FEATURE: Spotlight: Martha Skye Murphy

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Martha Skye Murphy

___________

THERE are a few good interviews…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Murphy

that I want to bring in when it comes to spotlighting the wonderful Martha Skye Murphy. She is a multidisciplinary talent who is among the most interesting and engaging artists in our midst. Having released two E.P.s last year, Heal and Yours Truly, I am keen to get Murphy’s thoughts and words on them. In 2018, she released her debut E.P., Heroides. It is a wonderful release, and one that signalled an incredible talent. There are a couple of interviews from 2019 that I want to source from first. When speaking with Fred Perry, a few questions in particular caught my eye:

“What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?

Daniel Johnson at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. I didn’t realise what I was going to see at the time, I didn’t know who he was. Instantly I was so completely enamoured by his songs, by him, his humble truth, his flamboyant unexpectedness. The memory still bewitches me. That I was in his presence fills me with joyous awe.

If you could be on the line up with any two musicians in history?

Delia Derbyshire and Tom Waits.
Delia Derbyshire’s contribution to experimental music is monumental yet, she remains a sort of unsung pioneer of electronic music. I like the idea that she has seeped into so many people’s childhoods with her original 1963 theme tune for Doctor Who.
Tom Waits’ theatricality is spectacular. I love the stubborn yet tender eccentricity of his stage character, his style, his voice, his wisdom, his honky tonk piano playing, him…

A song that defines the teenage you?

'Bonnie and Clyde' - Serge Gainsbourg

A song lyric that has inspired you?

"I’m In Love with a German Film Star"
'I’m In Love with a German Film Star' - The Passions

A song you wished you had written?

'Is That All There Is?' - Peggy Lee”.

In an interview with Loud and Quiet, we learn more about her debut E.P. There is a particular part of her musical life that I want to highlight soon. Before then, we understand more about an accomplished musician and actor:

“Despite the clear lines of sight these experiences gave her into the world of music, there’s still a refreshing absence of pressure in Martha’s approach to writing. She’s unhurried, and the vast expanse is a space that her songs are inhabiting beautifully, with an assured but skeletal confidence. “I think pace is – who cares? I mean, everyone has different methods of working. But I really respect people like Jason Spaceman from Spiritualized – you know, you’re lucky if you get an album in a decade. I really like that commitment to only releasing something once it’s ready.”

Somewhere between the duality of her life as a musician and her other life as an actor, Murphy’s also considering a job offer here. She teaches English and History of Art as a tutor and sells vintage clothes at trade fairs, if only to ease her own addiction to buying clothes. “Any job is kind of a compromise on everything else that you’re about,” she says, struggling with some of the social politics behind the various worlds she enters, “like, I don’t feel fully comfortable helping privileged children get into Oxbridge, but you’ve got to play the game somehow.”

Her debut EP, Heroides, was released last year on Slow Dance. A tolling piano grounds the heart of each track for Murphy’s ethereal vocals to dance with. It was recorded at Abbey Road, but she really doesn’t like The Beatles (“I mean, saying you like The Beatles literally means nothing”). It’s a world away from the music she made when she was 15, she tells me, all of which accidentally included the digital metronome in the back of GarageBand. Her work sits in good company with the likes of Amanda Palmer and PJ Harvey; there are hints of ‘Cloudbusting’-era Kate Bush on the melodramatic vocals of ‘Soaked’. There’s a dark theatricality to everything that makes it feel like you’re being toyed with slightly – laughed at in a teasing way, similar to Aldous Harding’s Paganist contortions on a song about a party, or Jessica Pratt’s heavy-lidded dirge about just how fucking in love she is. You’re compelled to keep coming back, if just to prove yourself worthy. Take Murphy’s cover of Bill Callahan’s ‘Rock Bottom Riser’, which accentuates the line “I bought this guitar to pledge my love to you,” as she plays it on piano.

