Millions Now Living Will Never Die was the second album by the Chicago-based band, Tortoise. Released in 1996 by Thrill Jockey Records, Millions...' is widely renowned as a groundbreaking album for post-rock: an uncredited review from Outersound.com declares that not long after the album's release, the group was "hailed as godfathers of the American 'post-rock' movement".
The album's title comes from a phrase used in the Jehovah's Witness faith in the early 1900s;

1998年，Tortoise发行了第三张专辑《TNT》。这时的“乌龟”已越发老道了。在没有“乌龟”的两年日子里，John McEntire正忙着给各路前卫同志们制作唱片，也成了大腕。不过，闲暇之时他对爵士乐兴趣日增。所以，在《TNT》专辑里爵士的成分有所增加。这次，Tortoise的旋律不再那么幽暗与自闭了，它充满了光明，好听又上耳。别误会，Tortoise可没有庸俗化，那种高度知识分子化的旋律是与成年人美好的回忆相联系的，沉浸在《TNT》中，能感受到优雅老龟在与孩童嬉戏。这是Tortoise在艺术上一次漂亮的转型。

Simply put, Tortoise has spent nearly 25 years making music that defies description. While the Chicago-based instrumental quintet has nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica and minimalism throughout its revered and influential six-album discography, the resulting sounds have always been distinctly, even stubbornly, their own.
It’s a fact that remains true on “The Catastrophist,” Tortoise’s first studio album in nearly seven years. And it’s an album where moody, synth-swept jams like the opening title track cozy up next to hypnotic, bass-and-beat missives like “Shake Hands With Danger” and a downright strange cover of David Essex’s 1973 radio smash sung by U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittmann. Throughout, the songs transcend expectations as often as they delight the eardrums.
Tortoise, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, has always thrived on sudden bursts of inspiration. And for “The Catastrophist,” the spark came in 2010 when the group was commissioned by the City of Chicago to compose a suite of music rooted in its ties to the area’s noted jazz and improvised music communities.
Tortoise then performed those five loose themes at a handful of concerts, and “when we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” says McEntire, at whose Soma Studios the band recorded the new album. “It turned out that for them to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They’re all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they’re orchestrated and complex.”
“All of the songs went through a pretty intensive process of restructuring,” adds Parker. “We actually had quite a lot of material that we ended up giving up on. Oftentimes, we’ll shelve ideas and come back to them years later.”
The album’s single “Gesceap” embodies the transformation of the original suite commissions, as it morphs from two gently intersecting synth lines into a pounding, frenzied full-band finish. “To a certain extent it’s more of a reflection of how we actually sound when we play live,” says McEntire of Tortoise’s heavier side. “That hasn’t always been captured as well on past albums.”
Elsewhere, “Hot Coffee” resurrects an idea abandoned from the band’s 2004 album “It’s All Around You,” gliding through only-on-a- Tortoise-album sections of funktastic bass lines, straight-up dance beats and Parker’s fusion-flecked guitar bursts. “It’s progressive experimental music with pop sensibilities,” says Parker.
“Rock On,” which McEntire says he and McCombs simultaneously had the idea to cover after having remembered hearing it on the radio all the time as kids, isn’t the only vocal moment on “The Catastrophist.” Also included is the bittersweet, honest-to-goodness soul ballad “Yonder Blue,” sung by Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley. “We’d finished the track and decided it would be good to have vocals on it,” recalls McEntire. “Robert Wyatt was our first choice, but he had just retired and politely said no. We were discussing asking Georgia to do something, but not that track in particular. Then we realized it would totally work.”
Tortoise is planning an extensive world tour in support of “The Catastrophist.” Admits McEntire, “figuring out how to reproduce these songs live will be a bit of a challenge. But I also feel like it might be time to dip into the back catalog a bit. The pool we draw from has been really consistent for quite awhile.
As ever, Tortoise has conjured sounds on “The Catastrophist” that aren’t being purveyed anywhere else in music today. There’s a deeply intuitive interplay between the group members that comes only from two decades of experimentation, revision and improvisation. And at a time when our brains are constantly bombarded by myriad distractions, “The Catastrophist” reminds us that there’s something much greater out there. All we have to do is listen.

