2024 - UK
Art Pop, Ambient Pop, Electroacoustic, Singer-Songwriter
In every theater piece there are two separated spaces : the stage and the seats. This allows people to forget their lives and passively experience an art performance. Um also is theatrical. But Martha Sky Murphy destroyed the separation between those two spaces, she destroyed the audience’s passivity. It’s no surprise if Murphy said in an interview she wanted people to listen to this album while they’re walking ; during an activity. And throughout the entire record, she does everything so the listeners are actively immersed in the music.
« Commence » and « That’s enough » are the only words respectively structuring the opening song First Day and the closing one Forgive. The theatrical performance doesn’t hide, it’s in plain sight as we’re told when to dive in, and when to let go. And as we explore the many sounds composing Um, we visit places made of sound collage, peculiar words and other curiosities telling us that we’re both in a completely familiar Murphy-esque territory as well as in a pretty strange landscape. « In a room that belonged to no one / I lost myself in there / Let’s go to the river / Let’s fight together / Let’s soak in the weight of each other » she sings on Spray Can. The immersive experience also comes from the fact that Martha Skye Murphy doesn’t present herslef as our guide. She’s a lost wanderer just like us, moving into her sounds not knowing what they all mean, discovering their beauty at the same time as we do.
As we walk into her disturbed sonic forest, we come to realize that the trees keep changing. It’s meant to, we cannot become passive and forget ourselves into a fluid moving matter. No, the matter always is irregular.
With her beautiful soprano voice, like an angel filled with oddities, Martha Skye Murphy moves expertly within each song. On Need, she sings : « I walk past the spot where I sat once / […] I’m scared / I break things so beautifully ». Indeed, Um is filled with breakage, but it sounds blissful.
First Day introduces you to that principle of matter always being broken. In the beginning, there’s a lovely string sound rising but all of a sudden it gets crushed by dissonance and a wall of noise slowly rising until… it gets crushed once again by a gentle piano melody and Murphy’s delicate voice. There’s no rest in Um, nowhere to stand still. Need in itself is a spellbinding multi-faceted piece. Her folk music is always under the threat of a more massive sound. Her quiet vocals turn into a shriek, a complaint, something brutal and unexpected. She’s a shapeshifter, a gust of wind travelling the way it wants, becoming the tornado, the breeze, and all in between.
Each time you dive in Um again, it’s almost impossible to remember exactly where all those shifts were. You’re always surprised by the directions her sounds take. You remember there was beauty all around, and some fear, but where ? The places she takes us in are blurry, just as her words. « I think I purposefully collect words and lyrics that are slighlty more ambiguous or vague. I’m attracted to things that have multiple meanings » she recalls in an interview with Clash Music. The breakage doesn’t only rise from the sounds, it also contaminates her language.
Does Um mean something ? Is it a word, a sound, something in between ? What’s sure is that it conveys a sense of uncertainty, a sense of doubt. Martha Skye Murphy keeps interrogating herself, none of her thoughts are engraved in stones, they’re moving, always. « Sunlight on the ice / Visions in the night / Are you hungry ? » Just like these lyrics from Kind, her mind drifts away, from one idea to the other, putting them together to create strange ensembles, paintings like no other that makes us wonder what kind of world we’re visiting.
With Call Me Back and Dust Yourself Off, she ventures into ambient and electroacoustic territories. There are no structures, and there are no words, just the sound of her voice. She adresses the topic of language on the logically-titled song The Words. But don’t expect more guidance, it’s the same thick black bile : « Loving them quietly / Whispering in tapestries / Black dejection / Dig oil from the surface / Wings are clipped / Guess what, you’re a baby ». But despite how bleak those lyrics might sound, Um doesn’t raise its glass to the apocalypse. It’s an ode to movement that acknowlegdes that, in order to embrace yourself fully, you need to travel through a thousand moods, a thousand ideas, a thousand places. Because in the end, « the words held me ». She clings to this doubtful matter, because it’s all that she has. And embracing doubt is the first step of a long jounrney towards inner peace. Because despite all this darkness, Um is an album drenched in sunlight.
« It’s a clear day / To make and decide to stop / And start again / Dust yourself off / Pick yourself up ». Pick Yourself Up radiates with that golden energy. Destruction, rebuilt, breathing in, breathing out, these are the core movements of the album.
Martha Skye Murphy and the characters she turns into might be longing for love on Need and IRL, but it’s not the most important feeling she relies on. « Missed my mouth / Staring at the calendar / Hoping that things would appear / Walking through each box / Wishing you were here ». There’s an undeniable journey happening here, during which she wonders who will lie by her side, who will take her to « theme parks and casinos, deserts and the savanna », but in the end it all comes back to that healing routine : « Dust yourself off / Pick yourself up ».
There might be obstacles on that journey, some sounds might appear much scarier than others, but there will always be a time to rest, to focus on the silence between the sounds, on the footsteps between the melodies. And when the album ends, the doors are still open. You wouldn’t think an album about movement and doubt would end on a full stop, but it’s not a question mark either, it’s an ellipsis.
