Berlin-based visionary artist Danielle de Picciotto’s recent solo work tends toward eerily disquieting sonic landscapes, sounding like soundtracks to Edward Gorey’s disturbing Edwardianism. Often, she recites poetry over these soundscapes, clearly enunciated and intentional. Yet, Paper Masks, her collaboration with Japanese experimental vocalist Phew, finds the sonics reduced to a windswept minimum. Meanwhile, her voice is processed, sometimes slipping into the background while at other times tussling with the sounds that threaten to engulf her.
Five years in the making and a loose concept to begin with, de Picciotto would send Phew bits and pieces of voice recordings, which were then radically manipulated, edited, stretched, layered, and otherwise deconstructed in Phew‘s studio to create what eventually became this album. The results sound like weather-beaten transmissions from bleak landscapes.
“Im Nebel”, for example, creeps along over occasional electronic whooshes of what sound like sine-waves, as a reverb-cloaked voice moans here and there in the distance. De Picciotto is double-tracked speaking (here in German). It’s the sound of a broken intercom system from a long-abandoned train station.
The opening track, “The Cat,” features mouth clicks as water drips, while de Picciotto whispers (in English) about a house pet that communicates with spirits and transforms into a ghost. Meanwhile, eerie voices swell around the poetry, and the drips become insistent percussion. It’s a disconcerting entrance into a wraithlike collection.
“Amnesie” is darker still; de PIcciotti’s voice repeats blunt phrases with an urgency that nearly verges on madness as uncanny, distant wails and churning industrial mechanics nudge her forward. It all feels like snippets of what once must have been more fleshed-out recordings, rediscovered in some town’s cobwebbed vault long after the businesses were boarded up and most of the inhabitants fled.
Paper Mask’s cover depicts a group of young people in a gymnasium, all huddled under a large white cloth, with only their legs visible. Together, they form a human jellyfish. It’s a perfect visual equivalent of the strange, shape-shifting tendrils of sound heard here, music that expands and contracts constantly, so transparent at times that it’s barely there at all.