Commence:

It’s been a few years since I’ve spoken to Martha Skye Murphy. In that time, she’s released one album, an avant-garde EP, some singles, featured on another Squid album, and her debut album proper. The last time we spoke Murphy was sitting in front of a plain white wall with a few family pictures on it. She could have been in London or the Mediterranean. This time she is seated on a sofa that wouldn’t be out of place in a rented flat or a management company’s meeting room. This is one of the things I enjoy talking to Martha Skye Murphy. You are never sure where she is, or why, but ultimately that doesn’t matter as the conversation flows. The same can be said for her music. At times you aren’t sure why something has been added, but it makes the song work in a way that it wouldn’t if it had been missing. 

To get things going I ask what she’s currently been listening to. Partly because I’m always on the lookout for new stuff, partly because I’m curious and partly because tis a great ice breaker. Martha’s response isn’t what I expected. Thinking she’d name-check one of her collaborators Maxwell Sterling, Roy Montgomery or Claire Rousay she mentions Underworld and the acappella version of their single ‘Denver Luna’. “I think, because I love you know, we’ve spoken before about how much I love, just vocal harmony. And like, choral music, there’s something in that track that resonates with the same interest I have in a beautiful choir in an abbey. Except it’s like, you know, somebody who’s been vocally distorted. You should check that.” Ice broken. Tip given. Interview underway. 

—

—

Before we head into talking about her debut album ‘Um’, I want to talk about her last few releases. Namely ‘Distance on Ground’ with Maxwell Sterling and her avant-garde cassette ‘Postcards Home’. “It’s interesting,” she posits “because ‘Postcards Home’ was, that was made during lockdown. So, it was a very kind of internal place to be, you know, all about silence.”

Martha goes on to explain that due to recording during lockdown there was no pressure on her to work to a specific deadline and she would be freer. “I had no boundaries and no rules for it. And it was an Experimentation with the voice. And it was fundamentally about like, flirting with the Notions of how the voice sits within us. And I was thinking about, so it took a long for me to realise what as a record was about”.

She then makes a connection to her new album and how there are threads that connect the two albums together, even though that wasn’t the original plan. “I think it is definitely communicating, with ‘Postcards Home’, because it’s talking about internal voices, and also how they speak to each other. Obviously just me, and it’s just my voice. And I was having all these conversations with my machines, but my machines were echoing back to me what I was saying to it. And I think with, ‘Um’, there are all these conversations and narratives that are going on between the songs, and it’s kind of it kind of functions in the same way.”

When asked if she considers them companion pieces, or bookends with her other releases in the middle, she replies: “Well, I’ve, I’ve always really liked the idea that somebody could kind of come up with like a conspiracy theory of how the tracks interact. So, I have placed little references and the album itself is inter-referential. But that’s kind of about memory and repetition and returning to ideas and how you can get locked in ideas.”

—

—

‘Postcards Home’ is a challenging album that doesn’t make its intentions known after a first listen, but its also a very strong, singular album. Self-released through Bandcamp, Martha Skye Murphy jokes that she was being discreet with its release and now, when she gets an order, she’s a bit taken aback. “Whenever I get an order for that, I’m like, ‘Oh wow. Yeah, good luck’. Because it’s, it’s a challenging listen, one that maybe isn’t even about the process of listening and more about the fact that it exists. And I really, I think it’s a really beautiful object, actually…”

When asked if she considers it her debut she replies: “No, I don’t actually, I see it as a sketchbook, I sort of exercise, vocal exercise. I mean, only in that the way that I’ve addressed this as an album and like, the packaging of it. But the whole cohesive thing, I thought through a bit more like it, I think, ‘Postcards Home; was a really fun experiment for me. And it, you know, it’s a route, and it’s part of the story and the narrative, but it’s, I wouldn’t see it as my entrance.”

In 2023 Martha Skye Murphy announced she had signed to AD 93, Nic Tasker’s label and follow up to his defunct Whities label; her first releases for AD 93 was the single ‘Dogs’.

“’Dogs’ had existed in on my shelf for a while. And it kind of incorporated two states of mind in my writing, because I had the song, as it was as a demo written on piano and voice. I’d been obsessively listening to these archive opera recordings. I had one as a child and I’ve been listening to that a lot. And I wanted to sample that.” Martha then says that she set up her looping device with the recordings playing and then played the track she’d been working on over the top of it. “And you know something unnerving happened, where it just all kind of aligned like it was it was improvised. I was playing the song and the ghosts of those recordings sort of started singing with me. And yeah, so that felt like good”.

She wasn’t sure whether to release it or not, but after taking to Tasker is made sense for him to put it out. “There is a really interesting concept when you’re releasing music because we’re made to feel like when something comes out it’s sort of instantaneous and it was almost written that day.” Martha then explains that her process is quite slow. “I write lyrics very fragmented and even when I finish something, I don’t feel like it’s fully revealed itself to me.”

—

—

Her debut album ‘Um’ has more in common with her early releases than ‘Postcards Home’ and ‘Distance On Ground’. The album saw her working with Ethan P Flynn, who she worked with on 2021’s ‘Concrete EP’. “Ethan understands my vision and what I’m wanting to do and how to unearth that without being didactic” she explains. “The process was quite long. It really encapsulates this notion of memory and things resurfacing.” Some of the songs were written five years ago, others two. “Some of them were composed of field recordings and voice memos that I had had in my phone for years. So, it’s kind of hard. I think that’s the point of the record is that it warps time.”

