A celestial hum and a plinking sound slowly fall like fluorescent raindrops from an acid sky. “The cat watches fireflies in my garden,” Danielle de Picciotto narrates in a distanced deadpan, musing on the creepy feline habit of chasing things – ghosts, she tells us – that we humans do not register. Meanwhile, Phew has placed de Picciotto’s voice into a reverberating chamber, making each word and sentence sound as if it has been extracted from a disintegrating recording that survived a nuclear apocalypse. She stretches the arid soundscape with a growing yet still restrained web of ambient-coded frequencies.
Considering their long friendship and respective solo paths, it was only a matter of time before Japanese musician Phew (aka Hiromi Moritani of Osaka’s post-punk legends Aunt Sally and countless other projects) and her US-born, Berlin-based colleague de Picciotto, of hackedepicciotto and Crime & The City Solution, would collaborate. The music heard on their debut Paper Masks started as a loose experiment five years ago, with no set commitments or plans. De Picciotto would send snippets of her recorded voice to Phew, who would, in turn, manipulate the samples in her Japan studio and spring music from the sonic aspects of her poetry: the vibrating flesh of phonemes and morphemes.
As a consequence, de Picciotto’s sung and recited words and vocalisations in English and German are used almost like a Futurist intonarumori here, producing oblique shapes that are then moulded to fit whichever mood they inspired in Phew. If the opening ‘The Cat’ leaves a taste of faint hope behind, ‘Der Verpasste Kaffee’ (‘The Missed Coffee’) leans into the angular, martial inflection of the German language, disembodying voices and straining, twisting electronics – a heartbeat, a sine sweep, a gust of static – until they begin to sound like a slo-mo tornado. Minuscule, cloudy details pull ambience away from background noise into the muted luminescence of no wave.
As it progresses, the album begins to sound increasingly like an unofficial sequel to Phew’s recently re-released collaboration with Erika Kobayashi and Dieter Moebius, Radium Girls. If that record wrapped harrowing tales of the dangers of atomic energy into Moebius’s motorik, kosmische-tinged electronics, then Paper Masks exists in a world where we didn’t heed its warnings. Words and music hang suspended in the ether over vast distances and disappear the moment we’ve heard them. The meditative yet haunting ‘Amnesie’ is carefully constructed using choral verses, then stripped of form as industrial machinery chews through vocal intonations. ‘Sugar Sprinkles’, meanwhile, sees Phew completely deconstruct de Picciotto’s carefully enunciated lines. She splinters words between unnerving surges of feedback until they begin to approach harsh noise, evoking that unique jittery mosaic of pointillistic electronics donned by many of her solo works.
The transitions between ‘Pixelwissen’, ‘Iceberg’, and ‘Paper Memories’ move the needle from krautrock-like pulses and sustained drones to sparse, Morse code-like signals. The closest and longest of the eight tracks on the album, ‘Im Nebel’, veers closest to traditional dark ambient. Yet, in Phew’s musical vocabulary, there is rarely anything traditional. She pushes against familiar sounds and meanders away with surprising dynamism, from shooting space rays to a Hans Zimmer-esque sense of massive volume.
Ultimately, Paper Masks presents an eerie dialogue, both intimate and cosmic. Existing in the fragile space between translation and transformation, it sounds less like a traditional studio recording and more like a series of spectral transmissions caught in a weather-beaten antenna.
