PHOEBE RINGS Release Their ‘Quietly Beautiful' Debut Album Aseurai
A lullaby-like, cyclical track which reflects on childhood friendship and nostalgia, focus track ' Playground Song ' features stereo acoustic guitars, warm synth textures, and gentle wave-like noises, with its centrepiece – a flute solo played by Lukas Fritsch – adding a dreamy, reflective touch. It's released alongside its floral-adorned live performance video directed by Nahyeon Lee – watch HERE.
On Aseurai, Phoebe Rings continue to explore their disco and city-pop influences while staying true to the dream-pop sound of their self-titled debut EP released last year. 'Aseurai means around you in the atmosphere, hard to reach, fading away,' singer Crystal Choi says, 'it's a poetic expression. You wouldn't say it in normal conversation, but I like that.' Across its four singles so far – 'Aseurai', 'Drifting', 'Get Up' and 'Fading Star' – the album has garnered praise from international outlets like Pitchfork, FLOOD, Beats Per Minute, Rolling Stone, frankie, Happy, Northern Transmissions and Paste Magazine, who said the album finds the band 'sharply in the pocket that makes them terrific.'
While Phoebe Rings – named for the outermost ring around Saturn which is known to be the largest, but the least visible – was originally a solo project of singer Crystal Choi, who is also a university-trained jazz pianist, Aseurai marks a shift with contributing songwriting credits from the whole band, which includes guitar/synthesist Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent, bassist Benjamin Locke and drummer/producer Alex Freer. With a more ambitious collection of instruments, Choi says this album heralds the start of true collaboration: 'I feel more precious about this LP because it includes everyone's gems.' The broth is richer with more cooks in the kitchen, and the brewing of textures creates a distinct ' Phoebe Rings ' sound.
If their S/T EP was spacey, then Aseurai settles on earth, rooted in tangible moments. 'Without getting too gloomy, it's a weird world out there. A lot has changed in the world since the EP came out,' says Kavanagh-Vincent on this transformation. The album delves into hope and longing across all possibilities, and this exploration of holding on and letting go is organically threaded throughout. They mark out a brilliant new constellation in their sky, bringing their individual compositions to the fore whilst seamlessly threading them into one celestial body all underpinned by their ongoing inspirations: Studio Ghibli films, Zelda and Stardew soundtracks, Bossa Nova, Stereolab, and 90's Korean ballads.
Phoebe Rings' storytelling ranges from tongue-in-cheek musings on gentrification, to commentary on the housing crisis (' Mandarin Tree '), musicians moving on in their careers (' Fading Star '), finding small oases in everyday life (' Not A Necessity ') and tender autobiographical memories – including on the title-track and 'B lue Butterfly ' both wrapped in grief, Crystal yearns for people she can't see anymore, in this case her late grandmother who she was separated from for a large period of her life (she also thinks that's why she wrote ' Aseurai ' in her mother tongue of Korean, in a way using it to be closer to her grandmother through song and shared language), ' Get Up ' on which drummer Benjamin Locke talks of the paralysis of extended periods of struggling with mental health and leaning on the famous scene from The Matrix to try to will yourself out of it, and ' Goodnight ', a tender, loving ode to our cats and the comfort they bring us.
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Photo: Supplied But back then it was an art form, and it mesmerised me to know that you could translate a moment in reality into something that was a beautiful essence of somebody through black and white portraiture and a moment in time, where you saw an emotion or an expression or a sense of the self that was portrayed In another person. It was never intrusive photography. When photography became fashionable in the 1970s, art photography became fashionable in the 1970s through the production of a book by Diane Arbus, and everyone had to be a photographer, sort of thing. But photography in a way, became corrupted by wide angle lenses and people not realising the sensitivity of the other, meaning the subject, and a lot of deceitful photography happened that was calling itself art photography at that time. DW: It's still very difficult on a number of levels to access the Papua New Guinea Highlands. But in 1977 and on your own, it would have been very, very difficult. VG: Yes, it was. But I was an adventurer. I enjoyed the attraction of the unknown and the challenge of finding a way into an area of such remoteness in the world, where there was not a pollution of modernity, if you like, upon the peoples that I wanted to meet. So yes, it was difficult. It was basically bussing up the Highlands into the Highlands, and then finding ways to get around. And I did have some fairly hairy encounters, not with the local people, but with imports, imported construction managers and things like people from Australia. Papua New Guinea was only two years into its independence at that time, so there was still a very raw aspect to the confusion between what was meant to be and what was, where you have an important psyche, like the Australian mentality, wanting to civilise and develop a country, and you had the indigenous people who had stayed sane and intact and culturally together and had a very rich, beautiful culture that was kind of timeless. 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I have spent time in a lot of different cultures using that means. DW: This happened back in 1977, so 48 years ago. Why has it taken you so long to bring a book out? VG: I have gone backwards, looking at my work, in a way, I'm going backwards. I am in my 70s now, and I mean, I have had other work that propelled me to do other creative essays that I was prompted to do by my own artistry, and that has come to an end. I am no longer a photographer, so I am more a writer now, and I am looking backwards and tidying up my life, you could say. And it is a beautiful little essay. It is a very poetic essay which portrays a form of gentleness, contrary to what is happening in Papua New Guinea today. It is a counterbalance to what is what is occurring in the Highlands today, which is now a lawless place where people have had their essential culture stripped from them by the incursion of missionaries and what have you, and mining companies and so on. It gives voice to a portrait of a people. 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This is mainly a portrait, and it's a poetic portrait which involves the poetry of the people, but also the more prosaic sort of day to day, here am I sitting in a marketplace, or here am I pulling my bow and arrow, carrying my grasses from the fields and so on. It is more a documentary portrait than an artistic portrait, but it contains artistry, of course.