It’s not ironic, though. You can hear her characters shifting deftly from the interior to exterior while still resonating with Amanda Palmer’s philosophy: stop pretending art is hard, just limit yourself to three chords and don’t practice daily”.

Just to jump ahead slightly. In this interview, Murphy was discussing the (at the time) forthcoming E.P., Yours Truly. I want to bring in this interview now because it is interesting learning about her collaborations with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis:

“Martha Skye Murphy was just 9 years old when she first collaborated with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, recording vocals for the soundtrack to John Hillcoat’s 2005 Western The Proposition. In 2013, she contributed backing vocals to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ spacious and contemplative Push the Sky Away and accompanied them on their subsequent tour. These early experiences had a profound influence on Murphy, who grew up in an artistic environment in South East London before going on to study History of Art at Cambridge University. Like Cave, the singer-songwriter and actor has a penchant for combining a dark sense of theatricality with pure emotional expression, two creative modes that are often seen as mutually exclusive. Inspired by classical literature, and specifically Ovid’s Heroides, her 2018 debut EP of the same name showcased her ethereal vocals as they coiled around dramatic piano and string arrangements, while her first EP of 2020, Heal, is more minimal and abstract, invoking the haunting soundscapes of a Grouper album. She casts these hypnotic qualities in a new light on her forthcoming EP, Yours Truly, whose strikingly potent title track brims with slow-burning intensity before culminating in a hair-raising crescendo.

About your new EP, you’ve said that you found yourself resorting to the voice of a child as a way to “confront the topic of ‘dishonesty’.” What do you feel you took away from channelling that voice, and how do you think it might influence your songwriting process going into the future?

Children have a conflicting relationship to deception and truth. They can be excellent liars yet also have a profound skill in telling you how it is! On the one hand I was interested in how childish behaviour manifests and on the other, in how by adopting the voice of an innocent I was able to explore a method of expression that exemplified the human’s capacity to feel such an extreme range of contradictory emotions. When people play at being adults it’s interesting to spot when they’re suppressing, modifying or hiding behind a veneer of ‘self’; one that is projected and dishonest. This partly comes from an enforced societal expectation for people to ‘grow up’. So without parenting, disciplining or taming myself within the songs, writing instantaneously and not labouring over them too much, the unpredictable structures and sometimes incomplete and abstract narratives came to life.

In addition to being a musician, you’re also an actor. What role does that kind of multidisciplinarity play in your work?

It means that the music is both a parasite and a feeder, it’s a database and also a portal to access other mediums of expression and interests for me. The multidisciplinary approach is just part of my nature, I look for meaning, inspiration and art in everything around me whether it’s real or imagined.

Both of the E.P.s Martha Skye Murphy released last year are fantastic. I especially love Heal. It is an E.P. that I would recommend people investigate and spend some time with. Not only do we hear more about the E.P. from a 2020 interview from The Line of Best Fit; Murphy’s early life and childhood musical loves are explored:

“Nestled in Herne Hill, Murphy remembers her childhood as one of great creativity and artistic stimulation – one where music “was never dormant”; speaking with real verve reliving her early obsessions with Shirley Bassey, Diana Washington, and Nancy Sinatra and her insistence that her mother buys her Dare! by The Human League for her 10th birthday.

During secondary school, Murphy submerged herself in the post-punk of Josef K, PiL, Gang of Four, and The Gun Club and began worshipping at the altar of Serge Gainsbourg. All of this was to the eternal bafflement of her peers who scrolled through her iPod before asking: “Why do you listen to old music? Why don’t you listen to Drake?”

As Murphy further descended into music’s cavernous vaults (Drake included), Nick Cave continued to encourage her musically, and their paths would cross again when he invited her to record vocals for three tracks on his 2013 album Push the Sky Away. At this point, Murphy was only 17.

Heal, her freshly released second EP that is already casting ripples in London’s musical pond continues this chthonic conjuring: “Heal is meant to make you realise how the past makes you feel incredibly present. How the things in the past can haunt you and linger like leeches.”

