Murmer

Murmer

Tether

Helen Scarsdale

***Murmer is the long-standing project of American/Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and with Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as being fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that which is alien, sublime, and profound. Here lies the tremendous prowess of the contact microphone, as wielded by an accomplished musician! The source material cited by McGinley includes cables, fences, wires, and vents. There is a heft to many of these sounds as heard throughout all of "Taevast" with deep throbbing pulsations from arctic wind generating subharmonic patterns upon thick high-tension wires. Elsewhere the subtle dissonance from a rasping cooling fan blooms into a brooding ambience that is sublimely rich in its metallic timbres and complex reverberations. McGinley has long been an exemplary artist in the field of phonography even as he is less prolific than others. On Tether, he has produced a majestic if occasionally foreboding work on par with the mythic wire recordings of Alan Lamb, Jacob Kirkegaard's haunted resonance from Chernobyl, and much of the Touch catalogue for that matter!

Murmer

What Are The Roots That Clutch

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***PATRICK MCGINLEY’s first full album in nearly five years marks an elegant continuation of We Share A Shadow. Field recordings and abstractions overlap and crosshatch into acousmatic passages with ghostly, half-melodic qualities. Two unprocessed recordings are impossibly complex in their accretions of sound. McGinley’s composed pieces embrace lithe, mysterious drones whose mossy, damp atmosphere perfectly situate with tactile crunches and events, and signal noise generation. Eels and leaches would not be out of place in such an environment; but the subaquatic murk snaps into a hallowed manifestation of ritualized minimalism at the album’s finale—one that LaMonte Young and Angus Maclise might have conjured in 1968 with clattering percussive elements and a hypnotic blur of harmonic drone. Letterpress artwork. Edition of 400.

Murmer

We Share A Shadow

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***MURMER is the pseudonym for PATRICK, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is the not the terminus of McGinley's work. He is far more interested in extracting a particular emotional, transcendent, or metaphysical kernel from those sounds, and then recontextualizing that germinated sound into sympathetic compositions of magnificent dronemusik. We Share A Shadow spirals his manipulated field recordings as a slow revelation of the environmental sonorities that undeservedly go unnoticed each and every day. Singing frequencies of a bowed piece of metal undulate against a gray tapestry of rain and rasping insects. Golden overtones from shimmering drones quell what agitated textures reside in McGinley's active field recordings, rendering the aggregate sound a nocturnal opiate with considerable potency. Strictly limited to 300 copies, featuring hand water-colored artwork and letterpress printing.