Thrill Jockey Records is pleased to announce Plastic Anniversary, the new album by Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos. Pushing off from the restricted palette of their last album, the critically acclaimed Ultimate Care II, which was composed entirely from the sound of a washing machine, Plastic Anniversary is also derived from a single sound source: plastic.
At once hyper-familiar in its omnipresence and deeply inhuman in its measured-in-centuries longevity and endurance, plastic supplies, surrounds and scares. Seemingly negligible, plastic is always ready to hand but also always somewhat suspect, casting toxic shadows onto the everyday. True to form, the band have assembled a promiscuous array of examples of this sturdy-yet-ersatz family of materials: Bakelite dominos, Styrofoam coolers, polyethylene waste containers, PVC panpipes, pinpricks of bubble wrap, silicone gel breast implants and synthetic human fat.
Though it has the tight editing chops, pop forms and bizarre sound palette of their early albums such as Quasi-Objects and A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure, Plastic Anniversary has a distinctive sound because of the foregrounding of plastic horns and plastic drums played by human beings. The bounce and snap of the duo’s programmed rhythms are here supplemented by a sweatier and more unruly human element provided by a surprising cast of guest musicians. Members of the horn and drumline sections of the Whitefish Highschool Bulldogs from Whitefish, Montana were recruited by Matmos and persuaded to take part in recording sessions at Snowghost Studios where they played objects sourced from a nearby recycling center, including massive plastic garbage bins. This was later combined with additional plastic percussion performances by Greg Saunier, a drummer known for his hyper-expressive, mercurial playing as a founding member of the band Deerhoof.
Taking the concept of “broken beat” literally, “Breaking Bread” is a bouncy digital dancehall number built entirely out of the plucked and twanged fragments of broken vinyl records by the Seventies soft rock group Bread. A mini-suite for plastic container, exercise ball and an amplified DNA kit that recalls both 80s pop and the hectic minimalism of Michael Nyman, “The Crying Pill” stacks frantic patterns of saxophone-like sobs onto deep sub bass stabs that are almost trap. Amplifying squishy synthetic human tissue created by the SynDaver corporation as a substitute for human corpses in medical schools, “Interior with Billiard Balls & Synthetic Fat” pairs squelchy electro made out of gross-out substances with tangy melodic riffs. This odd combination of Cronenbergian body-horror and sunny grooves continues on “Silicone Gel Implant”, a skanking number that works rubbery basslines out of, yes, a breast implant, but by the time the plastic flutes snake into the mix, the source becomes secondary to the trance-like form. Side one closes in a more reflective and somber key, with the title track “Plastic Anniversary”, whose cod-medieval martial drums and horn fanfares recall Matmos’ penchant for anachronism circa “The Civil War” before giving way to a close-mic-ed cascade of plastic poker chips.
If side one is playful and poppy, side two is sharper and darker in its implications, and features more live drumming than any other Matmos album. Things kick off with “Thermoplastic Riot Shield” a single-object study built entirely out of the sound of a police riot shield being stroked, rubbed and struck. The resulting sounds are processed into a tense assemblage of harsh noise, deep dub basslines and jarring cuts of silence. On a squeaky loop straight out of a Jacques Tati film, “The Singing Tube” draws out the pinging resonance of a ten foot long PVC pipe played entirely with plastic toilet brushes, and hits a flanged overtone effect not unlike the string compositions of Arnold Dreyblatt. Bristling with whistles and noisemakers and plastic-gloved handclaps, “Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom” bolts a percussive showcase for the high school marching band playing the signature patterns of drumline and Baltimore club onto jarring edits of LEGO bricks clicking into place and weird smears of processed plastic horns. Since plastic was described by its first developers as a “fourth kingdom” beyond animal, vegetable, and mineral, this track heralds the eventual collapse of the political economy that birthed the oceans of garbage that now choke our world. Thinking the dystopian consequences of plastic through to their post-human conclusion, the final track, “Plastisphere” sounds like a field recording of insects and birds and pattering rain and ocean waves, but is in fact a work of digital sleight of hand: every single sound on this track has been artificially constructed out of samples of bubble wrap, Velcro, plastic bags and straws and, tellingly, an emergency stretcher. After a volatile and vibrant suite of poppy plastic electronics, Plastic Anniversary ends in an acknowledgement of the planetary price yet to be paid.
Production Details:
Plastic Anniversary was pre-mastered by extreme digital sound artist Jeff Carey.
Mastered for vinyl by the renowned mastering engineer Rashad Becker.
Cover art, which collages high resolution, up-close photographs of the objects used to create the music, is by Ted Mineo, the creator of the cover art for Ultimate Care II.
Back cover image by photographer and activist Chris Jordan depicts the plastic contents from the stomach of a Laysan albatross photographed in an atoll near the Pacific Ocean Plastic Gyre.
Touring:
Matmos will be touring World Wide throughout 2019.
Anniversary:
Drew and Martin celebrated their 25th while making the album.
credits
releases March 15, 2019

