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Murmer - What Are the Roots That Clutch [The Helen Scarsdale Agency - 2012]

Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) is an American-born sound, performance, and radio artist currently based in Europe. Since 1996, he has travelled the European countryside armed with recording equipment to collect found sounds that are then amalgamated and manipulated into musical pieces.

Murmer’s work is all about removing ambient sounds from their natural environments and placing them within soundscapes where they become new and unrecognisable and where the sounds around us which we normally ignore become the focus of our attention. 

On the hour-long  ’What Are The Roots That Clutch’, his first full album in five years and follow-up to  ’ We Share A Shadow’, Mc Ginley uses field recordings, gathered between 2006 to construct original  ambient pieces that do not betray their sources.

The album consists of five untitled parts, with parts one, three, and five composed from found sounds, found objects, and live room feedback, and the other two consisting of unmanipulated found sounds gathered in Mooste and Dieppe.

The title - a line from T.S. Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland’- was apparently found through an exercise in coincidence. McGinley made a list of the sound sources used and performed an internet search. On the first page of results was a link to a quasi-religious blog with the title as its tagline that inexplicably had the entire list of sources distributed within one of its posts. 

The eighteen-minute opening ‘Part 1’ begins with the sounds of what appears to be high winds and water on a lonely beach. The white noise intensifies into rushing brutal waves which roar and subside to be followed by signs of life, in this case a froglike chorus of calls and a cricket like twittering. Deep drones like wind through pipes follow as birdsong appears and we become immersed in a new organic world alive with strange creatures. Fire begins to crackle and the piece slowly draws to a peaceful close.

In ‘Part 2’, we hear the sounds of deep metallic wind chimes and the roar of the wind on a desolate landscape before ‘Part 3’ begins with the sound of water and distant dog barks, followed by a strange crackling over which we hear occasional signs of life as doors open and close. The whole thing here has an atmosphere of dread, of something approaching. It would be a great soundtrack to a cabin in the woods movie like ‘Evil Dead’, the calm before the storm.  A hissing like escaping steam becomes prevalent as we move on and the noise intensifies to a terrifying level as we enter the industrial world of ‘Eraserhead’. Eventually our nightmare journey ends with deep heartbeat like pulses.

‘Part 4’ is six minutes of unprocessed metallic scraping and creaking very reminiscent of Nurse With Wound and then the disc concludes with bubbling mud and wooden tapping which is soon joined by percussive clanking and wheezy tones like a mechanical organ playing in a haunted fairground.  Finally it all sinks back into the primordial sludge and our journey is over!

This is a great CD and really shows what can be done with found sounds. The whole thing works to great effect and is best played in the dark on headphones so that your imagination is free to wander within the imaginary worlds. For those who wish to hear more there is a good selection of free high-quality downloads available from the website - here.

Rating: 5 out of 5Rating: 5 out of 5Rating: 5 out of 5Rating: 5 out of 5Rating: 5 out of 5

Dave Biddulph
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