On her constant quest for novelty, a quest that will remain unfinished, Murphy reminds us of how ephemeral feelings can be, the happier ones as much as the most painful. And as we actively walk through her music, the only doubt that doesn’t cross our minds is whether Murphy will be a brilliant artist to keep an eye on in the future or not. She is, and we’ll be there. So dust yourself off, pick yourself up, and keep walking.
« Commence » and « That’s enough » are the only words respectively structuring the opening song First Day and the closing one Forgive. The theatrical performance doesn’t hide, it’s in plain sight as we’re told when to dive in, and when to let go. And as we explore the many sounds composing Um, we visit places made of sound collage, peculiar words and other curiosities telling us that we’re both in a completely familiar Murphy-esque territory as well as in a pretty strange landscape. « In a room that belonged to no one / I lost myself in there / Let’s go to the river / Let’s fight together / Let’s soak in the weight of each other » she sings on Spray Can. The immersive experience also comes from the fact that Martha Skye Murphy doesn’t present herslef as our guide. She’s a lost wanderer just like us, moving into her sounds not knowing what they all mean, discovering their beauty at the same time as we do.
As we walk into her disturbed sonic forest, we come to realize that the trees keep changing. It’s meant to, we cannot become passive and forget ourselves into a fluid moving matter. No, the matter always is irregular.
With her beautiful soprano voice, like an angel filled with oddities, Martha Skye Murphy moves expertly within each song. On Need, she sings : « I walk past the spot where I sat once / […] I’m scared / I break things so beautifully ». Indeed, Um is filled with breakage, but it sounds blissful.
First Day introduces you to that principle of matter always being broken. In the beginning, there’s a lovely string sound rising but all of a sudden it gets crushed by dissonance and a wall of noise slowly rising until… it gets crushed once again by a gentle piano melody and Murphy’s delicate voice. There’s no rest in Um, nowhere to stand still. Need in itself is a spellbinding multi-faceted piece. Her folk music is always under the threat of a more massive sound. Her quiet vocals turn into a shriek, a complaint, something brutal and unexpected. She’s a shapeshifter, a gust of wind travelling the way it wants, becoming the tornado, the breeze, and all in between.
Each time you dive in Um again, it’s almost impossible to remember exactly where all those shifts were. You’re always surprised by the directions her sounds take. You remember there was beauty all around, and some fear, but where ? The places she takes us in are blurry, just as her words. « I think I purposefully collect words and lyrics that are slighlty more ambiguous or vague. I’m attracted to things that have multiple meanings » she recalls in an interview with Clash Music. The breakage doesn’t only rise from the sounds, it also contaminates her language.
Does Um mean something ? Is it a word, a sound, something in between ? What’s sure is that it conveys a sense of uncertainty, a sense of doubt. Martha Skye Murphy keeps interrogating herself, none of her thoughts are engraved in stones, they’re moving, always. « Sunlight on the ice / Visions in the night / Are you hungry ? » Just like these lyrics from Kind, her mind drifts away, from one idea to the other, putting them together to create strange ensembles, paintings like no other that makes us wonder what kind of world we’re visiting.
With Call Me Back and Dust Yourself Off, she ventures into ambient and electroacoustic territories. There are no structures, and there are no words, just the sound of her voice. She adresses the topic of language on the logically-titled song The Words. But don’t expect more guidance, it’s the same thick black bile : « Loving them quietly / Whispering in tapestries / Black dejection / Dig oil from the surface / Wings are clipped / Guess what, you’re a baby ». But despite how bleak those lyrics might sound, Um doesn’t raise its glass to the apocalypse. It’s an ode to movement that acknowlegdes that, in order to embrace yourself fully, you need to travel through a thousand moods, a thousand ideas, a thousand places. Because in the end, « the words held me ». She clings to this doubtful matter, because it’s all that she has. And embracing doubt is the first step of a long jounrney towards inner peace. Because despite all this darkness, Um is an album drenched in sunlight.
« It’s a clear day / To make and decide to stop / And start again / Dust yourself off / Pick yourself up ». Pick Yourself Up radiates with that golden energy. Destruction, rebuilt, breathing in, breathing out, these are the core movements of the album.
Martha Skye Murphy and the characters she turns into might be longing for love on Need and IRL, but it’s not the most important feeling she relies on. « Missed my mouth / Staring at the calendar / Hoping that things would appear / Walking through each box / Wishing you were here ». There’s an undeniable journey happening here, during which she wonders who will lie by her side, who will take her to « theme parks and casinos, deserts and the savanna », but in the end it all comes back to that healing routine : « Dust yourself off / Pick yourself up ».
There might be obstacles on that journey, some sounds might appear much scarier than others, but there will always be a time to rest, to focus on the silence between the sounds, on the footsteps between the melodies. And when the album ends, the doors are still open. You wouldn’t think an album about movement and doubt would end on a full stop, but it’s not a question mark either, it’s an ellipsis.
On her constant quest for novelty, a quest that will remain unfinished, Murphy reminds us of how ephemeral feelings can be, the happier ones as much as the most painful. And as we actively walk through her music, the only doubt that doesn’t cross our minds is whether Murphy will be a brilliant artist to keep an eye on in the future or not. She is, and we’ll be there. So dust yourself off, pick yourself up, and keep walking.