Phew

Phew, born Hiromi Moritani in Fukuoka, Japan in 1959, emerged from Osaka's punk underground as vocalist for Aunt Sally before launching a solo career that positioned her as one of Asia's most uncompromising experimental musicians. Her 1981 debut Phew fused Conny Plank's metallic production with minimalist synth textures and her detached, sometimes whispered vocals, creating an eerie post-punk document that resonated with the cold wave movement. Working across decades with collaborators including Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Jim O'Rourke, she has maintained an aesthetic of sparse, haunting electronic soundscapes that resist easy categorisation. Her music navigates space and silence with an almost sculptural approach to timbre, favouring delay-drenched guitars and skeletal drum machines that suggest industrial decay as much as introspection. Albums like Our Likeness (2018) and New Decade (2021) demonstrate her continued commitment to sonic exploration outside commercial expectation. Phew's influence extends through generations of Japanese experimental artists, her work embodying a particularly feminine refusal of both Western punk orthodoxy and J-pop convention, existing instead in self-determined isolation.