Phew (Japan) w/ Freddie Murphy and Special Guest

The legendary Phew will be joining us this November! Starting out in post-punk band Aunt Sally, she moved on to perform as Phew and initially made records with members of Can. Since then her music has been varied and often with different collaborations but with a focus on improvised analog electronics and her unique vocals. 

“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. In a recent interview, she self-effacingly claims that, “It’s been over 40 years, and I’m still making music the same way. I have not grown at all. I think this is a terrible thing.” The truth is that she haschanged, while remaining true to herself, operating at the fringe of her homeland’s experimental music scene while also retreating for years at a time. 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. She’s just released New Decade, a stunning solo album recorded in her home studio in the Tokyo suburb of Kawasaki during the pandemic. The album is simultaneously dystopian and oddly human—a transmission rooted firmly in the present with little concern for what will happen tomorrow. 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.”

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 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. 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. 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.”

w/

Freddie Murphy

And 

Special Guest