Description
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. The album is dedicated to the so-called Radium Girls, female factory workers in the United States during the 1920s who painted watch dials with radioactive luminous paint and suffered severe health consequences from radium poisoning. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the label Bureau B is reissuing Radium Girls -- for the first time also on vinyl. 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 five 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 Corporation -- previously named the Radium Luminous Material Corporation -- specialized 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.