The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster shifted the perspective. What had originally been planned as a musical collaboration between Japanese avant-garde artist Phew and German electronic pioneer Dieter Moebius (Cluster, Harmonia) soon took a different direction under the weight of the catastrophe. Together with Japanese visual artist Erika Kobayashi, the idea for a concept album emerged – one focused on the “Radium Girls”: the female factory workers in the US and Canada who, in the 1920s, painted watch dials with radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint and suffered severe health consequences as a result.
Radium Girls 2011, released in 2012 under the name Project Undark, draws on the full range of Moebius’s sonic legacy. His dystopian, grumbling textures borrow from ambient, industrial and proto-techno, shifting between rhythmically anchored pieces and beatless vignettes, but always cultivating a sense of disquiet. Over these uneasy backdrops, Phew and Kobayashi deliver spoken-word performances – part chant, part narration.
Originally issued in Japan as a CD-only release, Radium Girls 2011 is now available on vinyl for the first time, complete with newly designed artwork. A long-overdue reissue of a project that turned historical trauma and contemporary catastrophe into sound.
