward a tender yet magical universality. What results is a pastiche of remembered, dreamed and imagined fragments, an album that feels as visual as it does auditory. “I created somewhere I could escape to,” says Coulter. “I imagined people in my mind, had conversations I’d never had. It created an album that’s a hallucination where I’m half me, half someone else.” But there’s a sense of coming full-circle in these songs, a reminder that as much as we try to reach beyond, we remain invariably ourselves. “They were all stories I was telling myself,” Coulter says, “and then I realized that there was something I needed to say, that it wasn’t just a story, but something about me as well.”
~ A.O. Gerber