Paper Dollhouse - A Box Painted Black

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4...according to our Mike on Thu 01 Dec, 2011.

Here's one on Votel's missus Jane Weaver's Bird imprint. Paper Dollhouse is the alter-ego of a certain Astrud Steehouder, who here has put together a quiet record of solitary and minimal songs. For the most part this album just has her understated voice and hushed, picked electric guitar, snatching wispy melodies from the ether. At times there's field recordings and layered vocal recordings in a concrete style, and there's a song that's delivered on piano rather than guitar, but largely we've got a collection of skeletal torch songs here. You feel like you've got to stay completely silent while you listen to these songs, as if they're being performed right in front of you. You can hear every squeak of fingers against frets as the vocals effortlessly convey an aching sense of solitude. I guess the fragile minimal delivery of Cat Power is a pretty obvious comparison, or even Smog's more sparse moments, but there's something darker and more modern about these recordings that it's hard to put my finger on. An intimate collection of quiet and personal songs from this songstress.

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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 Gall, 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 keyholeof 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.”

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