Less an album than a sustained act of listening, ‘Paper Masks’ is a transcontinental conversation between two artists who have long defined the edges of avant-garde sound. Phew and Danielle de Picciotto have taken five years to cultivate this collaboration, and the patience is evident: every fragment, every distorted syllable, feels deliberate, as though the music itself were attuned to a frequency just beyond ordinary perception.
Opening with “Sugar Sprinkles,” the album immediately disorients. Vocals drift in and out like fractured radio transmissions, manipulated and multiplied to the point where they become both intimate and uncanny. Phew’s electronics are sparse, deliberate, almost surgical and create a sound world in which de Picciotto’s poetry hovers like a specter. The track teases at narrative without delivering it, forcing the listener to navigate meaning through texture, tone, and silence. This tension between clarity and distortion recurs across the album, creating a sense of suspended communication, a dialogue that exists as much in gaps and echoes as in direct statement.
The interplay of distance and proximity is central to ‘Paper Masks.’ Phew composed in Japan while de Picciotto recorded in Berlin, and this geographical separation translates sonically into a meditation on dislocation. On tracks like “Der Verpasste Kaffee,” minimal passages suddenly erupt into jagged electronic bursts, suggesting the unpredictability of human connection. In “Amnesie,” voices orbit each other, sometimes colliding, sometimes diverging, capturing the fragile architecture of understanding across language and space. It is a record that privileges process over polish, exploration over resolution.
What makes this collaboration compelling is the synthesis of Phew’s meticulous electronic approach and de Picciotto’s sculptural use of language. Her trilingual fluency and lifelong engagement with poetry are bent, stretched, and refracted through Phew’s sound design, resulting in phrases that feel simultaneously familiar and alien. The effect is uncanny: a language of the in-between, where meaning is both obscured and intensified. It is an art of suggestion rather than declaration, a space where imagination inhabits the gaps.
‘Paper Masks’ is also profoundly intimate. Despite, or perhaps because of, the distortion and distance, the album communicates a sense of human vulnerability and curiosity. Each manipulated voice, each ambient swell, each sudden electronic intrusion carries emotional weight, speaking to longing, memory, and the strangeness of connection. It is music that rewards careful attention, revealing new layers with each listen, and insisting that the listener participate in its construction of meaning.
Ultimately, ‘Paper Masks’ is a testament to what happens when two artists refuse conventional narrative or accessibility in favor of exploration. It is a record that balances minimalism with emotional immediacy, abstraction with intimacy, and meticulous composition with the serendipity of improvisation. Phew and Danielle de Picciotto have created an unsettlingly beautiful world, one in which sound itself becomes a medium for dialogue, distance, and imagination; a landmark in contemporary experimental music and a remarkable addition to both artists’ legacies.
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