London-based cellist and songwriter midori jaeger opens up about heartbreak, identity, and creative release through “exasperate” and her EP ‘(Un)planted,’ unpacking the tension of uprooting, the hard work of self-discovery, and the courage it takes to let something deeply personal finally exist.

Stream: “exasperate” – midori jaeger

Heartbreak doesn’t always collapse inward; sometimes, it thrums.

On “exasperate,” midori jaeger captures the fevered aftermath of pushing someone to their limits – and pushing yourself, too – until something has to give.

The London-based cellist and songwriter builds the song around a restless pulse, tracing the frantic space between regret and resolve, between wanting the unfamiliar and mourning what’s been lost. “I want something unfamiliar, unpredictable / Who do you let your guard down for?” she sings, voice close and urgent, as if the question has only just occurred to her and already refuses to leave.

Tell me you didn’t feel it
Soft feathers in that tiny room
Dark stain on the ceiling
I thought of climbing up
and looking through

I want something
unfamiliar, unpredictable
Who do you let your guard down for?
Oh today I spoke for hours to no-one

Featured on her recently released EP (Un)planted (out now), “exasperate” offers a striking glimpse into a project rooted in upheaval and redefinition. Born in Japan, raised between Tokyo and the UK, and classically trained at the Royal Academy of Music, jaeger has long wrestled with ideas of uprooting and replanting – cultural, romantic, creative. (Un)planted marks her most comprehensive statement yet: Music written in the immediate aftermath of a long-term breakup, recorded over ten intense days in Lisbon, and shaped by a desire to create art that is novel or undeniably unique.

“I intentionally try to make music that doesn’t sound like something that already exists,” she says – and here, that intention feels fully realized.

The origin of “exasperate” is as visceral as the track itself.

“I improvised the music for the song at the cello in one go during an intense period of loneliness and change,” jaeger tells Atwood. The word itself lingered in her mind – the idea that she had somehow driven her former partner to their breaking point. “To exasperate somebody is to push them to their limits,” she adds. “This song is about knowing you did that, but also knowing it was true to who you are. Exasperated by the overpowering urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost, this song expresses the incessant pull of the unknown against the push of the familiar.”

Where do my hands go?
I’ve gotta feel you joining me now
Join me when my fingers fall
Carry my body like a doll
Fallen tree trunk in your
Exasperated arms

“Although I knew it wasn’t exactly true, I was pondering and imagining this extreme narrative where my actions alone had driven my ex to the point of exasperation.” That spiraling self-interrogation fuels the song’s tension; it never settles into certainty, only motion.

And motion is everything here. Electronic textures and acoustic resonance melt together in a percussive, staccato dreamscape that feels both bodily and otherworldly. Claps land like punctuation. Synths flicker in and out of the cello’s woody grain. The rhythm doesn’t drift – it pulses, nervous and alive, as if mirroring the mind replaying old conversations at 2 AM. There’s a lightness to it, too – an organic buoyancy that keeps the song from collapsing under its own weight. It’s a breathtaking, inescapably frenetic three-minute whirlwind: jaeger sweeps you up in a storm of feeling and places you back down gently, a little shaken, a little clearer.

I’ll never know what that note said
Bear your needles on a page
I’ll leave this door wide open
To remember how you filled my days, oh but now

I want something unfamiliar, unpredictable
Who do you let your guard down for?
Oh today I spoke for hours to no-one
Where do my hands go?

The chorus cuts deepest. “Carry my body like a doll / Fallen tree trunk in your / Exasperated arms.” The imagery is raw and strangely tender at once – the self rendered both fragile and heavy, displaced and offered back. That language resonates even more when viewed through the lens of (Un)planted, a project jaeger describes as being “all about being uprooted.” The cello, once a tree itself, becomes an emblem of that transformation: Dug from the soil, shaped into song, held against the body. She sheds old patterns and old certainties, turning grief into groove.

I’ve gotta feel you joining me now
Join me when my fingers fall
Carry my body like a doll
Fallen tree trunk in your
Exasperated arms

For jaeger, songwriting is intensely private. “I’m very private in my process and don’t share anything until it’s done,” she explains. That intimacy radiates here. “‘Exasperate’ is about the urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost… But it’s also about knowing that you ultimately had to do those things to be yourself.” The track doesn’t resolve that tension – it inhabits it. Regret and self-recognition share the same breath.

As the first part of a double EP release, (Un)planted reintroduces jaeger not just as a classically trained cellist, but as an artist fully entwined with her instrument and her history.

Where her previous EP See Touch Kick And Sweat explored deeply personal terrain, this new body of work speaks more explicitly to cultural identity and displacement – to replanting oneself in new soil, again and again, and choosing to grow anyway. Across the EP, that sense of uprooting takes on different forms: The simmering introspection of “dark green” lingers in emotional limbo, while “bones & mirrors” fractures identity into a more fluid and uncertain state, and “particles” drifts toward a fragile, hard-won sense of release. Each track becomes its own act of replanting – a recalibration of self shaped by memory, movement, and the quiet resilience of starting over.

