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 Murphy conjures images inspired by everything from Ancient Roman hand-binding torture to a Fred and Ginger tap routine. A deep sense of longing and echoes of lost, distant memory haunt the record.

On the album, the artist says she wanted “the listener to feel
disoriented, erotically charged by the intimacy of a bedroom, then catapulted into a desert.”