French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote in his 1949 essay The Cruel Practice Of Art that art “puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, [offering] us ravishment without death.” Each song on Martha Skye Murphy’s new album Um inches closer and closer to obliteration. Not only does the London singer-songwriter elude genre, but her music sounds as if it’s echoing from another realm.

Um, which arrived last month, abounds with visceral crescendoes like exorcisms and quiet moments of unshielded vulnerability and searing contemplation. Murphy guides the listener into piano ballad “Spray Can” with the disarming confession, “Wanted to write a song/ To fill the day/ But I had nothing to say.” The voyeuristic ambient excursion “Call Me Back” sounds like a glimpse into another galaxy. The ominous opus — which is her first full-length — serves as a startling soundtrack for preparing to plunge into the unknown.

On a Zoom call, Murphy discussed the influences for Um, which include medieval torture devices, foreign films, George Saunders, and more. Dive into our chat below.

Medieval Torture Devices

MARTHA SKYE MURPHY: One of the main visual references that’s in the song “Need,” which I perform with Roy Montgomery, is this line about my hands being bound in string. That’s kind of about being in a bind. It’s also a reference to Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance female painter, because — this bit of the story is dark — when she was raped by her tutor who she was the apprentice for and then actually ended up falling in love with, she kept it a secret for a really long time. When it finally came out, they took her to court to testify whether she was telling the truth. The method they used to decipher whether she was being honest was this finger torture mechanism which binds the fingers and slowly breaks them. And obviously, as a painter, this was both a psychological form of torture and a physical one because it was toying with her instrument. So there was that reference. It’s called a sibille torture device.

But I also liked the idea of cat’s cradle, and being entangled and enmeshed in something. And then in that song, it was only when I was looking over the lyrics again I realized that there’s two references to medieval medical instruments or torture instruments, because there’s another line at the very beginning of “Need,” which is, “Blow a hole through a mountain and drill it through my head.” That line is obviously somewhat of an innuendo. It’s kind of playfully erotic, but also it was also directly about being told that the way motorways or freeways are made if there’s a mountain is that they drill a hole through it and it collapses the insides of the mountain so that you can get a straight path through it. I just thought in the face of a monumental scale of something, the idea of just eroding it from within to get into your straight path was kind of beautiful.

It also referenced this medical treatment that in the medieval times was quite common. It’s called trepanation. It was where a hole would be drilled into someone’s head to relieve them of melancholia. So if someone was displaying signs of depression or generally was a bit wacky or disturbed, they would drill holes in specific parts of the head that they thought targeted the humans to cure you of your depression.

On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden

MURPHY: I think the whole record is loosely musing on the feeling of not knowing and memory and fiction and how fiction has such a big part in our nonfiction lives and narratives and how interwoven those things are. In “Spray Can,” there’s this line, “I wanted to know without knowing.” I recently read this really beautiful, extraordinary book, it’s a collection of essays called On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden. It gave me so much clarity because I think we feel like not knowing isn’t a topic. You have to know what you’re talking about the whole time. This record is kind of me figuring out what I am even thinking about talking about. Those particular essays are so fluid and beautiful and doing this thing that I’m very interested in in my own practice, which is trying to loosely weave fictional narratives with history or with fragments of ephemera to construct this other world this other time, this losing of yourself in this space, which isn’t quite identifiable in concrete terms.

A lot of female musicians deal with audiences assuming that what they’re writing is diaristic and nonfiction. I was wondering if you’ve dealt with that at all.

MURPHY: I think when I first started writing music, I consciously wrote lyrics that were kind of shrouded in disguise. I thought they were shrouded in disguise through references to mythology and abstract thoughts. But then I realized that I was trying to hide from the fact that actually what I was doing was writing very raw, raw, raw material that actually didn’t need to be disguised because I don’t write exclusively about myself actually at all.

I write about what I’m seeing and what I’m observing. Quite a lot of the time, I take on the voice of other people. So I find it really intriguing. It’s interesting — two things happen. I think when the brain listens to other people singing and using the word “I,” what happens is the listener slots into the role of the “I” and they become the protagonist. I think that can happen in the theater as well because you’re cocooned in this space. That was kind of what I did with the “Commence” and the “That’s enough,” like bookending it with the curtain rising and the curtain closing. But on the idea that people look at you, and they’re like, “Wow, you’re really fucked up,” or, “I can’t believe you spat in his mouth,” that kind of stuff, I find just great and amazing. It means I can talk about a host of made up things in the same breath or sentence as something actually deeply personal and harrowing or joyful, whatever it is. You’re in this space where something you’re saying is just as easily pretend as it could be real. So I just like to be playful with it. I just like to play with that.

