This album was first released in 2012 using the band name Project Undark and inspired by a need to memorialize the women whose health and lives were shortened by being employed in the US to paint watch dials with Radium. The paint was known as Undark. The project originally started when Dieter Moebius sent a CD-R of tunes to legendary Japanese artist Phew, who after the Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster of 2012 decided to enlist the help of artist and writer Erika Kobayashi to pay tribute to the victims of radium poisoning by adding text and narration to the tunes, keeping to the order on the CD-R.
The album opens with Radium Girls that takes Moebius minimalist techno backing, adding deadpan vocals to explain the dangers those Radium Girls were exposed too, this has a rather haunted feel to the vocals, especially the moans in the outro.
Evelyn has a slow intro to this tale of what happened to Evelyn that is spoken in Japanese, those watch faces that she painted and how it then affected her health. The feelings of bitterness and anger at the injustice comes through in the intonation of the tale.
Tracy has a cartoonish beat and synth soundtrack that is as disquieting as I imagine the lyrics to be. Marie sounds like she's walking through a walled environment telling us about her pain and distress with the bleeping sounds and woozy synths sounding suitably opiated for her pain, the odd snatches of English add to the disorientation felt during this piece.
Helena has dark room, pounding through the wall's techno, with clanging and drilling noises, for her terrible tale to unfold too, like she is suffering the most extreme tortures, distressing descent through the disabling effects. Erica sounds like deep whaling pits of despair, alarms ringing, the engine that never kicks into gear, why did this happen to poor Erica.
Manhattan Project has pulsing synth heartbeats, creating the environment for a serious discussion of the work of the Manhattan Project, from the perspective of the victims of the projects dastardly work. A child's voice speaks of unspeakable terror, deep beats, dismayed distressed and diving into the depths of man's inhumanity.
Little Boy And Fat Man are tap tap tapping their way through the rubble strewn streets, screams of anguish rise through the cracked earth, a never-ending siren connects them to the before times, before Uranium 235 destroyed the environment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Katherine is floating in between worlds, a definitive quickly spoken story of her suffering from the radiation sickness, among the repetitious clanging sounds, bells and chimes wobble though the landscape of disbelief this can be real.
Argonne National Laboratory so much pain and distress caused by this one facility, the music seems designed to aggravate the senses, make you feel prickly, itchy and unsure of how to cope in a world that this exists, whatever the narration actually tells us.
EBR-1 has what sounds like ancient Japanese string instruments, with deep percussive bursts for the slow narration to progress through, to help understand what an awful thing EBR-1 was, the first Experimental Breeder Reactor to open in 1951, the beginning of the atomic energy age, a still controversial fuel, the dystopian nature of the project comes through the music loud and clear. The album closes with Radium 266 that is the longest lived of the radium isotopes with a half-life of 1600 years, this is a eulogy to all the suffering it has caused.
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