Phew, otherwise known as Hiromi Mortani, is a musician based in Kanagawa, Japan. While fronting Aunt Sally, one of Osaka’s earliest punk groups, Phew played a critical role in developing Japan’s underground music scene. Phew’s oeuvre spans a vast array of experimental sounds: from no-wavey synth-hymns; to poppy, shoegazing, industrial undertones; to eerie incandescent drones. Since the 1970s, Phew’s dynamic, compelling voice and her commitment to unfettered experimentation has been critical in shaping the sound of avant-garde music both in Japan and internationally.
Phew’s distinctive voice and spoken-word-like singing style have resounded in international underground music scenes over the last four decades. Starting from fronting the legendary punk band Aunt Sally in Osaka, she steadily released a series of solo albums with prominent collaborators such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, the former Can members Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. After the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan, she opened a new chapter by channeling the power of analogue synthesized sounds and the human voice. This solo performance showcases her recent compositions and improvisations. Phew is presented in partnership with Arts in the Margins, Montréal; Debaser, Ottawa; send + receive festival, Winnipeg; Strangewaves, Hamilton; The Music Gallery, Toronto; and Western Front, Vancouver, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.
Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) based poetry_sound ensemble Cloud Circuit finds inspiration in communication gli//tc;hh()h, brok()n spee?()-eech, and contact lost. Its motors are the grey areas of connection, those lost threads, dropped signals, failures of technology, and outages at the edge of night. Poet Deanna Radford channels her iterative text reams as deconstructed words of mouth, and sound artist Jeremy Young plays sine waves in flux, 1/4″ magnetic tape and captured radio airs. In performance, CloudCircuit’s approach is collaborative and improvisational; its sound composed, dissected, and refracted. They have shared the stage with Sam Prekop, Lea Bertucci, David Grubbs, Vito Ricci, Ora Clementi (crys cole & James Rushford), Jessica Pavone, skintone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Paul Dutton, Sarah Pagé, Greg Davis, and many others. Their début EP, Bur sting brea k’r, was issued by Archive Officielle in the thawing months of 2020 on clear vinyl. Cordially, The Cloud Eternal Network.
Daniel Majer is a sound artist & musician from Vancouver, Canada. Born to first generation immigrant parents—a Vietnamese artisan and Slovak visual artist—he grew up in Vancouver where he studied composition and participated in the city’s unfolding experimental music scene for more than a decade. Majer creates and collaborates in sound collage, film scores, sound design, multi-media installation and live musical performances. His practice draws from film, metaphysics, themes on time, culture, archives, memory and more. He’s given performances across Canada and internationally in Europe, Japan and Central America. He has released albums on labels such as the Canadian/Mexican based Isla & Jan Jelinek’s Berlin-based Faitiche. In 2019, he performed at Montreal’s international digital arts festival Mutek. His latest album of experimental sound designs, Time for No Memory, is out on Vaagner on October 4th, 2024.