Wednesday, March 14   1:00 a.m.
Creekside EMC at Hilton Garden Inn   (500 N IH 35)

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Jeremy Warmsley is a 22-year-old musician currently residing in London.
He’s literate, bespectacled, wears braces, and, certainly most relevantly of all, has written, performed and produced one of 2006’s most intoxicating listens in debut album ‘The Art Of Fiction’.

Recorded across desolate, wintry evenings from the ending days of 2005 through to the warmer midst of the present year, ‘TAOF’ is a heady, venturing blitz of electronica-strewn, folk-belting soul. It marks the culmination of a young lifetime of assorted musical fiddling.

‘TAOF’ follows the French-English songsmith's now sold out limited edition
10” vinyl EP’s ‘5 Interesting Lies’ and ‘Other People’s Secrets’. And it is these kinds of productions that has led the press to compare him to “Arcade Fire crammed into one bedroom” and “acoustic pop filtered through Aphex Twin's satanic electro mills". It has also resulted in sessions for Rob Da Bank on Radio 1, Tom Robinson on BBC 6music and BBC Radio 2, and two sessions for John Kennedy on XFM.

The early influences are predictably very unpredictable; Paul Simon, Sam
Cooke, classical music, but it’s perhaps more recent inspirations such as
Microphones, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Radiohead that proved to be the biggest influence on his current sound.

Hence where we are now – a blissful, transient state between deft, Bowie-sized epics such as ‘I Knew Her Face Was A Lie’, home-leaving, strings-bolstered anthems such as ‘Dirty Blue Jeans’, the ‘it-should-have-happened (-but-didn’t... or-did-it?)’ tragedy of ‘5 Verses’, and intricate, laptop-bleeping remorse of ‘If I Had Only’. But it’s also about celebration and unification – the righteous thrill of learning what your bits are for in ‘Modern Children’ and the sensuality of the opposite sex (‘I Believe In The Way You Move’) – universality we can all nod heads to.

Trying to step back and assess the world objectively, either by talking about it in the third person or by assuming a character is one of the more common themes that runs throughout the album. This is founded in Jeremy’s fascination by the question of authenticity in pop music, and the way that some people believe that a song is better if it's true, or the way people believe that things pop singers sing about really happened to them.

“It’s Oasis and Arctic Monkeys Vs Talking Heads and Tom Waits, I suppose.” Jeremy says. “I was always conscious of this writing these songs and as such made an effort to write in such a way that this kind of thinking would be an interesting factor... somehow.”

The titles of his debut EPs, whose songs make up most of this album, bear this out to an extent. "‘5 Interesting Lies’ was supposed to draw your attention to the subject matter of the song and get you thinking about whether or not they were true."

"The next EP title, ‘Other People's Secrets’ was intended to make it sound as though the tracks were all sudden glimpses of something, a window into someone's secret life." The title of the album plays off a similar theme and was lifted from a book by David Lodge that attempts to categorise every different sort of fiction it is possible to write. Jeremy once had the visions of making an album of song that would fit in each category. (“Didn't quite happen in the end...”)

With the follow up already on the way, there is no stopping this incredibly productive and talented young artist. But until then, sit down and immerse yourself in his diverse and exciting debut, "The Art Of Fiction."