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.
Phew
6 posts
When Phew starts it’s a slow hypnosis of slippery sounds, her voice recoiling a merry-go-round full of twisty vapours. This bamboo beat is introduced, whipped in rhythmic rat tails and trapped moth zither. The sounds are rich, roll into each other with stretchy squishability I totally warm to.
A police car’s blue lights flows through the venues windows from outside. A random moment that dances the back wall to Phew's sleek slivers. Blurring fragments that compass a faint fœtal heart’s beat that’s reverbed to boom outwards, as subtle injections of Japanese leak on through pinched-in reversed glints.
Mute Like Phew‘s first album, this collaborative jewel was recorded in Conny Plank‘s legendary studio in Cologne. For the occasion, Chrislo Haas of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft fame gathered a few like minds to soundscape the surrounds. Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) on guitar, Thomas Stern (Crime And The City Solution) on bass and Can‘s drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who was no stranger to collaborating with Phew, having worked on her solo […]
Mute Phew‘s New Decade strips it all away, orbits the sultry sizzle of fragmented abstracts and of course Hiromi Moritani’s vocal dynamics that magnetically grab-bag. Born in the pandemic, the album’s whispering contours were a result of wishing to not annoy the neighbours too much, an oh-so-quiet verve that’s best suited to and appreciated on headphones.
Disciples I’d like to imagine there’s some Freudian primary school where aspersions are cast heartily on people’s unconsciousness, though one wonders the effects of Oedipalising on ‘your mum’ jokes. Phew describes this album as “an unconscious sound sketch” and, for all the half-finished-ness that might imply, she’s got a thoroughly glittering musical psyche and intuition.