Phoebe Killdeer - The Piano’s Playing the Devils Tune (2016)

Phoebe Killdeer & The Shift is the collaboration between newly Berliner Phoebe Killdeer (Nouvelle Vague, The Short Straws) with experimental musicians Thomas Mahmoud-Zahl (SFX, The Nest, Tannhäuser Sterben & das Tod, Von Spar) and Ole Wulfers (Kapaikos, Party Diktator), supported by actress and singer Maria de Medeiros (i.e. »The Saddest Music in the World«, »Pulp Fiction«).

»The Piano’s Playing The Devils Tune« is »free music« in a most emphatic sense: The interplay between the abstract instrumentation on the one hand, equally recalling genres as diverse as noise rock, bass music and musique concrète, as well as the intimate, concrete humanity of the sound on the other hand establishes a sprawling sonic space that gravitates around the haunting vocal passages of Killdeer and de Medeiros. »The Piano’s Playing The Devils Tune« thereby succeeds in combining a decidedly experimental gesture with an urgent, uncanny familiarity and warmth; a precise sense of composition with an almost lavish casualness.

Phoebe Killdeer & The Shift do not resolve the numerous paradoxes that mark »The Piano’s Playing The Devils Tune«: The result is an equally challenging and rewarding album that in fact—as played out as this predicate may be—truly defies categorization. Devils tunes.