And I think it’s really fun toying with the sexualization that happens as a female singer-songwriter. It seems to be an interesting way of engaging with that, because it’s 100% a thing. What I try to do is turn it on its head in music videos and in the lyrics — turn a listener who would be sexualizing me around in on themselves so they start looking at their own reflection. I think that’s something you can do and manipulate. I really like doing that — just fucking with people.

Hiraeth

MURPHY: Hiraeth is a Welsh word, but maybe I’ll start by carrying on from that idea of not knowing about time and being warped in that space where you’re writing music or when you’re listening to music or when you’re just in a bizarre scenario where you lose yourself and your recognition of self. The song “Theme Parks” is about how theme parks and casinos exploit the method of time distortion to keep people situated in their environments. They’re stretching time and warping time by not having windows and not having clocks. And I just thought that that is how it feels being in my head. A lot of the time, I’d quite like a window out of my head.

But Hiraeth is this Welsh word which Marta Salogni — who mixed the record — gave to me when she first heard it. I’d spoken about the thoughts and ideas behind it and she said, “It’s really reminding me of this term Hiraeth, which means nostalgia or longing for somewhere that you haven’t been or that you might never go.” It’s a very specific term for the Welsh people and is embedded with the history of Wales and its independence and its mythological feeling and King Arthur — there’s a lot of folklore associated with Wales. So I think to them, it probably is about that. But for me, it felt a summary of this sensation that I both crave and feel trapped in a lot of the time, which is that lustful feeling of desire, but a desire that ultimately is laced with arsenic. It’s laced with something that’s painful or unachievable or unattainable or unknown.

Do you think your music helps you move toward that place you want that doesn’t really exist?

MURPHY: Yeah, definitely. It’s weird. I don’t write music frequently. And I’ve struggled with the idea of that a lot of should I, as a musician, be working 9-5 every single day? Obviously, for some people that works, maybe at some point I will do that, too. But I think part of the reason I don’t do it is because it feels like such a magical, dangerous, and emancipating place to be in when you lose yourself to this otherness, which is simultaneously a sense of knowing what you’ve been processing or seeing or observing or feeling and also feeling completely removed from it and having this external voice come through you and feeling like a conduit. I think I really enjoy feeling like a conduit. I feel more myself in those moments, but also more separate from myself than ever. It’s almost like in that moment it’s my spirit or my soul, and the body, the corpse is just a vessel to channel it. In that sense, I don’t feel like it’s me.

But I also have an issue a little bit with this. I think when you describe music like that, it can almost imply that you’re some kind of godly thing, that you’ve been gifted this deified power, which is not at all how I see it. It’s definitely something else that happens, which I think is about an aura or a spiritual element that we’re not fully understanding yet. I’m sure in a hundred years, there’ll be an explanation for it. To answer to your question, it’s about wanting to be in that place where it feels like you can reach somewhere but you never do. And it’s addictive.

And you don’t really ever want to reach that place. You just want to be in that movement toward it.

MURPHY: Exactly. Actually, Anne Carson talks about that so beautifully. She speaks about how the most exciting part of thought is the movement of it. The destination kind of eradicates the thrill somehow.

I read Autobiography Of Red and red doc>. I’m pretty picky with poetry, but it didn’t even feel like poetry. It felt like its own thing.

MURPHY: Yeah, she’s amazing. There’s something really humorous about her writing. It’s somehow incredibly dense and academic and rich, but also kind of light. She’s not presenting her observations in any kind of threatening way. Obviously she is a monolith of intelligence, but I just find her writing style so unique and so direct. But she is also able to write in a direct fashion about really abstract things and not lose the magic of that abstraction.

Books With Interreferential Forms

MURPHY: In terms of literary references, I had been reading books that had interreferential forms and structures within them. Pale Fire by Nabokov is about a professor whose final manuscript is discovered by his fan and there’s all these annotations and notes by his obsessive stalker in it. Just the way you lose your sense of what’s real and who’s the voice and who’s the narrator I really love.

