Intro voice and lyrics for Tar Pond's 'Dirt' off ' Petrol' released on Prophecy Productions 15. September 2023.

Meaning What Exactly? is Perverts in White Shirts’ second album, recorded in Zürich and Berlin between 2016 and 2020. Released on Misanthropic Agenda 20 June 2022. Available as a digital download or a limited edition (100 copies) vinyl LP packaged in deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket (download included).

'from the pulsating, seemingly free depths of the earth to a disconcerting present characterized by constraint, the album takes the listener on an existential journey through sonic and incorporeal ambiguities. nathalie dreier and dave phillips enter the next level of their collaborative explorations and refine their dialogue mixing treated field recordings with organic acoustics and digital sources, brought together in long trance-inducing sessions of meticulous audio de/construction and philosophical debate, in which they regularly push each other beyond their personal, artistic and aesthetic limits. on “methamphibians” PIWS collaborate with bryan lewis saunders. in the lyrics, bryan describes a dystopian dream that blends with the immediate reality of his tennessee neighbourhood, a reality in which he created the mask that ended up being used for the album artwork. this hypnagogic juxtaposition of contrasting realities reflects an ambiguity topically explored throughout the whole album. piws’ music has been called electro, industrial, witchhouse, experimental, noise pop, or “trans-genre”. the new song structures are more organic, often using elements constructed from field recordings. omitting the groovebox used on the first album, the allround sound has become more abstract though it still revolves around rhythm. the album title is an hommage to coil. the last track “the house is black” is inspired by the 1962 film by Forugh Farrokhzad of the same name. the cover photographs are by red rubber road. the audio has been mastered by riccardo mazza.

Sold out at misanthropic agenda, use our bandcamp or write me for one of the last copies
listen or buy digital on bandcamp
listen on soundcloud

Reviews
Perverts In White Shirts is a duo hailing from Zürich, Switzerland and consists of Dave Phillips and Nathalie Dreier. I’ve been aware of David Phillips for many years, initially from his metal and noisecore days with Messiah and Fear Of God respectively, and then from his experimental works since the middle 80s; a prolific and radical artist. Nathalie Dreier on the other hand contributed vocals on two of David Phillip’s previous albums 2012’s Abgrund and 2016’s Selective Memory / Perception, as well as visual art in four other releases. On top of that, Misanthropic Agenda constantly delivers amazing releases, so I was positively adjusted, even before listening. Meaning What Exactly? is the second album of the project, with its title being a homage to Coil. The album is a vastly sensual, mid to slow-paced work, partially electronic, partially acoustic- as well as merging these two disciplines. With the whole thing often heavy with dark atmospherics. Meaning What Exactly? is an amalgam of field recordings, sound manipulation, electronics, acoustics and vocals; this work is strongly based on vocals utilizing various expressions, concealed under a heavy veil of sonic layers. Furthermore, the duo collaborated with Bryan Lewis Saunders’s poetry for the second piece. This album resides in the post-industrial spectrum and that aesthetic is most evident. The bass and percussion could easily have escaped from recent works of -let’s say- Einstürzende Neubauten with each of its four pieces crafted with materials leaning to a more minimal approach. Meaning What Exactly? is not loud per se, but it is evolving loudly, exceptionally lyrical and at the same time, it is heavily saturated with a bass-oriented production, giving a real mass to its outcome. The sound production is tight and strong. Within there’s a bouquet of hypnotic storytelling where words are floating in a tamed sea of abstraction, overloaded with rhythm that sounds marvellously organic. The cinematic touches, the mesmerizing voice and all the above combined are delivered in a top-notch experimental work, which transgresses from industrial to minimal, to electro, to experimental. Buy from here and get lost in it!

