Martha Skye Murphy

London-based artist Martha Skye Murphy releases ‘Concrete’ feat NYC duo LEYA plus Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins on bass - the title track from her preternatural triptych out today via Practise Music. ‘Concrete’ follows Murphy’s transcendental singles ‘Stuck’ and ‘Found Out’ and has been co-produced by Martha Skye Murphy and Ethan P. Flynn.

Always weaving theatre into her music, ‘Concrete’ is told from the perspective of a captor to their beloved hostage. Part lamentation, part chant, this is the last joust in a triad on escapism and desire. Discussing the video Murphy offers: “Using my surrounding city environment in its constant developing yet abandoned state, and nodding to the visual language of video games, I wanted the film for ‘Concrete' to turn a static building in its harsh location from something stoic and functional into a charged site of dysfunctional memory. This concrete block can become anything you wanted, saw, imprisoned, thought or lost, it can be past or present, real or imagined. Thinking of Edward Burtynsky’s harrowing aerial photographs of large scale industrial waste and short films such as The Black Tower by John Smith, I wanted to comment on the capacity for spaces to host, entrap and influence feeling.”

For the triptych artwork Murphy uses a piece by the musician’s sister and frequent collaborator, artist Ceidra Moon Murphy. The photograph is taken from her series ‘Salt’, a sequence of manipulations of a low-res scan through which the artist states she is 'making the clear, unclear and the ruined, Romantic’.

Murphy’s multidisciplinary attitude spills into other mediums such as acting, she has toured the UK with the documentary theatre company she co-founded, I Swear I Saw This, in a one-woman show ‘Two Body Problem’. Murphy’s latest melding of disciplines comes in the form of an opera which she describes as an improvised field recording. This piece will have a multi-media release early next year, with an interactive premiere at The Purcell Rooms.

Murphy has recently featured on Squid’s lead single ‘Narrator’ taken from their debut album Bright Green Field, released the score for enigmatic motion picture The Late Departure directed by Ivan Krzeszowiec and collaborated with producer Dan Carey on his Quarantine series. She has also been honing in on her flair for cinematic sounds, working alongside film score composer Maxwell Sterling on a project coming out in the new year with Chicago based label American Dreams. 

This summer Murphy has been busy beguiling audiences at festivals like Pitchfork London, Green Man and Latitude where she joined Squid for a breathtaking rendition of their single ‘Narrator’ and went on to support the Bristol five-piece at their first ever London sold-out headline at Printworks.