Phew and Danielle de Picciotto – Paper Masks

Mute

Percolating for over five years between Japanese soundscaper Phew and Berlin-based songwriter Danielle de Picciotto, this musical exchange of voice and electronics breathes a rewarding listen within your headphones.

De Picciotto’s close mic(ed) curls on “The Cat” are akin to the witchiness of Ruth White’s Flowers Of Evil. Words that conjure a shadowy strangeness, embrazened by chanted apparitions (that seem to stem from both parties) and a modular chattering chirrup of droning otherness. That skittering transcript Phew always manages to pull out of the bag, excite your ears with. Sonic fireworks you could imagine a cat chasing along a wall, the floor, or as mentioned by the narrator — playing with the coat-tails of ghosts.

Paper Masks is a lovely focused affair where the hypnotic pull of the words shimmer in a peppery abstraction that invites you to taste the kernelling kinetics behind what’s being spoken. The lyrical lullaby that is “Der Verpasste Kaffee” trapped in a plankton-esque whirring, its tannoy-torn sentences hissing a sibilant softness that shimmers like an oscillating UFO, drifting on choral lilts and vaporised flourishes. Love-letter repeats, subtly sacrificed to warbling arcade game sounds.

The use of choral intones haunts the space beautifully, gives the words falling through them added power. The instructive fall of German on “Amnesie” feels almost innovative as manic repeats potently scissor your head like a soothsayer’s warning, even when mulched in those wet-roaded atonals.

It’s as if the arc of language was rhythmically spluttering, freeing letterforms from the narrative’s prison to geometrically splatter like a Tristan Tzara-esque elastic of “Sugar Sprinkles”, gleefully distorted and pulled apart, given over to harsh digitalised injury. The unravelling schism that is “Iceberg” nose-diving into the linguistic soft tissue. Its sounds clipped in a metallic chain-mail shimmer or exoskeletal rub, like an eroded inscription covered in radioactive lichen.

Others read like whirr-cushioned fairytales, dialling it back on the mellow breeze of “Pixelwissen”. A drone caught, half-sung haze, wet with a percussive caress and machine purr. Its fleshy memory dribbling in vocoded harmonics. Those fire-flying cursives of “Paper Memories” too, a torch-lit dance in a moth-filled night — its words purpling wounds on the retina.

Without doubt, the lingering phantoms of Paper Masks are something to be treasured, finishing up on the dreamlike spectrals of “Im Nebel”, its double exposures wavering out on sine and invocatory moan, whirling a near perfect ending to this late-night listen.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-