Martha Skye Murphy

"Martha Skye Murphy is in utterly unique form throughout ‘Need’, a song with a palpable sense of atmosphere.”– CLASH

“The latest dispatch from her shadowy, in-between place is "Need." It's classic Murphy in execution — chilling, stormy, equal parts glass and stone” - Exclaim!

Today, Martha Skye Murphy has released her highly anticipated debut album ‘Um’, via AD 93. Listen to the album HERE

Focus track ‘Spray Can’ is a disorientating song of ache, that takes the listener from the secrecy of a journal with alternate pages missing, to an unidentifiable natural landscape. It is philosophical and existential with stretching vocals reminiscent of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, and a piano melody that transmutes into crashing rock and noise.

On the cover of her debut album, Martha Skye Murphy sits at a lie detector. In a grey and austere looking room, the chair next to her that should be operated by her interrogator is empty. It is an image, both striking and stark, that encapsulates exactly what’s so engrossing about this extraordinary debut LP – a record that thrives on the push-and-pull between fact and fiction, intimacy and coldness, revelation and secrecy, trust and deception, distance and closeness.

There are central ideas that emerge from ‘Um’’s contrasting currents; loss, longing, and memory. These are states, Murphy stresses, that distort one’s sense of time and place, and so she plays with the power of fluctuating landscapes: opener ‘First Day’ consists of individual notes recorded on different instruments from Texas to New Zealand to London, coalescing into one hovering chord around a field recording Murphy took while wandering New York. It's telling, incidentally, that when Marta Salogni, the acclaimed musician and producer who mixed the album, first heard ‘Um’, she commented that it was like experiencing a memory that hadn’t yet happened. She introduced Murphy to the term “Hiraeth”, an untranslatable Welsh term that refers to a blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing for one’s home. “It summarised the whole record,” Murphy says.

Inspired as much by literature and cinema as she is music, Murphy developed a fascination with other art forms that might undermine the idea of linear narrative. “I wanted to reference footnotes and endnotes, where there’s a distortion of reading and you’re interrupted in the process,” she says. Take ‘Pick Yourself Up’ and ‘Dust Yourself Off’ for example. The title of the latter appears in the lyrics of the former, but by the time it’s actually heard on the record six songs later Murphy’s vocals have been reduced only to a wordless hum.

As a vocalist Murphy has a rare talent for transformation, from her intimate, cracked whispers over the hypnotic drift of ‘Theme Parks’, to her piercing disembodied wails as ‘Kind’ implodes into a cataclysm of electronic noise. Elsewhere, she offers us little more than a distracted hum. In the studio, she and co-producer Ethan P. Flynn focused on maximising those vocal capabilities by teasing out different personas. One of the biggest sonic influences on the album was sacred choral music and so Murphy and Flynn would put mics in odd places, each vocal part positioned in varying areas of the room to try and channel a choir in a church or a sacred space.

It would be an oversimplification to say that Murphy inhabits different characters on the record. Rather, she extracts different characters from the depths of her own psyche who gesture towards the fact that ‘the self’ is ultimately a vague and impermanent thing. She can be both exorcist and orator. ‘Um’ builds on what has come before in Murphy’s nascent, yet already storied career. As a child Murphy contributed the vocals to the opening credits of 2005’s ‘The Proposition’, for Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score. She would work with Cave again almost a decade later, as a featured vocalist on The Bad Seeds’ ‘Push The Sky Away’. Murphy has long since evolved into her own, entirely unique artist, but a spirit of collaboration has never left her. Her caterwauling guest vocals were a lightning bolt to Squid’s ‘Bright Green Field’. On ‘Um’ she deploys field recordings from Claire Rousay and Roy Montgomery (who also provide percussion and guitar respectively), vocals from Dan English, flute from Gentle Stranger and caroline’s Alex McKenzie (she returned the favour with an appearance on Gentle Stranger’s ‘Inner Winter’ LP last year), trumpet from Squid’s Laurie Nankivell and the 10 year old Lara Soraya, to capture hints of Murphy’s own voice as a child. Finally, Murphy enlisted mastering engineer Heba Kadry to sprinkle their magic across ‘Um’.

Collaborative as it is, however, ‘Um’ is ultimately a work that only Martha Skye Murphy could have made. An obsessive when it comes to the finest details of sound, vision, and even physical packaging, and an artist whose work is littered with references and connections that defy one’s everyday notion of space and time, this is the work not just of a musician, but of a true auteur.

Meaning shifts throughout Martha Skye Murphy's debut album ‘Um’ with songs that meld moments of baroque beauty with crashes of electronic noise, employing textures that are by turns organic and artificial, hi-fi and lo-fi. Collaborations with the likes of Claire Rousay and Roy
Montgomery are finely intertwined with the fruits of rigorous studio sessions with producer Ethan P. Flynn.

Lyrically Murphy conjures images inspired by everything from Ancient Roman hand-binding torture to a Fred and Ginger tap routine. A deep sense of longing and echoes of lost, distant memory haunt the record.
“I wanted the album to feel like this constant tension between being in a very intimate domestic space, and then being propelled into a far stranger environment that is difficult to situate,” she says. “I want people to feel
disoriented, erotically charged by the intimacy of a bedroom, then catapulted into a desert.”