“I am not an athlete,” Phew wrote, “I’m a musician.” She welcomed the freedom of limitation. Last year, Phew noted how, despite her experimental pedigree and breadth of experience, she has resisted honing skills for the sake of them. And yet, on the radically self-contained Voice Hardcore, it is inspiring to hear Phew alone. She has worked with members of Boredoms, Bill Laswell, and Jim O’Rourke (somehow never with Sonic Youth). In 1981, she bridged the worlds of Japanese punk and German motorik by recording her essential eponymous debut with members of Can at Conny Plank’s studio. Phew is often considered in the context of her better-know collaborators. “Scat” has no noise, but it feels like Voice Hardcore’s greatest risk and deepest expression. Hardcore, in Phew’s world, might be synonymous with extremity, or vulnerability, or discovery-by way of challenges to logic. This spartan approach suits the record’s title, and its feeling of total autonomy recalls her punk roots in Aunt Sally. It seems choral, but it is disarmingly melodic, like a punk version of Gregorian chant. “Scat” is the heart of Voice Hardcore, and it is simple: just Phew’s wordless voice, sensitively layered. Many of her lyrics (all in Japanese) are about the quotidian and the mundane-a common interaction with a stranger, a stain on the ceiling, an annoying cafe-and with that, the music shows how heavy everyday life can feel. Phew sounds like she is enacting a cast of characters, with balletic shrieks, robotic spoken word, and screams that seem to come from a floor above. There is a rumble beneath “Just a Familiar Face,” but the openness is what reaches out to you. The more space Phew allows-the more explicit her canvas-the more distinctive she gets. Whether somber or bewitchingly cackled, passionate or dry, Phew’s vocals humanize her experiments, making Voice Hardcore sound like an ensemble of herself. Phew’s speak-sing is alternately distorted or pure, spoken or shrieked, guttural or graceful or sometimes both. Her hyper-present voice cuts in from any side of a track. Phew creates droning environments thick with texture and stillness they can feel ecological, overcast or humid, as if dew is forming on notes. Recorded in eight hours over three days in her Tokyo bedroom, it was, Phew said, “an attempt to make new reverberations that I have never heard before using only my body.” For her latest, Voice Hardcore, Phew used no instruments beyond her resilient voice and some electronic effects. Of course, Japanoise has a rich history, but among its best-known artists-the skull-drilling onslaught of Merzbow, or the noise-rock pummel of Boredoms-Phew’s subtler approach is anomalous. These are questions Phew never stopped answering, especially on her recent collections of minimal, inquisitive noise music, 2015’s A New World and last year’s Light Sleep. Phew’s work underscores how similar the punk impulse was to the avant-garde’s simultaneous extended vocals excursions, which all seemed to ask: Where can things move? What have we not seen? What part of the mind has not yet been reached? And so for Phew, that “completely different world” encompassed screams, flutters, grunts, laughs, and coolly flat singing. Her aesthetically anarchic Osaka post-punk band Aunt Sally was inspired by the Sex Pistols, but took little of ’77 punk’s supposed sonic dogma-they took only the question marks that punk used to replace any concrete understandings of what is acceptable in art and life. But Phew came from more lawless territory still. This sounds like a statement you might expect from a Downtown vocal iconoclast at the end of the 1970s: Meredith Monk, perhaps, or Joan La Barbara.
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