Bleep

Vertigo KO is a collection of both new Phew tracks and material which was recorded around the same time as the Japanese artist’s LPs Light Sleep (2017) and Voice Hardcore (2018). As such, the record runs with the highly original sound of its predecessors, channeling the avant-punk energy that Phew has displayed since her career began in the 1970s through a set of experimental electronic soundscapes, ultra-leftfield songcraft and industrial vocal music.

The artists who spring to mind as points of comparison for Vertigo KO are those figures who advanced the very notion of what popular music was in the 1970s and 1980s. The influence of Laurie Anderson, This Heat, Throbbing Gristle and Lou Reed in his Metal Machine Music mode can all be discerned in these strange and beguiling tracks. Some of the numbers here provide rhythmic thrust, though tracks such as ‘The Void’ still have an unusually lopsided feel to their beats. Others dive full-on into abstraction, offering either grainy drones or scuffed-up manipulations based around Phew’s voice. Indeed, vocals are at once part of and apart from these textures - Phew’s frequently spoken musings often murmur away of their own accord but sometimes also find themselves subsumed into the drift of these tracks.

Bringing together new material and unreleased work from the Light Sleep/Voice Hardcore sessions, Phew’s Vertigo KO is another brilliantly idiosyncratic industrial record from the former Aunt Sally member and all-round Japanese avant-garde legend.