(Karl Grümpe, Musique Machine, June 2022)

I’ll admit, I was struck by the name when this landed in my inbox. Success! With an insane number of submission emails a day, I don’t even open most, let alone play the albums attached. But then I learned that PIWS is Nathalie Dreier – who’s interesting for her visual work as well as her audio – and Dave Phillips, who’s To Death I covered last year – which deepened my intrigue. And it’s one hell of a cover, too. Meaning What Exactly? is quite a different proposition – from pretty much anything, in truth. Presenting four lengthy compositions, it’s fundamentally an electronic album, but it’s far more than that, or anything. The title is a challenge, a query, a – what I keep hearing as a phrase in my corporate dayjob – a ‘provocation’. It comes down to ‘exactly’. The word is weighted; even without explicit emphasis, it feels emphasised, vaguely stroppy even. The addition is the lexical equivalent of a hand on hip, a raised eyebrow, a scowl, a sneer of condescension to a worker from another department who has no facts. ‘Yeah, do your research, bitch’, is what it says. And who really knows what it means, or what anything means? Exactly. And what this album means – exactly – I can’t quite fathom. The titles conflict with the contents, at least, based on my lived experience, on my reception. They say it’s a ‘dialogue mixing treated field recordings with organic acoustics and digital sources, brought together in long trance-inducing sessions of meticulous audio de/construction and philosophical debate’. But how much of that is apparent in the end product? Well, that’ debatable. ‘Pangolin’ is otherworldly eerie: a booming drum echoes out through a shifting reverberation of spine-shaking synths. It doesn’t readily evoke aardvark-like creatures, apart from perhaps in the final minute or so when Dreier’s monotone vocals are replaced by snuffling barking sounds. It’s weird, but then, what did you expect? I don’t know what I expected, if I’m honest, but probably not this. This is dark, disorientating, disturbed and disturbing, and even more challenging for the absence of context. Meaning is the end product of intent, of purpose, and there’s no clear indication of where this is coming from, meaning we’re left to face the strange with no guidance. A grinding bass and muffled, muttering voices, whispering about fish all build to a hellish tumult of murmurs and doom-sodden low range hums and thrums, and nothing feels right. It’s awkward, and unsettling. You – certainly I – don’t really tune into the words delivered by Dreier in her suffocating spoken word passages, not out of disregard or disrespect, but because all of it comes together to create a claustrophobic listening experience. Meaning What Exactly? is not an album you sit and dissect, or sit and comfortably disassemble or analyse. I find myself, instead, contemplating the meaning of meaning. ‘Us vs Us’ plunges into deeper, darker territories, with a grinding, driving bass worthy of Earth, propelled by thunderous sensurround drumming, with purgatorial howls echoing all around. It’s heavy, harrowing, and it’s that simple, tribal drum style that defines and dominates the eerie eleven-minute closer, ‘The House is Black’. The house is black and the atmosphere is bleak: the vocals are mangled and distorted and play out against a murky, fragmented, fractured backing, to unsettling effect. The beats are sparse, subdued, distant, yet taut, crashing blasts and ricochets. You make it want to stop. The clock is ticking. Your chest tightens. The nerve rise, jangling, fearful. It’s like walking through a graveyard at night, knowing there’s someone lese shuffling around nearby. Make it stop, make it stop! A crackle, a crunch. What is this, exactly? Perverts in White Shirts don’t only excavate darker domains, but scour and gouge their way into the darker, deeper territories where tension pulls tight and tighter still. It’s the sound of trauma, of suffocation. Meaning it feels like a direct passage to the depths, meaning it’s dark, uncomfortable, like it’s almost unbearable at times. Meaning it’s good.

(Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation, June 2022)

Posttraumatische Sounds, privatphilosophische Explorationen und drastische Selbstuntersuchung ergeben beim Zürcher Duo Perverts In White Shirts eine dunkel vor sich hinbrütende Mischung, die jederzeit explodieren könnte, es aber dann doch selten tut. Eigentlich nie. Das zweite Album von Natalie Dreier und Dave Phillips, Meaning What Exactly? (Misanthropic Agenda, 20. Juni), baut auf die Kraft der Entfremdung und alles, was von Industrial und radikaler Kunst übrig blieb. Baut auf Stille, Introspektion und Reflexion, nicht auf die im Schimpfluch-Umfeld, aus dem Phillips stammt, üblichere Katharsis.

