Murmer

Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, 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 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’ continues where Murmer left off with the exceptional ‘Husk’ album (in collaboration with JonathanColeclough), in spiraling 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 grey 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. We Share A Shadow was released in a first edition of 300, and a second edition of 150, featuring hand water-coloured artwork and letterpress printing.