In collaboration with Phew, Danielle de Picciotto and Mute, World of Echo have the new album 'Paper Masks' on vinyl exclusively available to buy in advance. The official release date is not until 20th February 2026, but we have early access, shipping early December 2025.
Jellyfish Colour Vinyl
Three months ahead of its official release, Mute have graciously served us with exclusive advance copies of a new collaboration between label pals and highly revered underground figures, Phew (aka Hiromi Moritani) and Danielle de Picciotto. There's a clear bipartite division of labour here, with Moritani handling the music and de Picciotto lending her voice (in both English and German), presumably at a distance given the five years it took to make. The results are suitably abstracted and ghostly, de Picciotto's spoken word floating in and out of range amidst a fog of signature fractured electronics and purgatory summoning minimalism. It proves a disorientating exercise in liminal space (the polyglot nature of deployed language key to this sensation) that speaks to Moritani's interest in numbers station recordings (see her contribution to our Inner World mix series for further examination of that) and reminds me in various parts of Henri Chopin's contributions to the Poesia Sonora compilation the narrative field recordings of the Robert Lax archive, or more recently, the distorted psychogeographic sound poetry of Hiele Kinsella's The Third Summer of Love. Given the pedigree of who is involved (Moritani's work has been well documented on these pages; de Picciotto co-founded Berlin Love Parade and has an extensive back catalogue running back to the mid 90s), it's no surprise that what would ordinarily be a relatively alien endeavour ends up sounding so engaging and hypnotising. I'm not entirely sure what is being communicated here, but the confusion only adds to the appeal.
FFO: Henri Chopin, Robert Lax, Hiele Kinsella, Sarenco
