In this interview, Danielle Depicciotto reflects on Paper Masks, her five-year collaboration with Phew, a record shaped by poetry, experimentation, and a deliberately open-ended creative process. Released via Mute on 20 February, the album captures a rare artistic exchange built on trust, curiosity, and a shared love of pushing sound and language into new territory. Read this special interview here below.
Welcome to Danielle Depicciotto from Danielle Depicciotto & Phew
So first of all Danielle I want to welcome you here and I want to thank you for your time and I want to you know thank you for accepting my offer. I hope is everything fine and how is going?
Thank you. I’m very happy to chat with you today and things are going well.
Paper Masks – the collaborative album from Danielle Depicciotto & Phew
I know your collaborative album with Phew has been recently released via Mute Records, and I understand it has been in the works for nearly five years. When did you first begin collaborating with her, and at what point did you realize it was becoming a full album? Collaborative projects can be challenging, so I’m curious about how this one took shape.
Well, it’s been released on the 20th of February. And we started collaborating at the beginning of the pandemic. However, we had spoken about it before and I just started writing poetry and then started sending it to Phew. Basically you know we’re both always quite busy doing all kinds of stuff so we would just send stuff back and forth. Then you know the other we would just do whatever we do.
Further, when we had time we’d work on it and then send it back. So it was really a kind of very relaxed really nice meditative kind of way of working like unusually relaxed in a way. I just really enjoyed taking the time because usually when I work on HackeDePicciotto‘s album, we have like two weeks to get it done and it’s superstressy. Instead, just being able to take time in the beginning without knowing where we were heading to, we just felt like doing something together.
“It’s quite an unusual mixture of putting poetry with noise”
In a way, you also sound surprised by the result of the album, because you just mentioned that you usually have only two weeks to record a HackeDePicciotto album. So it seems like you didn’t expect it to turn into a collaborative effort.
I mean I wasn’t surprised but it was kind of a really nice way of working together where you don’t know what’s going to be the result, which is nice, you know, because I’m not sure if Phew has ever worked with somebody that writes poetry before. And I think it’s quite an unusual mixture of putting poetry with noise, because it could be, I don’t know, you just don’t know what to expect.
It’s an unusual combination. So we were both curious to see how that would work out. You know, like we’re both experimental. We like adventures. We like taking risks. Indeed, we both kind of said, “Okay, this sounds really interesting and unusual”. Let’s see what happens.
The relationship with poetry
I know you began writing poetry at a very young age, and that you’ve always had a deep love for language and for stretching words into new shapes. So how did it feel to work with language in this way? Writing poems and then playing with and reshaping words feels like another level to me. It’s almost about knowing exactly which word to use at the right moment, and how to expand its meaning.
Well, it’s something I really love doing. I love distorting sound and, I mean, a voice’s sound. So, distorting words is something that’s really fun. I mean, like, when you work with music programs, you can make them go really, really slow which makes them not understandable or you can make it go really, really fast.
And it is really interesting about the meaning of words, because the meaning changes. And then you start thinking about how much worth one word is and how, like all these kind of things.
The relationship with poetry (part 2)
So I’ve always wanted to do something like that with another artist that as radical as Phew. And I told her, “Please do not, you know, hesitate to do whatever you want with my language”. I really want it to be bouncing around and going loud and quiet and doing all kinds of things. And so she did. And that was great. So I started out basically reading it.
Subsequently, I would also read it with different effects on my voice and also reading it with different ways of reading it. You know, you can do things like reading a language. I once read a German poem so that an Italian audience would think that German is a beautiful language.
German VS Italian (part 1)
OK, that’s it’s really interesting. Well, for the standard Italian, German, it’s really a hard language.
Exactly. It looks like people are always angry [laughs].
Yes. But now listen to this. I live nine years in the Netherlands. I speak fluently Dutch and I understand German. And for me, it’s strange, but now it doesn’t feel at all that German language is always angry. It doesn’t feel like that anymore. So I have another perspective, another view, because I think that Dutch is much more angrier when you are not, you know, you’re not familiar with it.
Yeah, I understand how it is. It was really funny because I was supposed to read, it was in Naples, and it was this big celebration for a poet called Leopardi. For this occasion, they asked me to read one of his poems in German.