(Frank P. Eckert, Groove, June 2022)

Aatmen - Touching Peripheries. Released on FormResonance on 19 May 2022
Listen and buy here.

Aatmen is the sonic playground of duo Nathalie Dreier and Florian Haik Schirmacher. Their debut ‚touching peripheries’ is an invitation into an immersive and explorative soundscape; a celebration of melting fusion, where organic is electronic, male is female and the individual is the communion.

The artists create their distinct dialogue during carefully interwoven live rituals that they dis-/re-assemble and enhance through live analogue mixing. Right from the start, this layered journey of sub-oscilllators, field recordings and melodic fragments pulls the listener into its sonic touch. ‘Touching Peripheries’ offers a journey that stems from a single live ritual recording, in which the artists interacted with each other over two separated rooms with no visual contact or cues. Despite this, the foundation of this EP captivates with a unique uniformity. This is highlighted in „Music for the dark room“, a mix of all three tracks that provides a fluid 30-Minute soundscape. Play on repeat.

Tracks:
Touching Peripheries
Melting Point
Ocean Walk
Music for the dark room (complete EP mix)

Perverts in White Shirts video to 'The House is Black' off "Meaning What Exactly?"
Footage by Nicole Schwarz, Nadine Schwarz, Marianne Engel
Edited by Nathalie Dreier

Perverts in White Shirts live at Koch Areal, Zürich, 7. Oktober 2017
Performing with Twen D. Vari and Kishana Herrle. Live cameras by Cédric Lorent, projected video art by AnaHell and Perverts in White Shirts, video edit by dp.

Perverts in White Shirt's debut album Power to the Sheeple. Released on 30. November 2016. available on bandcamp and soundcloud.
Lp (edition of 300, dirty white vinyl) released on cruel bones.
Tape release by black horizons.

Reviews

Perverts In White Shirts is a collaborative effort of Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips, the latter of Fear of God fame. Power To The Sheeple, released on vinyl LP by Zürich based Cruel Bones, took five years of experimentation to produce, and that is not difficult to understand. This is some peculiar, peculiar music, in many ways defying classification.
The album begins with a minimalist, choked beat with a synth note where the snare drum should be. Bass and percussion of various types follow. Disfigured female voices work their way between the speakers, and a variety of samples and melodies enter and exit the sound collage as the track, called “e.l.a.n.k.y”, keeps building. As is often the case, the initial song is a good indication of what is to come. Rhythmic, experimental, electronic and usually quite powerful (though seldom aggressive) music, defying many if not most musical conventions, but maintaining some staples that help keep it far away from harsh noise or some other non-musical genre.
There are also several exceptions to the formula, if such a thing there be. Most notable among these are “benjamin”, which consists of a heart-beat with subdued Hammond style organ. Furthermore, each and every track utilizes many different elements and borrows from many genres, making for an interesting and often bizarre sound, stuck in some borderland between soundtrack, industrial, ambient, dance music and sound experiments.
The label believes the music should be called “noise pop”, which would make sense when compared to regular pop, but less so if you’re coming at this album from a harsh noise or HNW perspective (which, of course, very few people are). To understand what this is about, you could think about what would happen if you deconstructed trip hop until almost nothing was left, and filled in the blanks with electronic industrial music, Japanese horror culture, and a sort of joyless-yet-sublime lust for experimentation for its own sake. You get the gist quickly, but will still be surprised by each and every song. In “sycophant” some aggressive female rapping brings Bang Wa Cherry’s “Chin Chin” to mind, in “overfucked and understimulated” the beat approaches something like chopped and screwed, while noisy chaotic synths create an atmosphere that really can’t be described.
To try to catch the overall feeling of this album, think of Aphex Twin stripped of any commercially viable elements, while retaining some of its catchiness. If we had to use only two words, “evil Björk” might do the trick, though now we’re stretching things. Power to the Sheeple is often dark, sometimes cold, and always unbelievable strange. Of course, we can’t recommend it enough.
In addition to this album (which can be pre-ordered on vinyl here, or digital download here), the band and AnaHell have also produced a video for “favor”. We won’t say much about it, but should you choose not to watch it, you’re missing out. Seriously.

