Roy Montgomery & Martha Skye Murphy - Nebular (LP)

Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy first connected when Murphy included one of Montgomery’s songs on a mixtape. Conversations about their respective practices soon followed, revealing a shared musical language. They also discovered they used the same recording device, a Tascam recorder, which prioritises process over correction. Their approach embraces layering, multitracking, and imperfection. Since then, they have developed an ongoing creative relationship, regularly sharing music and crossing paths in various projects. Montgomery later featured on Murphy’s 2024 album Um, released via AD 93 to critical acclaim, while Murphy joined Montgomery during his summer 2023 residency at Cafe OTO. What draws them together is the emotional force of each other’s music. Montgomery’s cyclical, decaying compositions are shaped through intricate guitar and piano work, blending post-rock, folk, and drone. Murphy, meanwhile, possesses a rare gift for transformation; though her vocals often resemble fragments of words, consonants, or vowels, they frequently function as pure sound, drawing on glossolalia and prioritising feeling over any ‘learnt’ language. Emotion and intuition are the driving forces behind Nebular, an album that oscillates between the intimate with the unknown. This spirit is reflected in its artwork. Murphy shared a painting by Irish artist Simon English depicting a solitary house bathed in dusky blue light, and the pair quickly settled on it as the cover image. Both were captivated by its atmosphere. Montgomery related it to the isolated, seemingly uninhabited houses he encounters while travelling through rural New Zealand—places that inspire a desire to knock on the door and discover what lies beyond. “Terra incognita springs to mind. A search into the unknown,” Murphy agrees. The nocturnal and remote nature of the artwork mirrors the process of making Nebular. The album was created entirely through remote correspondence, with stems exchanged via email. Their messages were often written and read at different times of day, and, because of the time difference and the demands of daily life, replies usually were sent late at night and the music too often composed at nocturnal hours. Their exchanges took on the quality of pen pals sending letters across great distances. This suspended sense of time is echoed in Nebular’s sound, with its feeling of temporal drift and timelessness. On Nebular, Montgomery and Murphy have harnessed raw emotion and launched it into a time capsule bound for the stars. It allows you to drift, to be present, and to feel; creating something timeless. Martha Skye Murphy comments: “Roy and I have a shared vernacular in the music we make together; a kind of sonic sign language, which allows us to communicate without ever really explaining the material to one another. This is partly due to our shared process, which embraces layers, multitracking and imperfection (for me). I see our collaboration as a continuously unravelling piece of string; one song leads onto the next like a slowly evolving constellation and I’d like to hope we continue in this vein.”