TAX FREE RECORDS / Germany / 2020 / CYosa on the artworks: “I was intrigued how “Phyton” could link child and plant, descendant and tree and wrote to four Berlin based artists who work with clay, the earthiest of materials and free form to create ceramic artworks within the etymology of Phyton.
In the past weeks Ana Botezatu, Carl Luis, Hella Gerlach, Zoë Claire Miller and I scoured the forest, talked and ate pears, sent letters, creaturely drawings and photographs back and forth. It wasn't as much about the outcome as it was about the process, about the slow sloping growth of tiny new leaves and ideas in an interspecies garden. Here are their works!”
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Craggy interdimensional pop hits by Yosa Peit on this transcending debut LP. Perfect time to invest. Brought to you by Tax Free Records and Termina.
Berlin-based producer and singer Yosa Peit debuted a singular series of lucid vignettes cutting across slo-mo disco, krautrock, and experimental electronica in 2015. Her release on Brandt Brauer Frick’s imprint The Gym was followed by a collaboration with the Holly Herndon ensemble on Proto, which came out on 4AD in 2019. Her debut full-length, Phyton, is released by Tax Free / Termina. The album is written, recorded and produced by the artist. Over time, Yosa Peits release Phyton will grow into a larger project encompassing collaborations with artists from other disciplines. The aim is to investigate ways of linking child and plant, descendant and tree in a new interspecies garden.
The production is super fresh! – Holly Herndon
Truly magical work – Colin Self
Shifts your center – Am Kinem
Tax and Termina doing a Yosa LP? That’s just not fair! – Jürgen Ratan
Phyton:
Home is not a static place. It is shifting, bubbling, and precipitating. It is alive with impulse and forgotten by expectation. Vines run their improvised course over pillared relics, and we breathe deeply. We find this place by listening: held between the two inventive hands of producer and singer Yosa Peit, music is a home of in-betweenness, the stirring of promise in damaged lands.
“Phyton” turns “plant,” “tree,” “creature,” “child,” and “descendant” into synonyms. It comes from “phúō,” i.e. “to generate, to grow, to spring up, to be by nature.” Phyton is the buoyant energy between idea and object, between infant and seedling, between wolf and granite. In the hot sun and dizzy storms of a changing climate, it grows up, out, around, and away. It is the mind’s own flowers, crimson and creaturely. On this striking debut album, the GPS of fancy leads Yosa through the colorful terrain of an interspecies garden. Phyton is both the search and the place itself; it is the sound of Yosa playing her own way home, investigating how “phyton” links child and plant, descendant and tree.
Each track is the raw material of impulse and circumstance: the curling of the fern, the seed leaf (I) turning to true leaf (II), the whip of the serpentine, the infrasonic rumbling of elephant communication, new stars shot through sky and time, thoughts exchanged between cell-phone-tower palm trees. A woman’s voice, soulful and digitally filtered, sings a process of becoming against the rising sirens and ticking time bombs of social change. In the thick texture of intuitive whimsy, Yosa ties a tattered world to its unlikely fertility. - Annie Garlid