PHEW, KOBAYASHI, MOEBIUS – RADIUM GIRLS CD

Opis

Japanese avant-garde legend Phew teams up with visual artist/author Erika Kobayashi and Cluster/Harmonia’s Dieter Moebius on this one-off full-length, originally released in 2012 under the Project UNDARK moniker and now reissued on vinyl for the first time.

 

 

In late 2010, Moebius reached out to Phew and suggested writing an album together, following up his request with a CD-R of demos. And a Moebius & Phew album probably would have happened if the Tōhoku earthquake hadn’t caused the Fukushima nuclear accident a few months later. In the wake of the disaster, Phew met with Kobayashi, who recounted the story of a group of factory workers from New Jersey who contracted radiation poisoning after painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint (sold as “Undark”) and successfully sued their employer. Phew imagined a concept album about the Radium Girls, and set to work on lyrics with Kobayashi, writing to Moebius’s original CD-R – even keeping the original track order identical.

 

 

At the time, there was a renewed interest in Moebius’s material – the classic Cluster and Harmonia albums had just been re-released, and even Moebius’s lesser-known deviations and collaborations had been making their way to the shelves again. Phew, too, had just had her career rebooted, releasing ‘Five Finger Discount ‘, her first solo album for 15 years, in 2010. She was also no stranger to the German avant garde’s outer perimeter, having worked with Conny Plank, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit on her eponymous debut album, and collaborated with Alexander Hacke and Chrislo Haas on its follow-ups.

 

 

Listening back now, it sounds unusually anxious; Moebius couldn’t have anticipated the subject matter, but his desolate, grinding rhythms and rough-surfaced synths – often sounding like eerie factory floor alarms or foghorns – aptly amplify Phew and Kobayashi’s deadpan incantations. Just check ‘Marie’, that plays wailing, reverberant synths and earwormd alien voices through Phew and Kobayashi’s chanted words, as if they’re bouncing off huge metallic sheets; or ‘Helena’, that might as well have been recorded in an underground bunker. On ‘Anna’, a broken alarm clock buzzes and whirrs into scraping oscillations, and on  ‘Manhattan Project’, a loose electro beat grows legs next to xenharmonic drones as Phew and Kobayashi tell the Oppenheimer story years before Chris Nolan would stick his oar in.

 

 

Some of the lighter tracks – like the toytown funk belcher ‘Tracy’ and exotica-coded ‘Evelyn’ – are a little out of place, but ‘Radium Girls’ works because it’s so musically heterogenous. By the time we near the end, Moebius teases his detuned modular sequences with gamelan-like percussive patterns (on ‘Katherine’), offsetting koto twangs with cinematic chorals (‘EBR-11’).