Phew – Voice, Electronics
Laura Ortman – Violin, Electronics
Japanese living legend Phew performs a voice-only set in celebration of the Mesh-Key Records release of her new album, Voice Hardcore. Violinist Laura Ortman opens.
Phew has been a pioneer of left field pop and avant-garde music for nearly 40 years. Her career began in the late 1970s as lead singer of Osaka punk group Aunt Sally (whose only full-length was released by Vanity Records in 1979). Ryuichi Sakamoto produced her first solo release in 1980, a two-song single, and in 1981 Pass Records released her debut album, a bonafide classic recorded with original Can members Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit at Conny Plank’s studio in Germany. She has forged a singular path over the past thirty-plus years, collaborating with folks from DAF, Einstürzende Neubauten, Boredoms, Anton Fier, Bill Laswell and more. Her early albums have been cited as among the “Greatest Albums of Japanese Rock ‘n’ Roll,” while her most recent albums, Voice Hardcore and Light Sleep, have received critical acclaim, finding her breaking new ground and staying at the forefront of fresh electronic and vocal music.
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn-based composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activistism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer, Raphaele Shirley and Martha Colburn. Ortman’s notable performances include venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe. In 2008 she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed the live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film “In the Land of the Head Hunters” (1914) that premiered to sold-out audiences at the opening of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Mesh-Key Records is a NYC label specializing in underground / psychedelic / electronic / punk / etc Japanese music. Artists include Phew, Shintaro Sakamoto, Chie Mukai, Nagisa Yoko, Yura Yura Teikoku and We Acediasts.