The album opens with the sound of a cassette being played and Murphy saying “Commence” and the album ends with Murphy saying, “That’s enough”. This made me laugh and it a nice way to start and end an album. Murphy said she wanted to do something that spoke to the listener and let them recognise that they were the audience. “It kind of felt a bit like opening the curtains of a stage play, and then closing them again” she says. “I really believe in that space that you enter, when you submit to being in an environment that is presented as entertainment. Like being in cinema or being in the theatre. I think you partly allow yourself to disappear and go into that world, which can be as much as a self-reflection as it is an absorption of another narrative. If you’re kind of presented it on those terms. It’s like, the Greeks have been doing it forever.”

Our conversation had been delightful at this point. You can tell that Martha Skye Murphy loves to deep-dive on her work and explain as much about her through process as the end result. Next, I ask a question that slightly changed the mood. After it was asked, she visibly tensed.

I said that while ‘Um’ is a very good album and strong piece or work it was more conventional than I had imagined – given how experimental ‘Postcards Home’ and ‘Distance on the Ground’ were in places. ‘Um’ has more in common with ‘Concrete’ and ‘Heroides’. I asked, “If this was a conscious thing or just how the songs turned out?”

Martha pauses, and asks “What do you mean by conventional?”

I explain the songs on ‘Um’ are more verse-chorus-verse in those respects… were you consciously trying to go away from ‘Postcards Home’ and ‘Distance on Ground’? Or did you want to write something a that could get radio play?

“I just write different styles of music,” Martha replies. “There’s kind of maybe two, two lanes that my music brain lives in. There’s the sort of improvise slightly more ambient leaning world and then there’s a space, which is slightly more focused. Yeah. You know, and so I think both of those need to exist concurrently for me to do either or? Yeah, I don’t think it was like a conscious decision of, I want to write conventional songs. I think I just, it was just what, where they went, you know, as the grouping of those of those tracks. And also, because I guess the records that you’re referring to as being kind of more lea field are pretty much absent of words. Yeah. And I’m obsessed with the relationship between sounds and words. So, this was more an expression of talking about searching for words, and the sounds that appear in the shape of words when you’re looking for them.”

—

—

And like that we were back on track. Lyrically Martha’s work can be quite precise but vague. She’ll be singing a line, and you’ll know its meaning 100%, then on the next one it would be about anything. When I bring this up, she replies: “I’m really glad that you say that about it being precise, but vague. I collect sentences and I collect words. They’re normally in different notes or on different pages of my lyric book. And then one day, I’ll just have some kind of strange clarity of how to group them. And then they’ll all these things that have been otherwise estranged from one another in my mind and physically on the page. We’ll just group together like a chorus in an opera or something. And they’ll suddenly make sense to me, and I’ll understand what the connection is between them.”

“I think I purposefully collect words and lyrics that are slightly. more ambiguous or vague. I’m interested in words that have the potential to mean three different things like Kind. For example, could mean you’re very kind to me, or it could mean a kind of feeling or a kind of apple. I’m attracted to things that have multiple meanings. But then within that, I think it then gives me this safety almost to feel like I can deposit far more intimate personal things that are going on. Then hopefully, within that phrasing, suddenly, the things that are deeply personal to me feel more human universal, or more communal to other people, or it taps into something that is not exclusive. Or is somehow posited in a way that allows you to read into it, something exclusive to you.”

Martha Skye Murphy’s music feels like it couldn’t have been made a few years ago. There seems to be more of an interest in music that doesn’t truly conform to the mainstream’s mandate. People are taking risks on things outside of their comfort zone. “I have no understanding of what the outreach is certainly of my music, but of that general community, because I think when Charlie XCX is dominating the music industry and everything, it’s hard to understand, what’s being heard and what’s being seen and what’s being listened to. Outside of your own experience of mutual adoration. I think on the whole, there is more awareness. More people that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to know, obscure. Artists that I’m listening to or would maybe have, you know, chortled at that before scoffed at like, why maybe more susceptible to it, which is really good. And I hope that that continues.”

—

—

The artist then talks about listening practices and how we’ve become more accustomed to listen to tracks rather than albums. “I think that we’re just slightly out of practice of that. Because the way that we’re being pushed to listen to music is so lazy and so flippant, whether it’s Spotify playlists, literally telling you what to listen to, on your Discover Weekly, or whether it’s people not having, you know, in paper publications to read or not going to record stores, like whatever it is. I’m not saying that I don’t take part in this as well. I think it’s being pushed onto us in a way that is very involuntary. But maybe people are returning somehow or finding their way back to listening to music or discovering music in a more organic way, which in turn, pushes you to be more open. I don’t know.” 

Lana Del Rey released a spoken word album that got to number 25 in 2020. That says to me there is a market for more adventurous releases. Let’s hope there is a shift and more avant-garde music makes its way to the mainstream because the music that Murphy makes deserves to be heard by the wide’s audience possible. Yes, she pushes boundaries at times, but at its heart its chocked full of solid songwriter, killer melodies and vocals to give you goose bumps. 

That’s Enough!

—

‘Um’ is out now.

Words: Nick Roseblade
Photo Credit: Ben Murphy

—