Beirut-based Kuwaiti artist, Tamara Qaddoumi, is no stranger to toying with temporality of time through her music, as we’ve seen on tracks like ‘To See You’. There persists an air of psychedelia that you can’t quite put a finger on in her music, and on ‘Cosmic Time’, she adds a layer of experimental, alternative folk-tinted soul to the otherworldly trip-hop cauldron of the track. Intangibility is an overwhelmingly present theme that carries us throughout the duration of the song.Before we’re introduced to Tamara’s sublime yet inexplicably delicate vocals, however, some light ambient percussion sets up the scene for a celestial meet-cute with a bassline riff. As the guitar chords sweep you off your feet, Tamara’s vocals come in, tantalising, evoking a fissure in her expression of a space-time continuum. The track is almost a kaleidoscopic view of Tamara herself fragmenting into the vastness of the cosmos; one moment she’s reminiscent of a past affair, the next she’s transcended into the vastness of space, she becomes “alive in cosmic time,” as the lyrics of the track instill time and time again.
As the song goes on with fittingly intangible visuals by Caroline Tabet, Tamara’s vocals become the axis around which the eclectic drumming and the resonance of that bassline orbit. Eventually, all these variables enmesh, and the track becomes nothing short of an astral projection into a cosmic realm where time is seemingly infinite. All these layers somehow eases the notion of melancholy that keeps threatening to scratch the surface of the track.
