As I mentioned earlier, I began to enjoy the process.
“But I began to feel that it was hard to work for perfection in a confined situation, and I wanted to create and preserve an openness and an outlet in my tracks, which may mean that they were unfinished. “Before the pandemic, I think I was trying to make something better and more complete,” says Phew. This dichotomy often seems intentionally raw, bursting with immediacy. “Days and Nights” percolates on a primitive drum machine, smothered by pulsing, atmospheric electronic tones, as Phew complements her feverish chants with wordless vocal curlicues that ricochet through the din like asteroids. The buried background vocals on “Into the Stream,” jostled by juddering percussion from guest musician Hiroyuki Nagashima, convey a weird sweetness within an otherwise stark sonic landscape. The album’s six tunes feel both apocalyptic and intimate. At that time, I could not feel any comfort or encouragement from any song or words, and even words of sympathy and compassion felt empty.” The announcer was reading the manuscript in an unhurried manner, and the voice tone was soothing. “As I was making it, I was remembering the news and weather reports I heard on the radio late at night after the earthquake and nuclear accident in March 2011. “This song had a calming effect on me,” she says of that first track. “By making it a habit, I was able to maintain a sense of routine through making sounds.” She speak-sings descriptions of falling snow, which connected her to another cataclysmic event she lived through nine years earlier: the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster. “When all my plans were cancelled due to the pandemic, I tried to make sounds in my room almost every day,” she says.
The new album’s opening track “Snow and Pollen” was written in March of 2020, as the pandemic began its rapid spread around the globe. New Decade is her first new studio album in four years, although she’s released a steady stream of archival material since her 2018 album Voice Hardcore, sharing several albums that compile material from CD-R releases she sold only at her performances. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track That spontaneity has been a hallmark of her music ever since, which she’s created in fits and starts over the last four decades, the last of which has seen her focus increasingly on home recording using only voice and electronics. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was still working with Yellow Magic Orchestra at the time, signed on to produce her first solo single “ Finale” in 1980, which led her to visit Conny Plank’s famous German studio where she made her largely improvised solo debut album with CAN’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. As she told Biba Kopf in a 2003 feature published in The Wire, “I realized this was not something you were supposed to watch, it was something you were supposed to do.” She returned home and started the art-punk band Aunt Sally, inaugurating a lengthy career in music defined by an enduring punk ethos. She’s always trusted her gut in 1977, she flew to London to see the Sex Pistols live, because she wasn’t content with experiencing them through recordings.
As she has said in the album’s press materials, “Personally speaking, I’ve stopped being able to see a future that extends from the present.” The album is simultaneously dystopian and oddly human-a transmission rooted firmly in the present with little concern for what will happen tomorrow. She’s just released New Decade, a stunning solo album recorded in her home studio in the Tokyo suburb of Kawasaki during the pandemic. She’s a genuine autodidact, mostly developing and honing her practice on her own, while occasionally collaborating with an international cast of heavies including members of the legendary German band CAN, American experimentalist John Duncan, Raincoats member Ana da Silva, one-time Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, and musical polymath Jim O’Rourke. I think this is a terrible thing.” The truth is that she has changed, while remaining true to herself, operating at the fringe of her homeland’s experimental music scene while also retreating for years at a time. In a recent interview, she self-effacingly claims that, “It’s been over 40 years, and I’m still making music the same way. For nearly four-and-a-half decades the Japanese singer known as Phew (neé Hiromi Moritani) has blazed her own path, trusting instincts that she’s stubbornly refused to temper.
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