That process didn’t come easily – and it didn’t come quickly. “It’s taken years for me to release this music, years which I spent either paralysed out of activity and doubting that I could instigate releasing it in a way that felt right, or trying so many routes to no avail,” jaeger recently shared via social media. “What held me back was the pressure for it to be released in the ‘right’ way, because I felt I owed it to myself to give the music ‘what it deserved.’”

She continues, “It is worth creating stuff, always. And it’s good to be vulnerable. I’m reading Audre Lorde at the moment. Incredibly inspiring writer who (in a totally different but possibly interconnected context) spoke of how she started writing because of a need to create what wasn’t there. Fear and doubt will exist whether we break a silence and reveal something or not (‘The Transformation of Silence’ is the full essay, I recommend it).”

In that light, (Un)planted feels not just like a release, but a reckoning – a body of work shaped as much by hesitation and doubt as by the courage it took to finally let it exist.

You can feel that weight in the music itself – in the emotion that never quite settles, in the sense of things constantly shifting beneath the surface. It’s not clean or conclusive; it’s alive, still unfolding in real time. “Exasperate” stands at the center of that friction – the moment where all of jaeger’s inner tension sharpens into feeling that’s immediate and impossible to ignore.

It may begin in heartbreak, but it doesn’t end there. “Exasperate” culminates in release – in the catharsis of naming what hurt, of feeling the push and pull of the unknown, of daring to be uprooted. midori jaeger has created a singular musical experience here: A world unto itself, percussive and human, feverish and tender. It’s more than a song about exasperation; it’s about the cost – and the necessity – of becoming yourself. And that’s why it resonates: Not for the answers it offers, but for the space it holds – for uncertainty, for contradiction, for the quiet, difficult act of choosing who you are even when it means losing what came before.

midori jaeger recently sat down with Atwood Magazine to talk about the tension, transformation, and liberation behind “exasperate” and the uprooting at the heart of (Un)planted. Read our conversation below, and step into her singular musical space – where everything begins to unravel and take shape at once.

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:: stream/purchase (Un)planted here ::

:: connect with midori jaeger here ::

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Stream: ‘(Un)planted’ – midori jaeger

A CONVERSATION WITH MIDORI JAEGER

midori jaeger: I intentionally try to make music that doesn’t sound like something that already exists…

midori jaeger: Musical north stars exist in several distinct categories! Firstly, there’s classical composers, J.S. Bach, Mahler, Schumann. Then songwriters like Adrianne Lenker, James Taylor, Madison Cunningham. Then electronic producer-artists like Caroline Polachek, Saya Gray. For me songwriting is all about the process; I love the feeling of following through with an initial spark and chipping away at something until it feels good enough for other people to hear. I’m very private in my process and don’t share anything until it’s done, so I think I enjoy that songwriting is really my own world that can move exactly at my own pace.

midori jaeger: I improvised the music for the song at the cello in one go during an intense period of loneliness and change, after a major breakup. I was processing this idea of exasperation in the relationship. Although I knew it wasn’t exactly true, I was pondering and imagining this extreme narrative where my actions alone had driven my ex to the point of exasperation that made them end the relationship.

midori jaeger: “exasperate” is about the urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost. It’s about turning over in your mind all the things you might have done to aggravate somebody. But it’s also about knowing that you ultimately had to do those things to be yourself.

midori jaeger: (Un)planted is all about being uprooted. “exasperate” describes the uprooting of heartbreak and the frenetic desperation that can be felt.

midori jaeger: (Un)planted speaks specifically about my cultural background and the uprooting and replanting I experienced. It also reintroduces the connection and symmetry I feel with my instrument, the cello, through shedding light on the fact that the cello was once a tree, uprooted from the ground, and now repurposed as my tool for expression. See Touch Kick and Sweat described themes deeply personal to me but didn’t expressly refer to my background.

midori jaeger: I would recommend listening to “See” and “dark green.” “dark green” because it’s also from the upcoming EP (Un)planted and “See” because it’s the only song of mine in a different tuning! (Less easy to tune the cello differently than a guitar…)

midori jaeger: First and foremost, I hope listeners enjoy and take something meaningful from the music in whatever way they want to. I personally hope they can tell that genuine pain, un-belonging and internal conflict were all felt to large degrees before the music for (Un)planted could come into existence! From creating this music and putting it out, I’ve felt a sense of catharsis and release, and joy to an extent that I could encapsulate these difficult emotions and find a language for them that speaks for itself.

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:: stream/purchase (Un)planted here ::

:: connect with midori jaeger here ::

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Stream: “exasperate” – midori jaeger

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