Phon°noir
electro-acoustic // experimental
Distant echoes return with a subdued haze, in an audible maze that approaches your ear. Matthias Grübel’s voice sparingly appears to direct and translate, through his Phon°noir dialect, as songs often build, unfold, surprise and sometimes delight with a scattered, spackled, mysterious transformation of blips, glitches, instrumental and skyward noises that become waves and bursts, then disappear. He credits Leonard Cohen and Four Tet as influences; I agree.
Suspicious, hypnotizing collages of reminiscent tinkerings.
Phon°noir – My Paperhouse On Fire
Phon°noir – The Objects Don’t Need Us
Update! 2008.06.21: Annie points us to an excellent video of the former track:
Phon°noir – My Paperhouse On Fire (video)
buy this cd
This is ace. It’s like the music that I have going around in my head.
The music is wonderful, but I become extraordinarily disappointed when he begins singing — especially since he sounds the same in each song on the album and most people I know could write better lyrics than him if given twenty minutes and a restaurant napkin.
Fabulous – love it ! Ambience at its best … :)
I dig the way these sound percussive next to the long sustained tones in the Susumu Yokota. (I’m listening playlist-style using a prototype greasemonkey version of the new player…)
I usually don’t like ambient/experimental music, but I love these. They have a kind of quiet energy, oxymoronic as that may seem.