OUC019 - OUW006 : Phoebe Tsang / Button Music

Cover art by Sullivan Hismans

OUC019 - OUW006 : Phoebe Tsang / Button Music

When things go missing, we can get lost in the spaces they leave behind.  

Button Music blurs the line between poetry and song. 
It’s an album of linked pieces for voice and violin, where one word can say as much as a cascade of echoing chords. It’s a manual for everyday magic, the magpie’s almanac. 

Minimalist songwriting meets rhapsodic improvisation. Acoustic violin and vocals lead you on a flaneur’s pilgrimage through a Brueghelian underworld of lost buttons. Lush string textures and quirky melodies conjure buttons and buttonholes, presence and absence, the things we let go of and the things we can’t live without. 
This is music from the cabaret where Duchamp plays card tricks while Breton reads your tarot cards.

All the lyrics of Button Music are HERE!

Phoebe Tsang (website here) is a Hong-Kong born British-Canadian writer and violinist. She writes with a Lamy Safari and composes on a 1907 violin by Paulus Pilat of Budapest. Her poetry and fiction has been published in the US, Canada, England and Hong Kong. Her songwriting blends classical contemporary with experimental folk.

Phoebe

Violin, vocals, text and composition: Phoebe Tsang
Recording and sound editing: Tom Stiles
Sound editing, mastering and album cover: Sullivan Hismans
Recording and production made possible through the Artist Residency Programs at Jack Straw Cultural Center (Seattle, WA). 

A nice review in The Whole note page 78 (white pages) here. 

Digital release on the 10th of May 2019.

Track listing :

A: Unbutton

1. No. 1  |  4:27

2. No. 2  |  3:23

3. No. 3  |  1:43

4. No. 4  |  3:34

5. No. 5  |  2:19

6. No. 6  |  4:46

B: Cards from the Tarot de Marseille

7. King of Cups  |  4:35

8. The Hermit  |  3:56

9. Le Pape  |  4:57

And on Bandcamp: