Pick Yourself Up: Martha Skye Murphy Interviewed
The last time this writer spoke to Martha Skye Murphy she 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 about chatting to her – 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 that piece 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 it’s a great ice-breaker. Yet her response isn’t what I expected – thinking she’d namecheck one of her collaborators Maxwell Sterling, Roy Montgomery or Claire Rousay, she in fact mentions Underworld and the a cappella version of their single ‘Denver Luna’.
“Well, I love vocal harmony,” she points out. “I love choral music… and there’s something in that track that resonates with the same interest I have in a beautiful choir in an abbey. Except it’s been vocally distorted. You should check that.”
Ice broken. Tip given. Interview underway.
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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 because ‘Postcards Home’ was made during lockdown. So, it was a very kind of internal place to be… and it’s all about silence.”
Continuing, she explains that the strictures of lockdown meant there was no pressure on her to work to a specific deadline. “I had no boundaries and no rules for it. It was an experimentation with the voice. It was fundamentally about flirting with the notions of how the voice sits within us. It actually took a long time for me to realise what the record was about”.
Martha then makes a connection to her new album, and the threads that tie those projects together – even though that wasn’t the original plan. “I think it is definitely themes of communication. With ‘Postcards Home’ it’s talking about internal voices, and how they speak to each other. Obviously, 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.”
Expanding on this, she points out: “I think with ‘Um’, there are all these conversations and narratives that are going on between the songs, and 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 always really liked the idea that somebody could come up with a conspiracy theory of how the tracks interact. So, I have placed little references in there, and the album itself is inter-referential in the way it deals with memory and repetition and how you can get locked in ideas.”
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‘Postcards Home’ is a challenging album that doesn’t make its intentions known after a first listen, but it’s 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 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 think it’s a beautiful object, actually.”
When asked if she considers it her debut she replies: “No, I don’t actually I see it as a sketchbook, a sort of vocal exercise. It’s part of the story and the narrative, but I wouldn’t see it as my entrance.”
Last year Martha Skye Murphy announced she had signed to AD 93, Nic Tasker’s label and follow up to his defunct Whities label. Her first release for AD 93 was the single ‘Dogs’. “’Dogs’ had existed on my shelf for a while. And it kind of incorporated two states of mind in my writing, because I had the song – a demo written on piano and voice. And I’d been obsessively listening to these archive opera recordings. I had one as a child and I’d been listening to that a lot, so I wanted to sample it”.
Martha then said that she set up her looping device with the recordings playing, and placed 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. I was playing the song and the ghosts of those recordings started singing with me.”
She wasn’t sure whether to release it or not, but after taking to Nic Tasker it 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. But I write lyrics in a very fragmented fashion, and even when I finish something, I don’t feel like it’s fully revealed itself to me.”
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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 kept in my phone for years. So, it’s kind of hard. I think that’s the point of the record, that it warps time.”
The album opens with the sound of a cassette being played and Martha’s voice saying “commence”; it ends with her saying “that’s enough”. Pointing to this, Martha Skye 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 a 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 a form of self-reflection as it is an absorption of another narrative. I mean, Greeks have been doing it forever!”
It’s worth noting the breadth of her catalogue – ‘Um’ is perhaps more conventional than ‘Postcards Home’, but no less taxing. “I just write different styles of music,” she replies. “There’s maybe two lanes that my music brain lives in. There’s the sort of improvisatory, slightly more ambient leaning world and then there’s a space which is slightly more focused. I think both of those need to exist concurrently for me to do either of those things.”
“I don’t think it was a conscious decision, it was just where the music went, as a grouping of those tracks. 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.”
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Lyrically Martha’s work can be quite precise but vague; meaning appears and then dissolves from line to line. 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. All these things that have been otherwise estranged from one another in my mind will just group together like a chorus in an opera or something. It will 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 attracted to things that have multiple meanings. But then within that, I think it then gives me the safety to feel like I can deposit far more intimate or personal things that are going on in my life. Then hopefully, within that phrasing, the things that are deeply personal to me feel more universal, or more communal to other people.”
Martha Skye Murphy makes music that feels as though it couldn’t have been made a few years ago. Presently, 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 mean, beyond Charli XCX dominating the music industry 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. People seem susceptible to new ideas, and I hope that continues.”
“I think that we’re just slightly out of practice, in terms of music discovery,” she says. “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 whatever. I’m not saying that I don’t take part in this as well, but I think it’s being pushed onto us in a way that is very involuntary. And maybe people are 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.”
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‘Um’ is out now.
Interview: Nick Roseblade
Edits: Robin Murray
Photo Credit: Ben Murphy
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