Meaning shifts throughout 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 Martha conjures images inspired by everything from Ancient Roman hand-binding torture to a Fred and Ginger tap routine. “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.”
The listener is indeed catapulted across landscapes and left disoriented. ‘First Day’ consists of individual notes recorded remotely on different instruments across Texas, New Zealand and London, coalescing into one hovering chord around a field recording Murphy took while wandering New York.
“There are recurring themes of interest to me which are loss, longing, and memory,” says Murphy. It's telling that when Marta Salogni, who mixed the album, first heard ‘Um’, she commented that it was like experiencing a memory of an experience 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.
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 focussed on maximising those vocal capabilities by teasing out different personas. “One of the biggest sonic influences on the album was Russian sacred choral music,” Murphy explains, “so we 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, and when I was performing, I would have a slightly different inflection for each voice.” On the crystalline ‘Pick Yourself Up’, part of which she wanted to sound like a lullaby, she cradled objects as she sang in order to draw out the maternal.
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