There was another book that I read around the same time called Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. It’s incredibly written. It’s all told through the voices of different characters. There’s no prose, it’s all speech. It reads a bit like a libretto for an opera. It’s about Lincoln’s son dying and him visiting going to visit the open grave, which is a true story, in the mausoleum. He had a mausoleum built for him. He was so devastated by the death of his son and this boy had been seen as this beacon of light and joy and beauty and was clearly just so important to Lincoln. He went and visited him every single day, until eventually he was like, I can’t keep doing this. It’s sort of about the ghosts in the cemetery who are all trapped because they feel like they’re just not ready to disappear into this other place, which is ambiguous, whether it’s heaven or hell. But they have these ideas of where you get taken when you succumb to this kind of submission.

All of these ghosts are characters who have died, obviously in different eras, and they’re all in conversation together, and they can’t quite figure out if they get on or not. It’s just so brilliant and it’s really funny as well. I wanted the songs on my album to be a bit like characters and to have conversations with one another. So there are these recurring motifs that appear or there are certain things — like at the end of “Call Me Back” there’s a choir, which is actually the reversed choir that ends “Need.” So there are all of these things embedded into the tapestry of the songs, which connects them all but kind of in a spiky way.

Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

MURPHY: Obviously, Fred and Ginger are referenced in the song “Pick Yourself Up.” In their film Swing Time, they do this routine. Fred Astaire’s character is in love with Ginger Rogers, of course, again, and he pretends he can’t dance and he keeps falling over and she keeps picking him up and singing, “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off.” I was not a tap dancer. I’m not into tap. But I did fucking love Fred and Ginger as a child.

The Lives Of Others

MURPHY: Having identified that the record was about the sounds that you make when you’re unsure and the sounds that appear in the form of words and whether you’re using words for their meaning or for their sound, when I was thinking about how to translate that visually the concept of foreign films and how we interact with them felt quite potent.

That image of me with the lie detector is obviously informed by everything we’ve just spoken about, too — fiction, nonfiction, lying, truth — but also I wanted it to look like it was a still from a foreign film, and plant that idea of how we interact with other languages and the narrative of other languages and the narrative of other people and understanding and translation.

There was one film in particular called The Lives Of Others, which is about a couple living in Germany very near to the time the wall comes down. If you’re creative or dissident, obviously you’re constantly policed. One of them is an opera singer, and one of them is a writer. This Stasi officer has their apartment bugged and is in control of hearing whether they’re doing something illegal. He falls in love with them, just through listening. So it was kind of a reference to that as well.

I feel like the idea of someone listening to you at all times is existential enough on its own, how much that changes things you said in the past.

MURPHY: Yeah, it’s weird to think people are going to be listening to me, like again and again. That really blows my mind — that sense of how you can trap a moment. But have you trapped that moment? Or is it kind of reborn every time it’s played in a different place? It’s mad to me to think that you’ve listened to the record over on Long Island. I can’t quite get over the idea that anyone else is actually listening to this music apart from me. I don’t think I believe that.

I actually wanted to ask you — I listened to the album a couple times on a walk and I felt like that was a really good place for it, but do you have any ideas of where you think the most ideal place to listen to it is?

MURPHY: Definitely walking. I’m so glad you said that. I listened to this record so much when I was walking. In fact, maybe only when I was walking in all of the process of kind of editing, amending, developing. It’s interesting — we were talking about the process of wanting to be in that space of moving towards the thought rather than the thought itself, because I think that’s how it feels when you’re on a walk. The thinking mind is still in gestation somehow.

Also, the cliché of listening to music in a car is great. I personally only have a good sound system in my car. So that’s how I’ve listened. But mostly just in headphones walking around. I like the idea of people listening to it in an intimate place where it’s just me and them, or just the music and them. Then it becomes a conversation, but also just becomes more intimate. I wrote a lot of these songs in my living room at the piano on my own. If I can replicate that feeling of comfort and solace, then that’s kind of the dream. I would love for people to put it on at a dinner party, but I doubt that will happen.

That would be an intense dinner party.

MURPHY: Yeah, exactly. That’s the problem. I don’t make easy-eating songs [laughs].

Um is out now on AD 93.