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.

Listen to Button Music track samples:

Read Button Music Lyrics

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

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). Digital Release date: Friday, May 10th, 2019.
Label: Off (Belgium)