Phew, Erika Kobayashi, Dieter Moebius – ‘Radium Girls‘ (Vinyl LP or CD)

In the shadow of the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, Japanese musician Phew, artist Erika Kobayashi, and German electronic music pioneer Dieter Moebius (Cluster, Harmonia) came together for an extraordinary project. Together, they developed the concept album Radium Girls 2011, which they released in 2012 under the project name Project UNDARK 114 years after the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie. 

Phew: ”First, there was music. Moebius suggested making an album together and sent me a CD-R. Initially, it was supposed to be a Moebius & Phew production. I think this was in late 2010, but I‘m not sure. Then, in 2011, the earthquake and nuclear accident in Japan happened. When I had tea with Erika Kobayashi, she told me about the Radium Girls, and that’s when I came up with the idea of making a concept album. Erika and I then wrote the lyrics for Moebius’ tracks. The song order is the same as on the CD-R he sent me. The music tracks were recorded at Moebius Studios, while the vocals were recorded and mixed in Japan.“ Phew, 2025.

The Radium Girls were female factory workers who unknowingly suffered radiation poisoning while painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium Factory in Orange, New Jersey, around 1917. A group of  affected women later took their employer to court, setting a legal precedent that granted workers the right to sue companies for illnesses caused by hazardous working conditions. Between 1917 and 1926, the U.S. Radium Corpor- ation – previously named the Radium Luminous Material Corporation – specialised in extracting and refining radium from carnotite ore to manufacture glow-in-the-dark paint, marketed as “Undark.“ As a supplier for the military, the company produced radioluminescent watches and other instruments. The New Jersey factory employed over a hundred workers, primarily women, to apply the radium-based paint, unaware of the serious health dangers associated with it. In total, around 4,000 workers across the United States and Canada were hired to paint watch dials with radium. Many later suffered from severe health problems due to radiation exposure, though the exact number of fatalities remains uncertain.