And I was like, “Okay, if I read it the way Germans would usually read it, the Italians would go, oh, God, German is such a horrible language”. Then, I read it with an Italian way of pronunciation, like very soft and melodious. Afterwords, people came up to me afterwards and said, I never realized that German is such a beautiful word.
German VS Italian (part 2)
So, well, if people in Naples told you that you read German in a non-angry way, well, it’s a compliment, trust me [laughs].
For me, it’s like it’s interesting because I was still reading German and it was still understandable, but I was just kind of pronouncing it differently. It was a different kind of melody or whatever. I thought it was really interesting that language can be influenced in that way. Probably like if you speak Italian with a German way of speaking, it would also sound very different.
In general, I just love, you know, thinking about language and things like that and experimenting with it and playing around. On one hand, I take my my poetry and the content very seriously. That’s why I really wanted them to be written on the album sleeve so people can read it if they’re interested, because the text also has something to do with thoughts that me and Phew had spoken about before or similar interests. I just like for the sound of it, I wanted to play around with it and really go way out.
Danielle Depicciotto & Phew: trusting eachother (part 1)
Allow me to say that it takes some level of trust to say to another fellow artist, “Do what you want with my poetry”, because I can also understand that poetry is personal. Not everybody can understand the meaning behind it. Given that, it takes a higher level of trust.
Yeah, yeah, it does. But I do trust few. I think that she’s a wonderful person. I really enjoy working with her, you know, she’s a friend. And I really enjoy speaking to her and I completely trust her sonically too.
Danielle Depicciotto & Phew: trusting eachother (part 2)
You know, I also like the fact that these words were about communication in a way. It’s an album full of communication, but also full of space, you know, with those electronic bars and those musical spaces which it’s a quite varied album, if you allow me that word. It’s, in a way, two different, you know, souls, musical souls that meet with each other. And it’s also difficult to find the right balance between one poetic soul and one electronic and also a lot experimental soul in a way.
I only work with people that I really trust and that I really like their music because otherwise I’m busy enough. I don’t need to collaborate. We did it really because we really appreciate that both of us have this kind of poetic softness. I mean, Phew is, you know, she’s from Japan.
And when she writes emails, they are so poetic, you know, not by specifically writing poems, but just the way she describes things and the way she speaks. It’s it’s very poetic. And on the other hand, her music is very, you know, radical. And I’m very similar. I have this mixture of poetry and being radical. We really understood each other blindly in that way, I think.
Further plans for Danielle Depicciotto & Phew
I know that you are really busy with HackeDePicciotto, Danielle, but my big question is: will this collaborative album find some space also on a live platform by playing a couple of special dates, for example? Or do you see it just on a studio-based affair, so to say?
Well, we would love to do performances with it. At the moment, we’re not sure when because both of us are so busy that we’re not exactly sure when, but we are planning for the future to do shows that we absolutely want to perform together.
We are looking forward to it and we’ve been already thinking of different ways and where and what. However, it’s going to take a little bit of time because the spring is already completely full for both of us.
The schedule with HackeDepicciotto
Completely because if I check the dates that you have already scheduled with HackeDepicciotto…
It’s crazy and we haven’t even announced half of what we’re actually going to be doing. Usually we all have to like prepare a year in advance because we’re like booked out mainly a year in advance. We’ll see hopefully something will work out by the end of this year. Considering that we have to combine Japan with Europe is also not so easy and that has to be organized.
Recalling the upcoming plans
Since we have mentioned HackeDePicciotto, I wanted to ask you just a quick reminder which are your next big plans and what looks like for you this year?
Well, we’re releasing a HackeDePicciotto‘s new album in July which we’re super happy about and we’re really happy with the result. It’s going to be a little different than the last ones because I’m going to be adding piano which I didn’t play it for a long time and there’s going to be more electronics. Indeed, we’ve been experimenting in that area as well.
On top of that we have been rehearsing with a theater piece in France where the premiere will be in May in Lausanne and then we’re going to be touring with this theater piece for the next two years not constantly but at least once a month. In all French-speaking countries such as France, Belgium and Switzerland. It will be a lot fun with the surrealist company of the theater director Sophie Perez. She has a fantastic theater company it’s very colorful and great. We love doing theater music, so we’re going to be doing that for a long time now too.
Danielle, I want to thank you for your time and for your words about Paper Masks.
Thank you.
