It’s been over 80 years since Robert Oppenheimer stood in the New Mexico desert and quoted the Bhagavad Gita, and we haven’t stopped imagining a world in which someone actually pressed the damn button. Thanks to the movies, we know what the ruins and the barren spaces might look like — but what would they sound like? A series of fractured transmissions, Phew and Danielle de Picciotto’s Paper Masks is a soundtrack for the post-apocalypse. Across eight tracks, Paper Masks plays out like a conversation between desolate souls who can’t tell if anyone is on the other end, but still they keep sending the signal.
Phew has been a constant in Japan’s underground scene since her time fronting post-punk pioneers Aunt Sally before collaborating…
Tag Archive: Phew
In the shadow of the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, Japanese musician Phew, artist Erika Kobayashi, and German electronic music pioneer Dieter Moebius (Cluster, Harmonia) came together for an extraordinary project. Together, they developed the concept album Radium Girls 2011, which they released in 2012 under the project name Project UNDARK-114 years after the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie.
The album is dedicated to the so-called Radium Girls, female factory workers in the United States during the 1920s who painted watch dials with radioactive luminous paint and suffered severe health consequences from radium poisoning. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…