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013EGGSCD/LP Paper Dollhouse A Box Painted Black Tracklist |
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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.
Named after the 1988 cult horror film Paperhouse “I watched the film
when I was about 10 and was really drawn in by it. Something about the
quality and tone of it, the psychology and aesthetic of that struck a chord
and been with me ever since. I'm into actual dollhouses and models of
things as well. I used to make these little viewfinder boxes containing little
scenes in them as a child for fun, I found them magical.”
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.”