MIA Wants, Needs Media Attention Says Sri Lankan Club Muso

Pop music has always been about reinvention. Even underground figures appreciate its value. Sasha Perera is no exception. The British singer/songwriter from Berlin's cult techno-dub combo Jahcoozi is introducing a unique sound, and handle to match, with Perera Elsewhere – and the album Everlast. Still, Perera maintains that her "odd DIY music" was only ever an experiment.

Perera, London-born of Sri Lankan origin, formed Jahcoozi in Berlin with Israeli instrumentalist Oren Gerlitz and German polymath producer Robert Koch in the early 2000s, pre-empting a futuristic and subliminal dubstep. They'd debut with the single Fish on WMF Records, winning praise from tastemaker legend John Peel. Jahcoozi have since released three albums – the last, 2010's Barefoot Wanderer, via Ellen Allien's techno hub BPitch Control. Oddly, Sydney nu-skool breaks DJ Kid Kenobi licensed Jahcoozi's Silikon collaboration with Modeselektor for a Ministry Of Sound Sessions compilation (Thom Yorke, too, dug the tune). However, Perera remains below the radar in Australia, Jahcoozi never having toured. "We've been approached a few times, but it's never really worked out," she says. Outside Jahcoozi, Perera – presently based in the Isle of Man tax haven, not Berlin, if her SoundCloud is to be believed – has long DJed and produced.

Everlast, led by the single Bizarre, lies somewhere between trip hop and (freak) folk – imagine a stranger Martina Topley-Bird. On Giddy Perera duets with Californian mystic Gonjasufi, the yoga teacher who has chanted for Flying Lotus, aired his own music on Warp, and lately been sampled by Jay-Z. Perera, who succinctly summarises Everlast as "a hybrid between organic and electronic sounds," began the project when she picked up a guitar bought for her boyfriend at a flea market. "There was never really a plan to do a solo enterprise," she explains. "I just started recording tunes alone with a guitar in my apartment in about 2010. I recorded bits of guitar and found bits I wanted to loop and then recorded vocals. I've always been a big fan of reverb and delays – [it] comes from my love of dub – and I started pitching, warping or manipulating the elements or sound textures that I'd recorded. I was just surprised how good these songs sounded in such a reduced environment. I did it more for fun than anything else and enjoyed playing around with melodies. It wasn't 'til around 2012 that I realised that a number of these songs sounded pretty good and that they sounded so coherent that one could even call it an album. I thought about turning them into Jahcoozi songs – dumping all my instrumentation and giving the vocals to my band to produce them into Jahcoozi-sounding songs. But I realised that the beauty of these songs was in their lo-fi simplicity – and so did Jahcoozi, to be fair."

Perera's solo material "is quite melodic and spacious" compared to Jahcoozi's. As a vocalist, she didn't need to "compete" with "hi-tech production". Everlast really is lo-fi. Bongoloid, created in a kitchen area, finds Perera drumming on bongos and a jar of muesli with wooden salad spoons – all recorded on an "ancient, really shitty Samsung telephone." And, because of this domestic milieu, the album is more intimate and personal. That said, one of Everlast's themes is "gender discrimination". "Lyrically, with both Jahcoozi and Perera Elsewhere, I've always been free to write whatever I want but, because of the mood of notes I choose to play on Perera Elsewhere, it puts me in quite a melancholic place. There is an air of honest sentiment."

Everlast has surprised Perera's supporters in blogdom. Bizarre (remixed by an apparently faux Hype Williams, not the urban video director) has been described as "abstractly on the folk-pop stratum," and the album's direction alternately trip hop and bluesy. "I love that fact that people have been calling it #Doom_folk," Perera says. "It's just come out of people talking about the tunes on Twitter and Tumblr. I love all the hashtag music genres that have been coming to life and dying a week later. It's exciting."

Curiously, Perera opted to issue Everlast on Leeor "Lazy Brow" Brown's Los Angeles label Friends Of Friends Music, her involvement with the label initiated with a Koch solo undertaking. "It's the first time I've worked with a label that is not based in Berlin for an album release – and I gotta say I'm enjoying it."

The viral Bizarre is surely Perera's poppiest song, its surrealist video (featuring a glimpse of Uluru) just the thing for late-night programming on Rage. Would she welcome greater mainstream attention? "I'm not really bothered, to be honest. Whoever likes the music should listen to it." Ironically, the pop act many associate with Sri Lankan émigrés is MIA – another underground stalwart, who nonetheless divides audiences and media. Perera is circumspect. "She is usually more about the back story than the music. I guess that is why she will always be a mainstream press kind of person. The mainstream press don't really analyse music – they analyse lives and celebrities. I guess that is something she wants or needs – or wants to feed off."

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