Distant Pairs: Ana da Silva & Phew

Friday, October 30th, ISSUE is pleased to stream a new collaborative work from legendary artists and cult punk icons Ana da Silva and Phew. In 2018, Ana and Phew collaborated on their debut release, Island, a bracing odyssey in industrial noise, absorbing textures, tactile rhythms—a showcase of each artist's highly developed and dynamic compositional style. Ana and Phew contributed pointillist bits of spoken word in each other’s native tongues of Portuguese and Japanese, reflecting on isolation, friendship, and nature. Composed through files exchanged files via email, both artists are familiar with working across distance with a sense of discovery that will be familiar to Raincoats fans—a sense of poetry and inquisitiveness, of intuition and invention, of new languages taking shape.

During the Fall, 2020, ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their' ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.

"Shelter" by Ana da Silva & Phew
Mixed by Hiroyuki Nagashima
Photography by Shirley O’Loughlin

Notes from Ana da Silva & Phew:

“I repeat my daily life before and after the lockdown.
Sleeping, eating, working, feeling anger, sorrows, delight and then fears.
The more I try to talk about what is currently going on, the more I can't find the words.
I try to imagine what will be left when the event is over.
Once we are in the past, we can talk about events as we please.
Made history.
One minute I'm wondering if I can express what I'm feeling at this moment as a musician, and the next I'm worrying about a cat with a skin disease.
I move on, repeating my daily routine. Mine, or maybe ours?
Life changes on its own, without us even knowing it.
Fluctuation and changing without trying to change, thinking about it.”
—Phew

“Time flows and the world is ill and worried.
Safety slips, hunger slowly creeping in.
I worry about the world.
Looking inwards can be rewarding, but isolation can be lonely.
Other problems also knock on the door.
Throughout this time, a great weight fell heavily on all of us - fear, mismanagement, injustice, physical and mental pain and massive loss.
I’m ok and I’m not ok.
I’ll make music with Phew to express these feelings of uncertainty, fear and… hope!”
—Ana da Silva

Ana da Silva is a founding member and songwriter of the pioneering post-punk band The Raincoats. Across four daring full-length records, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it to be—an act of raw expression, not any one sound. The Raincoats have offered creative and spiritual inspiration for several generations of artists, cited as a formative influence by Kurt Cobain, Carrie Brownstein, Bikini Kill, and Sex Pistols’ John Lydon. They set a crucial precedent for feminist work within a DIY punk context, marked all the while by Ana’s poetic lyrical style and innovative noise guitar playing. After The Raincoats’ hiatus in 1984, Ana collaborated with The Go-Betweens on their single Bachelor Kisses and she formed the band Roseland together with This Heat’s Charles Hayward. She wrote music and collaborated with choreographer/dancer Gaby Agis on Shouting out loud and Undine and the Still performed at Sadlers Wells, Riverside Studios, ICA and Almeida Theatre, London, and she wrote the music for Channel 4 film Freefall in 1988. Ana returned to song writing and performing with The Raincoats after Kurt Cobain invited them to tour with Nirvana shortly before his untimely death in 1994, and they released an album Looking in the Shadows in 1995 on DGC and Rough Trade. In 2005, Ana released her solo debut, The Lighthouse - a self-recorded collection of spare, elegant experiments in electronic indie-pop on Chicks on Speed’s label. Ana’s recent appearances with The Raincoats include a 2016 collaboration with Angel Olsen for Rough Trade’s 40th anniversary, as well as a 2017 presentation at The Kitchen, New York of The Raincoats and Friends, a celebration of Jenn Pelly’s book The Raincoats, and in November 2019/February 2020 they performed a series of rare European dates including Le Guess Who?, Utrecht and Centre Pompidou, Paris in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their first album The Raincoats.

With the international release of her album Voice Hardcore (on her own BeReKet and New York’s Mesh-Key labels) legendary Japanese musician Phew consolidated her binary interests as vocal performer and, latterly, analogue electronics improviser. Indeed, since her 2013 conversion to analogue electronics Phew has continued evolving her live solo project around the world. In 2015, she released her first almost entirely solo-driven CD, aptly titled A New World, on the Japanese label Felicity featuring nine songs backed by herself on electronics and drum machine, with contributions from Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, and synthesizer / electronics player Hiroyuki Nagashima. Including “Finale 2015”, her remake of her 1980 debut single “Finale”, it turned the Phew story full circle. In 1978, Phew started out as the singer in Aunt Sally, the Osaka punk group she formed after exposure to The Sex Pistols infected her with punk’s self-belief that music was all about doing it yourself. A year later Phew released her debut solo single “Finale”/“Urahara”, produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 1981 she made her debut solo album Phew at legendary producer Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne, accompanied by Plank, and Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. She returned to Conny’s studio to make Our Likeness (Mute, 1992) with Jaki Liebezeit, former DAF/Liaisons Dangereuses member Chrislo Haas, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke, and their ex-Crime and The City Solution colleague Thomas Stern. And in 2011, she and Erika Kobayashi formed Project UNDARK to record the texts of Radium Girls with music by the late Dieter Moebius, of Cluster. In Japan she has made a series of acclaimed records under her own name, or with leading bands such as Novo Tono and her contemporary punk group Most. Her other projects include the electronics and voice duo Big Picture with Hiroyuki Nagashima.