Hometown: London.
The lineup: Astrud Steehouder (vocals, music).
The background: Paper Dollhouse is the adopted name of Astrud Steehouder, a singer, musician and producer whose recordings are, broadly speaking, divided between electronica and folk. She took her studio and stage alias from the 1988 cult horror movie Paperhouse in which a girl from a dysfunctional family draws a house that comes to life, to disturbing effect. Having watched the film aged 10, "something about the quality and tone of it, the psychology and aesthetic", struck a chord with Steehouder and has been with her ever since.
That sense of gothic creepiness is discernible throughout A Box Painted Black, her debut album, which, as we say, veers between folk-ish acoustica and longer pieces of haunting atmospherica. Armed with some effects pedals and the equipment necessary to capture the eerie stillness of a normal day in a side street in the capital, it was recorded entirely in the kitchen and garden of her London home and features numerous incidental sounds: trains passing, children playing, doors slamming and water running. These form the ambient backdrop to a series of songs – some folky and concise, others ambient/abstract – that suggest a powerful imagination: Steehouder, who wanted to be an astronaut as a child, cites as influences everyone and everything from early-60s electronic pioneers Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue to riot grrrl to "bewildering post-nuclear landscapes, bleak fields, forests, thunderstorms and archaic industrial objects in the middle of nowhere".
Steehouder thinks she sounds like "a gnarly version of Enya". On the more conventionally song-like numbers such as Daisies and Golden Ships, on which you can hear the scrape of finger against string, she conjures a plaintive mood, echoey for sure, but essentially they're not a million miles away from Laura Marling. And the latter is goth-y only in the sense of shadowy atmosphere rather than witchy bombast. By Moon, however, things have taken a turn for the Yoko-esque and her voice is treated to the extent that it sounds more like a cry. Silence 4 is even further-out, more Diamanda Galas than, say, Daughter, reminding us how great it was when Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins covered a track from Tim Buckley's Starsailor. Without doubt with Steehouder, it's a case of the weirder the better. On Emeralds the music phases in and out, suggesting folk played by a krautrocker or a BBC Radiophonic Workshopper. Untitled is six minutes and 50 seconds of undulating ethereality from another planet or a dark forest; ethnic music from a lost tribe or species. Space 2 is sheer kosmische bliss. That title is a clue: this is folk from outer space, waves of gorgeous static picked up on a transmitter. As with Monday's lot, you get sucked into an immersive experience. Definitely a song of the year, although "song", of course, doesn't quite do justice to what this is and does.[source]
thanks, waiting for next post
BalasHapus