Listening to Martha Skye Murphy’s music isn’t a mindless activity where the sounds droning out of our earbuds get our half-attention or where the notes are confined to a state of perpetual existence as ‘background noise.’ Rather, her music is a full-body experience.
Perhaps what’s most masterful about Murphy’s latest release “Self Tape,” is that places listeners in an utterly entrancing soundscape with just her ethereal vocals, a simple piano, and an expansive ambient noise.
This track, which is the second release off of Murphy’s upcoming EP Yours Truly, promises a unique listening experience. It opens with solitary piano notes, which continue as a somber and almost haunting ostinato throughout the six and half minute track—a guide for listeners during their transcendent walk through the thick emotion Murphy lays on throughout. As Murphy’s breathy high-register vocals enter, she grips listeners with a feeling of resistance akin to the feeling of walking in a pool or suppressing angry tears. And as she lyricizes about the terrifying world of online social media, we can’t help but hang on her every word.
As indicated by Murphy’s raw vibrato, existing in this online space wreaks immense havoc on her—but the audience only sees what she wants them to.
Just me and my daddy
Hold the camera steady
Watch while I become
Someone else
In a statement to Brooklyn Vegan, Murphy said, “our online identities are often misinterpreted as being a window into an HD version of ourselves…we are lusting for holograms of ourselves as though constructing a genetically engineered child. It’s scary that we seem to be levitating in this digital self, where fiction is perceived as reality and judgment is expressed as ‘yea or nay.’”
Stabs of static noise are peppered throughout the track, rupturing the beautiful ambient sound as if to remind listeners that this online alter-ego of which she sings is an eerie mirage. But although the self that she presents online is fake, the pressures of the audience’s gaze are all too real.
Never had any fortune, any luck
But if I smile
Through the hole
Strip and grab the pole
Then maybe I’ll
Come off of thе self tape
As the song progresses, Murphy’s vocals grow more desperate, like an internal scream that’s brimming with anger and frustration, but can’t quite wrestle to the surface to break free. She is trapped in this voyeuristic hellscape that’s the online social world, and she has no choice but to contort herself to satisfy the gaze of her onlookers.
I’ll be hypersonic for you
I’ll be iconic for you
I’ll be ironic for you
At this point in the track, the delicate ambiance transforms into a low rumble, as if the “hologram of ourselves” is rupturing in real-time and Murphy is finally able to break free from this world. The final minute of the song seems to signify this release as the background noise crescendos and takes command of the whole track. Here, “Self Tape” sounds much like Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)”—it’s a sound so enormous it’s almost inconceivable. Like Eno, “Self Tape” is this ubiquitous, omnipotent being—emanating from seemingly everywhere and having complete power over the listener. When listening to “Self Tape,” we are forced to bear witness to its haunting beauty—and we should feel lucky to.
