There’s a whole lot going on here. I first heard Martha Skye Murphy’s music via this Exclaim! piece, and decided to wait until the whole record came out to really dig into her music. This was the song featured in the piece:
What in the grinchfingers was that video? It’s delicate, orchestral, cinematic and intimate. It’s also creepy and sinister. It’s a good entry point for this record, and it only gets better (and spectacularly weirder) from there.
Sometimes when an album grabs me early, I start scribbling notes as I listen for the first time, to try to capture a strong first impression. I started that with this record, but by the third track, I was spellbound, staring into the near distance, fully immersed in the music.
It’s strange to be worried about spoilers when writing about a record, but that’s what’s happening here. It feels like every song has something completely unexpected in it – the voice at the end of Theme Parks, the off-key parts in Spray Can, the (redacted) on Irl. The first 3 seconds and last 3 seconds of the record. None of it is gimmicky, and almost every instance made me want to go back and start the song again to see if there’s any foreshadowing. I describe a lot of records as cinematic, but that feels insufficient here. This album feels literary.
EDIT: I wrote that before I read this outstanding piece in The Quietus, where you can find this:
The physical packaging of the record has been deliberately plotted too, not just that Cold War-inspired artwork, but a back cover where the track’s titles are arranged to resemble a table of contents, and an insert containing lyrics presents them as if they’re endnotes. “I wanted to reference literary forms where there’s a distortion of reading, like with footnotes and endnotes, where you’re interrupted in your process,” she says.
…guess I’m buying the record.
The centrepiece of the record is the unbelievably hard-hitting Kind. Delicate, hushed and captivating melody gives way to a full-on storm in the last third of the track. It’ll stop you cold:
Other pieces about her work use words like baroque, chamber, and orchestral. While they’re not wrong, they suggest some kind of inaccessibility or snootiness to the music that isn’t there. This is kind of orchestral, kind of electronic, kind of experimental, but those labels don’t matter.
Martha Skye Murphy has a very distinct voice — breathy and fragile, with a ton of range and character. She’s maxing out those qualities on this record, but somehow it never feels like a performance. It’s visceral.
Holy mucous membranes, that was a gloriously uncomfortable watch.
I’ve listened to this record a few times now, and different details, layers, and elements stand out each time. This album is like a collection of short stories by an absolute master — what you draw from them is dependent on your own frame of mind and the environment in which they’re encountered.
And once you’ve encountered it, you won’t forget it. It’s absolutely stunning.
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