The record, made up of three songs, unfurls like a sacred procession to a waiting chamber with Murphy’s vocals luring you along. It radiates a distinctly Egyptian otherness nestled within a Tricento trance echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy.

During the opener “Dung Beetle”, Murphy tempts us to become lost in her forest of hieroglyphics: “I have spent my day travelling and waiting / when I was lulled into a hazy boredom / stuck on a platform / I received a beetle / a sticky dung beetle / with nothing but juice to give”.

The centrepiece of the EP, the 7-minute track "Heal" is almost ceremonial with its gentle drumming guiding the listener forward; with Murphy’s equally airy and screeching vocals coaxing epiphanies through the looped ouroboros-like repetition of a handful of slippery koans embedded in meditative soundscapes like insects in amber.

Murphy is adamant that she wants the listener to emerge into the wondrously strange closer “Augustine” clutching onto their own singular revelations: “When I write lyrics, I want them to be able to be heard and read with many meanings. I am using the words to get people to think about truth and stories and lies and how lies and deception can reveal truth in many ways”.

I’d like to challenge the multi-disciplinary aspects of the work much further”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Murphy

I am going to wrap up with an interview from earlier this year. In her chat with God is in the TV, Murphy looks back on her second E.P. of 2020, Yours Truly. Every interview with the songwriter reveals something memorable and amazing:

“She released her excellent EP ‘Yours Truly’ at the end of 2020. It came off the back of the ‘Heal’ EP, and cemented a reputation for wonderful spectral and slightly unsettling songwriting invested with the kind of majestic, peeling back of the curtain of reality that the likes of PJ Harvey and Joanna Newsome can conjure. These sparse, piano-led arrangements ripple with Murphy’s exquisitely artful tone, sitting on the razor’s edge of beautiful and sinister.

Murphy describes her ‘Yours Truly‘ EP as “a children’s book for adults.” The narrator on ‘Yours Truly’ oscillates between the vocal character of a child, ruminating on the vulnerability of being an adult. Normalising the fluctuating emotions an adult’s perspective might deem unstable; and a thoughtful protagonist who alludes to Russian politics, Greek legend, the Mafia, contemporary psychoanalysis, digital ethics, profiling and surveillance capitalism.

She says, “The best way of disguising yourself is through the appearance of truth. These songs are my exploration of that. They are the raw skin underneath a scab”.

She describes a starkly ascending piano motif across ‘Outis’ as her ‘analogue inversion of a Shepard tone’.

“Shepherd tones are amazing. It’s that moment in a pop banger, or like a drum and bass song where it escalates and seemingly keeps going up and up and up, and up and up, and up and up.”

Above this Martha emotes surreal, existential fragments of poetry, her voice is reminiscent of Kate Bush or Jenny Hval in its artful improvisatory, hushed style that sounds like a whisper in the ear.

Murphy doesn’t want to be prescriptive. She doesn’t want to explain exactly what the songs are about. To allow the listener to sort of make up their own whatever their impression is.

“Well, I think the intention is really to engender meaning for someone else. Yeah. So for me to explain to you what I was thinking or writing specifically about is almost kind of pointless, because really, the point of my work is to trigger as many interpretations and ultimately kind of make people reflect on their inner sanctums”.

“It’s not necessarily me that I’m writing about. I write very briefly, using snippets of conversations that I’ve had, in a kind of cut-up fashion, like Bowie but hopefully not as cruelly as him,” she explains”.

I am going to round things up there. I would encourage people to follow Martha Skye Murphy on social media. She is a phenomenal young artist who has been in the industry since she was a child. That said, her best years are very much ahead. I think we are going to see a lot more amazing music from Murphy. Having recently appeared on the Squid single, Narrator, she is proving herself to be someone who can collaborate with a wide range of artists and produce her own unique music. Such a versatile talent should be recognised. I know we will hear this golden and brilliant music…