Phew, Erika Kobayashi,, Dieter Moebius - Radium Girls

  by Steve Kinrade

published: 17 / 8 / 2025

---

There are records that demand your attention. Not for their volume or for their brashness, but because of the quiet, persistent gravity they exert. 'Radium Girls' is one such album. First released in 2012, this collaboration between Japanese experimentalist Phew, artist and writer Erika Kobayashi, and the late, great German electronic pioneer Dieter Moebius (of Cluster and Harmonia) has lost none of its eerie resonance. Now reissued on vinyl by Bureau B—timed with the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it returns with a chilling relevance that feels entirely of this moment. At heart, 'Radium Girls' is a concept album. But to call it that feels oddly clinical, like calling 'Guernica' a painting. This is a memorial in sound. A haunted echo chamber of injustice, contamination, and resistance. The album draws its name and emotional centre from the story of the Radium Girls—young women who, in the early 20th century, were employed to paint luminous watch dials with radium paint. They were told to lick their brushes to maintain a fine point, swallowing small doses of poison with each stroke. Their employers assured them it was safe. The reality was far more grotesque. What’s remarkable about this album is how it transforms such a harrowing piece of history into a living, breathing sonic experience. Phew’s vocal work here is not so much sung as exhaled—ghostly utterances, murmurs, and cries that drift like smoke through Moebius’s bleak electronic landscapes. Her voice, shaped by decades of artistic evolution since her days fronting Osaka punk band Aunt Sally in the late '70s, carries a quiet authority—equal parts sorrow and steel. She doesn’t dramatise the horror; she lets it sit in the room, between the notes, growing colder by the minute. Moebius, who died in 2015, was a master of restraint. His contributions here don’t announce themselves; they seep in. His electronics throb and hum like distant machines - sometimes sterile, sometimes oddly organic—always unsettling. There are flickers of melody, moments of almost pastoral calm, but they never linger. Like the half-life of radiation, beauty here is temporary. What remains is the residue—the unease Erika Kobayashi’s role is perhaps less overt but just as crucial. Her writing, woven through the album in fragments and whispers, forms a kind of textual spine. Kobayashi has long been fascinated by radiation and its invisible fingerprints on history, particularly in post-war Japan. Her words are not illustrative—they are incantations. Whether drawn from fiction, documentary, or dream, they tether the abstract soundscapes to lived experience. 'Radium Girls' was created in the shadow of the Fukushima disaster, which gives it an added layer of urgency. But even that event—so massive in its own right—feels like just one entry in a wider ledger of nuclear grief that this record keeps. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Cold War silences, contaminated rivers, ticking Geiger counters. It’s all here, though rarely named outright. The power of the album lies in its ability to evoke without spelling things out. It demands that the listener meet it halfway, and in doing so, invites us to reckon with the ghosts that linger just outside the frame. What makes this reissue feel especially significant is its medium. Vinyl, with all its imperfections and physicality, offers the perfect vessel for a work like this. There’s something apt about placing a record with such corporeal themes on a format you can hold, turn, and feel. The grooves themselves seem like metaphors for the scars left behind—on bodies, landscapes, memory. Listening to Radium Girls is not an easy experience, nor should it be. It doesn’t comfort. .It disorients. Tracks blur into one another. Time loses its grip. There’s no neat beginning, middle, or end. Instead, there is drift, decay, echo. And through it all, a strange and terrible beauty. Not unlike the radium paint that once glowed softly in the dark, hiding its poison behind a shimmer of promise. This is not an album to be played in the background. It requires—and deserves—your full attention. Its themes are grave, its mood funereal, but it is also a work of quiet defiance. A resistance to forgetting. A protest against erasure. In the current age—when historical amnesia seems a recurring affliction, and corporate misdeeds continue to endanger lives—'Radium Girls' feels not just relevant, but essential. It reminds us, with haunting clarity, of what happens when science outpaces ethics, when profit trumps humanity, and when the consequences of today’s decisions echo for generations. That this album also stands as a tribute to Dieter Moebius adds another layer of poignancy. His fingerprints are everywhere, but always subtle—never flashy, never overbearing. His legacy, much like the story of the Radium Girls themselves, is one that asks us to listen a little more closely, to lean into the silence and see what it contains. 'Radium Girls' is certainly a difficult record. But it is also a necessary one. A sonic monument to those whose suffering was hidden, whose voices were silenced, and whose legacy lives on in the strange, glowing aftermath.

Track Listing:-

1 Radium Girls
2 Evelyn
3 Tracy
4 Marie
5 Helena
6 Anna
7 Manhattan Project
8 Little Boy and Fat Man
9 Katherine
10 Argonne National Laboratory
11 EBR-1
12 Radium226

Label Links:-

http://www.bureau-b.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/bureaub/videos
https://www.facebook.com/bureaub
https://twitter.com/bureaublabel

Play in YouTube:-

Have a Listen:-

Post A Comment

---

Comment

Name

your name

Location

ie London, UK

Submit

Check box to submit

Adam Coxon
Adrian Janes
Amanda J. Window
Andrew Twambley
Anthony Dhanendran
Benjamin Howarth
Cila Warncke
Daniel Cressey
Darren Aston
Dastardly
Dave Goodwin
Denzil Watson

Dixie Ernill
Dominic B. Simpson
Eoghan Lyng
Fiona Hutchings
Harry Sherriff
Helen Tipping
Jamie Rowland
John Clarkson
Julie Cruickshank
Kimberly Bright
Lisa Torem
Maarten Schiethart

Malcolm Carter
Marie Hazelwood
Mark Rowland
Nick Dent-Robinson
Nicky Crewe
Nige Nudds
Philamonjaro
Richard Lewis
Shirley Procter
Spencer Robertshaw
Steev Burgess
Steve Kinrade

Steve Miles
Tommy Gunnarsson
Zena Grieg