Meaning shifts throughout Martha Skye 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. The listener is 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. 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. 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 little more than a distracted hum. In the studio, she and co-producer Ethan P. Flynn focused on maximizing those vocal capabilities by teasing out different personas. 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. It would be an oversimplification to say that Murphy inhabits different characters on the record. Rather, she extracts different characters from the depths of her own psyche who gesture towards the fact that "the self" is ultimately a vague and impermanent thing. She can be both exorcist and orator.
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