![]() Aunt Sally had a short lifespan, producing one album before breaking up. Born in Osaka, Moritani formed the punk band Aunt Sally as a teenager after listening to the Sex Pistols. This delicate complexity has long been central to Phew’s sound. But Phew has incredible restraint and a knack for piecing together compelling, complete compositions from the simplest collection of sounds and rhythms.” “You can record something at home with 200 tracks on your computer that sounds muddled and overwhelming. “There’s an intimacy to the recordings, and I don’t think it’s simply because she recorded them at home,” says Justin Simon, Mesh-Key’s founder. But I can start recording quickly whenever I get ideas.” “It’s about the size of the compartment seat on the train, and it’s very messy. ![]() “I record music in my very tiny room,” Phew says. Compared with A New World, which had a more robust sound, Light Sleep feels sparse and candid. “The songs on Light Sleep were like the sketches for A New World,” she says, referring to the 2015 album that marked her proper return as a solo artist. Here, it ranges from unsettlingly monotone on “New World” to frantic on “CQ Tokyo.” That closeness often feels tense she’s constructed the music out of an assortment of analog synthesizers and vintage rhythm boxes, and the decades-old equipment creates an unnerving quality in the songs as always, her voice, which is always unpredictable and commanding, is the central feature of her music. ![]() This directness is readily apparent in Light Sleep, a six-song set featuring some of Phew’s most intimate songs to date. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track “My thoughts and feelings at the moment I made that music were reflected directly in the songs.” Yet despite the growing acclaim, Phew didn’t release any solo material until she started recording songs for Light Sleep in 2014.“I recorded at home casually,” she tells me. She landed at number 35 on Japanese magazine Snoozer’s “150 Greatest Albums of Japanese Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and two of her albums were named Music Magazine’s best Japanese albums of the ‘90s list last year. In recent years, local music media have begun affording Phew the critical respect she deserves albums she created over the last 40 years have gone from record store rarities to being included on “best of” lists. Over the past 20 years, she’s collaborated with various musicians, fronted the punk-rock band Most, and played shows all across Japan. It’s not that Phew-real name Hiromi Moritani-vanished, necessarily. ![]() She’s released a pair of full-lengths-2015’s A New World and the off-kilter Light Sleep, released this past March via New York label Mesh-Key. This is an especially welcome development, considering her last record before that was released in 1995. The last two years have been rewarding for fans of Japanese experimental artist Phew. ![]()
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