Phrazes – South African photographer / musician, Robin Molteno – brings us his first music release.
Growing up in Cape Town and now living in Berlin, Phrazes is doing his best to manifest a life focused on pursuing his artistic practice. Having spent his life immersed in sound as his lens through this reality, it was high time he released some of his own orchestration.
Midway through the year, Phrazes found himself trapped between the covid-regulated borders of Cape Town and Berlin, stranded in Utrecht (a mini-Amsterdam town in the Netherlands) with a green tent and music gear. When faced with deciding between a cramped kitchen-lounge floor or absurdly expensive Airbnb – a large inflatable mattress and a power line was procured, and a studio tent space was built on the roof of an apartment building. Wrapping it in a 20m long string of fairy-lights brought from Cape Town, and carefully mapping out his recording gear, Phrazes spent almost a month living in his own private canopy, next to those of trees, accessible via a ladder bolted to the outer wall of the building.
You can hear this ladder being climbed at the start of the track ‘Tent, Alone’.
There were strings of days of almost total solitude which kept him working in the tent, along with the light Dutch rain, which is very audible on the improvised track (Tent, Alone), recorded with his long-suffering iPhone 8 mic.
Robin grew up with a classical-music fanatic mother whose 6 CD changer would be turned on at 7am, and switched off at midnight or 1am.
This musical education met itself at the crossroads of early high school interest in early music psychedelia and eastern philosophy, and in turn Indian classical. Drone notes and pivot-tones are used subtly throughout the pop of DEMOTAPE 1.
There is also a taste of the odd signatures that will come in later releases: measures of ‘Tent, Alone’ roll between 7/8 and 4/4. A childhood dream had been to find and learn Indian instruments (bansuri and sitar), of which just the bansuri makes a feature on this release. A Korg minilogue (small analog synth) takes over the second section. Kashaka (West African shakers) open the track ‘Kerosene’, and in this panned percussion intro, you can hear the sound of streets below squeezing past the heavy ‘gating’ of the sound.
A dreamy, bird-space period: DEMOTAPE 1.