(Archaic Triad, February 2017)

Musik im Bereich des Genres Noise ist immer schwierig einzuordnen. Man weiss manchmal für sich selbst nicht so ganz, wo man es jetzt nun einordnen soll. Spricht mich dieses Geräusch an oder nicht? Diese Frage geht viel weiter als: Spricht mich diese Melodie an, oder gar dieses Stück? Die Frage nach dem eigenen Geschmack wird auf das Minimum runtergebrochen, auf eine Ebene, auf derer sich viele nicht mehr wohlfühlen, weil man sich da schon zu sehr mit sich selbst beschäftigen muss. Cruel Bones ist ein Musiklabel aus Zürich und Winterthur, das sich Musik aus dem experimentellen Bereich, zu der auch Noise gehört, verschrieben hat. Für ihr anfangs Januar erschienenes Release habe ich mir die Zeit genommen und mich auf die Musik einzulassen.
Das Album heisst ‘Power to the Sheeple’ und kommt vom Duo ‘Perverts in White Shirts’. Dahinter stecken Nathalie Dreier und Dave Phillips. Sie haben über viele Jahre gemeinsam an dem Album gearbeitet, das nun erschienen ist. Von Dave Phillips kennt man hauptsächlich seine Arbeiten mit Noise Musik. Das vorliegende Album trägt auch unverkennbar diesen Einfluss, obschon es wesentlich eingängiger ist als reiner Noise Sound. Und schon ist man wieder beim Zuordnen. Wo genau Power to the Sheeple einzuordnen ist kann man schwer sagen. Es lohnt sich aber durchaus, sich hinzusetzten und sich mit den Klängen berieseln zu lassen. Mal fein, mal rau, manchmal mit viel Druck und manchmal ganz sanft. Jeder Track beherbergt eine eigene Stimmung, die von angsteinflössend bis zu sphärisch wohlfühlend reicht. Wer sich gut achtet, wird mehr Informationen und Aussagen in den Stücken findet, wie es anfangs den Anschein macht. Die Platte gibt es in einer Auflage von 300 beim Label Cruel Bones und kann hier erstanden werden.

(Dominik André, 45rpm, March 2017)

