| Paper Dollhouse – A Box Painted Black (2011) |
Paper Dollhouse – A Box Painted Black
Location: London, United Kingdom
Album release: December 5th, 2011
Record Label: Bird (Finders Keepers) - direct from the label's website: http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/
Paper Dollhouse is the work of Astrud Steehouder; dark minimal gothic folk which comprises haunting vocals, acoustic guitar, effects pedals, found sounds, slide projector and minimal electronic atmospherics. Her debut album A Box Painted Black is set for release this winter on Bird Records, the femme-folk off shoot of the Finders Keepers family. Inspired by early 60s electronic pioneers Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radique, bleak British television soundtracks, minimal dark electronica, Scott Walker, Arthur Russell, Christine Harwood and France Galle, the music combines simple folk songs with environmental and electronic textural sounds and visuals to create a pared down, beautiful experience. Steehouder has created a new kind of (black) magic on her debut release. ‘A Box Painted Black’ was recorded entirely in the kitchen and garden of her London home amongst the incidental sounds of trains passing, children playing, door slams and running water. The songs retain the ambience of the place they were recorded. Often first takes and recorded as soon as the songs had been penned, they combine an immediacy and raw quality which fills the work with a naivety and emotive dark tonality. Dense in simplicity and thick with silence the songs are restrained, intense, lingering and decorated with white noise. Steehouder names “bewildering post nuclear landscapes, bleak fields, forests, thunderstorms and archaic industrial objects in the middle of nowhere” as influences, rather than the listing the much and over cited normal singer-songwriter fare. The songs possess a folk pop sensibility rich in mysterious hooks that creep up on you from around a dark alleyway, following you on the all the way home at night. Steehouder has recently been working with photographer and writer Nina Bosnic in a live capacity using a variety of sonic and visual techniques including an old slide projector, a dictaphone and prismatic imagery, to create a live show which is as haunting as it is bare. There is a raw completeness to the work, the body of which is clearly a deep and evolving spectrum. Hypnotic, meditative and a midnight look through the keyhole of Paper Dollhouse’s secret garden “the album’s like a Pandora’s box of messages. It was kind of a dark solace for me, the slight way the album happened. Almost hidden.
Review:
CD: Paper Dollhouse - A Box Painted Black
Spooky atmospherics from solo Rayograph
by Kieron Tyler / Saturday, 07 January 2012
Paper Dollhouse's 'A Box Painted Black': dark and foreboding
One of last year’s finest surprises was the debut album from Rayographs, a fractured, psychedelic excursion that remains enthralling. Paper Dollhouse is the solo guise of Rayographs’s Astrud Steehouder. While A Box Painted Black isn’t quite the shock Rayographs was, it beguiles.
As Paper Dollhouse, Steehouder (pictured above) sustains Rayographs’s spookiness. A Box Painted Black‘s “I Dreamt You More Than Ever” uses the cross-talking effect of vocals cutting in and out that's so effective with Rayographs. Their Amy Hurst contributes a photo to the album's booklet. Nina Bosnic is, on a couple of tracks, the only other collaborator. Otherwise this is a solo – very solo – album.
Over the 28 minutes of A Box Painted Black‘, Steehouder accompanies her disembodied, echoey voice with a distant acoustic guitar. She plays rumbling piano on the instrumental “Icestorm”. The atmosphere is creepy, like a dark, foreboding early Dario Argento film. Extraneous sounds leak in, crackling and hissing. The album opens with a short, twinkling music box refrain. Then Steehouder asks “did you wake up smiling?” By “Moon”, the album’s final track, her wordless, keening vocal reverberates as if bubbling up from a unseen valley. Although a solo woman with an acoustic guitar will inevitably be seen as some form of folk, A Box Painted Black is more the soundtrack of a waking dream than anything else.
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/paper-dollhouse/sets/a-box-painted-black/ / MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/paperdollhouses / Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/!/pages/Paper-Dollhouse/1#!/pages/Paper-Dollhouse/130780236946752 /
| Press contact: |
will@inhousepress.com
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|---|---|
| Reservé agent: |
paperdollhouses@gmail.com
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AU REVIEW: As one third of acclaimed trio The Rayographs, Astrud Steehouder contributed to a sound that nodded to visual influences like David Lynch as much as it did musical ones. That filmic, evocative quality remains a feature on her first solo release as Paper Dollhouse. Recorded entirely in the kitchen and garden of her London home, A Box Painted Black is characterised by a minimal, sparse folk sound infused with found sounds and eerie atmospherics. On tracks like ‘Did You Wake’, quietly intense vocals pan disorientatingly from speaker to speaker, while the oddly buoyant melodies of ‘Daisies’ contrast with the spare instrumentation. While the record is undoubtedly effective in capturing a certain nocturnal ambience, over the long run it can begin to feel like one lengthy track – and not in a good way. Daniel Harrison
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KEY TRACKS: ‘DAISIES’, ‘WILLIAM’, ‘BLACK OAK TREE’.
FOR FANS OF: TASSEOMANCY, LAURA SHEERAN.
Photo by Nina Bosnic
Photo by Nina Bosnic
Photo by Nina Bosnic
Photo by Nina Bosnic
Photo by NIna Bosnic
| Paper Dollhouse – A Box Painted Black (2011) |