Like many British teens in the late 1970s, when Hiromi Moritani heard the Sex Pistols, she started her own punk band. But even by the standards of punk and post-punk, Japan’s Aunt Sally stood apart: dirge-y psychedelic rock, piano waltzes, spiky outbursts, a whistling take of “Heart and Soul.” And when Moritani struck off on her own in 1980 as Phew, she bushwhacked her own path. She had Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto produce her experimental first single. And for her debut album, she tapped a German dream team: producer Conny Plank and Can’s rhythm section of Holger Czuaky and Jaki Leibezeit, who cast a pulsing, harrowing sound. In the almost four decades since, she’s continued to carve out her own peculiar niche in rock, often working with legends who abet her vision, including Anton Fier, Otomo Yoshihide and members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten. You can hear Jim O’Rourke’s turn on bass on her 2010 album Five Finger Discount—covering Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” no less.
But since that time, Phew has taken to holing up in her own bedroom with an array of analog electronics and old drum machines, bending sine waves, screwing down drum sputters and warping her voice to add another layer to the din. Even within her own discography, it was a stranger and far more foreboding sound, but one only audible if you bought CD-Rs at her shows in Tokyo. Culled now into a six-track album, Light Sleep is the sound of a depopulated urban streetscape at 3 a.m., at times veering into the realm of nightmare. Through such clamor and darkness, Phew’s voice emerges as a brief bit of consolation.
“New World” starts off spare, its oscillators flatulent and bleating. A mechanized hi-hat hiss slowly gathers steam and a ghostly mist of electronics start to thicken, Moritani’s voice alternating between plainspoken and assuaging. The furious “CQ Tokyo” returns her to her early punk roots, barking against a deliriously fast cha-cha beat, as if Yoko Ono snuck into Suicide’s practice space and stole one of Martin Rev’s rejiggered drum machines back in 1974. Menacing snarls of electronics roar alongside her increasingly fraught yells, the drums lurching faster and faster until they lash like a whip.
On “Usui Kuki,” Phew sets up a snare roll on that old Ace Tone rhythm box that threatens to cohere into Sly Stone’s “In Time,” but Phew is deft enough to never let it settle into a steady beat. Ungrounded wire hum and other electromagnetic turbulence eddies around her, the components and her processed voice increasingly hard to differentiate. “Echo” returns to the strobing pummel of early Suicide as Phew overlays a flickering beat with one in double-time. But rather than intensify the track, Phew instead lets in more space and hum, her voice increasingly desolate as feedback and hiss slither in the background.
“Mata Aimasho” centers Phew’s calm speaking voice as metallic subway drones scrape all around her. As she moves through the song, pacing her words as if describing a dream, an incessant buzz begins to resemble black outer space around her. Phew suddenly whistles along like a mockingbird—which, rather than lighten the mood, turns it more menacing, like Robert Mitchum’s bellowed hymn in Night of the Hunter.
In the present moment, it’s no thing to hoard old analog gear and fetishize vintage-sounding equipment so as to give a sense of “warmth” to a recording. But in Phew’s hands, she roots in these components for a sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. Light Sleep signifies her coming back full circle to the kind of relentless music she made as a young punk. There’s something both harsh and hopeful in her latest, as exemplified by a performance she gave a week ago in New York City. With her devices she conjured a sound that roiled like an oil fire. But just when it seemed blackest, her voice would begin to emerge from such harsh noise, tempering it. On Light Sleep, Phew strikes an uncanny balance, in control of all the sounds around her, allowing them to slip from her hands.