Ah ! L’a-neutralité helvétique…
La Suisse a quelque chose de bien. Elle est emphatiquement microcosmique. C’est bien son paradoxe et on l’en remercie. C’est peut-être le propre de ce pays que l’on conçoit comme fermé sur lui-même de permettre l’éclosion de tendances culturelles radicales. On ne présente plus Dave Phillips. Activiste radical ayant démarré sa carrière à la fin des années 80, ancien membre du défunt Fear of God, cheville ouvrière de la formation à géométrie variable Schimpfluch-Gruppe, l’Helvète s’est toujours engagé dans des projets extrêmes dont les captations vidéos témoignent allègrement de l’investissement hors-norme qu’il y déploie. Collectionneur pléthorique de collaborations de haut niveau telles qu’avec Joke Lanz (AKA Sudden Infant) et Rudolf Eb.er (Cf. Schimpfluch-Gruppe), Francisco Meirino, Masonna, John Wiese, etc… son domaine de prédilection est l’expérimentation.
Nathalie Dreier s’est illustrée à de nombreuses reprises aux côtés de Dave Phillips, vocalement certes puisqu’il est question d’elle en tant que chanteuse dans PIWS, mais principalement visuellement. Son travail personnel est plus à chercher du côté de l’image. En effet, elle co-alimente avec AnaHell un projet d’autoportraits photographiques, Red Rubber Road, dédiée à l’esthétisation surréaliste des corps, mâtinée parfois d’une légère subversion. C’est dans ce champ-là que sa contribution au projet intervient également puisque sa coreligionnaire réalise le clip d’un des morceaux de l’album, «Favour », par la mise en scène des membres du groupe dans la continuité de la série Secret Friends. C’est donc dans les territoires d’une certaine marge que l’on trouve les deux protagonistes de Perverts in White Shirts. Mais cette collaboration est définitivement policée voire polie au sens d’un arasement des aspérités et de la rugosité. Il est évident que Dreier est l’instigatrice de l’assagissement de Phillips et non l’inverse au vu de leur pedigree respectif. En somme, c’est arty! Désormais, il est rare qu’un tel terme suscite immédiatement la sympathie. Et pourtant… il est des associations qui provoquent l’adhésion. On passera d’emblée sur l’évidence un peu trop appuyée du titre Power to the Sheeple dont le jeu de mots laisserait subodorer une certaine facilité d’esprit. Mais enfin, nous en sommes tous là, parfois, et là ne réside pas l’enjeu…
Car l’écoute, elle, que dit-elle ?
« e.l.a.n.k.y » entame doucement par un effet panoramique de sonorités métalliques sous-tendu par une grosse ligne de basse et une rythmique efficace. La construction gagne progressivement en puissance, à l’unisson d’une voix tout d’abord contenue qui se déploie franchement en transe hystérique. « Favour » se place dans une continuité de construction électronique et vocale qui rappelle définitivement le 1er album de Cercueil. C’est gentiment complexe et définitivement accessible. « Sycophant » est sans conteste le morceau le plus percutant de l’album. La simplicité efficiente de la groovebox Roland MC-303 y est forcément pour beaucoup. Démarrant par un empilement de basses sur lesquelles la voix intervient parcimonieusement, il se développe comme un véritable hymne saturé Breakbeat amplifié par les scansions proches de la démence de Dreier : un format d’électro-clash. Cela fait songer à du Crystal Castles certes, mais surtout à du Camilla Sparksss dans la rage débridée. « Overfucked and Overstimulated » calme cette forme de violence ouverte en une menace plus sourde, murmurée par une voix masculine. Un même motif se trouve ainsi décliné de manière hypnotique. Se posent sur ce canevas des entrelacs d’expérimentations et captations multiples se répondant mutuellement. Le collage sonore témoigne d’une formidable maîtrise sans toutefois tomber dans l’hermétisme. Le final de l’album, « Anton », donne toute la mesure des capacités de Phillips dans le field-recording. Construit autour des matières dans une visée de paysage sonore, il ferait volontiers croire à une bande-originale hypothétique d’un moyen-métrage de Jiří Barta. The Last Theft, pourquoi pas… ?
L’écoute se clôt ainsi et intime le constat suivant : voilà ce que donne une musique accessible qui ne verse pas dans la putasserie. L’avantage incontestable qu’ont les gens qui savent d’où ils viennent et surtout ce qu’ils font avec peu de choses au final ! Si le terme «arty» pouvait de nouveau avoir cette définition, ce serait appréciable.

(Mélanie Meyer, l'ombre sur la mesure, February 2017)

I’ve been on the mailing list of Dave Phillips for ages. This morning, the latest missive was waiting for me and it contained a link to this. I immediately thought “what is there not to love?”. A great band name, a great album title and a cover that riffs on Swans’ “Public Castration Is A Good Idea” double LP.
Then I heard the music … lysergic and hauntingly twisted anti-club hymns that delight and disturb at the same time. It’s truly stunning and is easily the best thing that I have heard this year.
PIWS are Dave Phillips and Nathalie Dreier. Next year, this will be released on vinyl by Cruel Bones and on tape by Black Horizons so keep an eye out for those! However, yesterday, dp also put this up on bandcamp as a “name your price” download so you can go and get it now. I definitely recommend that you do!

(Badgerstump, Bleakbliss, December 2016)

Video to 'Favour' off 'Power to the Sheeple' released 30 November 2016.
Directed by AnaHell

Video to 'Overfucked and Understimulated' off 'Power to the Sheeple' released 30 November 2016.
Video by Nathalie Dreier