Mouse on Mars’ Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner return with their most inventive album to date, Dimensional People. The new album finds the Berlin-based duo reunited with Thrill Jockey, a powerful aesthetic partnership marked by such seminal albums as Radical Connector (2004), Idiology (2001), and Niun Niggung (2000). After a series of notorious dance floor releases, Dimensional People reveals them working deep within their own vernacular, digging into fertile terrain of their inexhaustible vault of digital and acoustic experimentation, and charismatically making elemental components new again. This album makes clear how their craft is of discovery, of finding new contexts for places, sounds, memories, sensations, ambiences, technologies, relationships, and of course, people.
A number of prolific guests joined the production: Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Zach Condon (Beirut), Spank Rock, Aaron and Bryce Dessner (The National), Swamp Dogg, Eric D. Clarke, Lisa Hannigan, Amanda Blank, Sam Amidon, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and about 20 more musical collaborators. The cast of characters are as unique as they are vast, clearly a rich quarry for the prodigious duo.
Dimensional People, initially titled new konstruktivist socialism, gives each participating guest a platform to imprint the album as whoever or whatever they want to be: a narrator, a perfect moment, a jam, an ensemble member, an abstract sound, a multiple persona, a mood, a soloist. Originally premiering as a spatial composition using object-based mixing technology playing with the possibilities of sonic design and collective musicianship, the recording expands upon these ideas. Dimensional People expresses itself as a dynamic 50-piece orchestra, telling a story in sound. Each player is a multifaceted character, the recording an imagined stage, and the production is direction, lighting, and setting changes. Mouse on Mars offer sound as a means to encourage open-minded societies, aided by cutting-edge technology including their own MoMinstruments music software or a spatial mixing technique called object based mixing, with which a spatial version of the work was created. It is a conceptual puzzle composed around one harmonic spectrum within one rhythmic scheme, mostly in the tempo of 145bpm (inspired by Chicago footwork, so the dance floor is not entirely absent). Looking ahead, Dimensional People will also be realized through installation, presenting the work as an immersive listening experience, as well as performance.
releases April 13, 2018

Boomkat Product Review:
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, who also forms one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos.
"Shall We Go On Sinning… began as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make ‘angry white guy’ music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.”
Those musical connections make this record what it is; vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left unchanged as with opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, other times shrouded in effects, morphing into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism."

Colleen is French multi-instrumentalist Cecile Schott, who uses her voice and the treble viola da gamba (a baroque instrument with gut strings), to weave intricate stories about the human mind and heart. Captain of None is the most melodic album in her repertoire, with fast-paced tracks rooted down by prominent bass lines and assorted percussive effects. It is also an album that breaks new ground for Colleen in terms of production. While previous works centered around sample-based or looped, minimal compositions, on Captain of None Schott significantly changed her approach, setting her viola and her voice as focal points. Captain of None is inhabited by delicately crafted, other-worldly pop songs incorporating dub-inspired techniques.
Captain of None was recorded, mixed, and produced entirely by Schott in her music studio in San Sebastian, Spain. Schott tried to open the gates in the way she played, sang, and wrote lyrics for the album, and set out to explore how effects like delay and echo could go from the “cosmetic sound varnish” role they usually play to a fully dynamic, constructive, song-shaping role.
Although the influence of Jamaican music is subtle, its implicit impact is felt throughout Captain of None. As a child, Schott became enamored with a cassette tape of Lee Perry tracks from 1976 to 1979. She continued to explore the music of Jamaica, awed by the amount and the variety of incredible music that was recorded with such breathtaking inventiveness. This infatuation can be heard on tracks like “Eclipse,” where Schott utilizes some of the more common dub production techniques, such as using an echo effect on the percussion and vocals. Her love of Augustus Pablo can be felt on “Salina Stars,” in which Schott uses the melodica, an instrument that she played for years but never used on her albums. She incorporates a Moogerfooger delay pedal to create vocal feedback and analog glitches, and used homemade devices — chopsticks, an Indonesian metal printing block — as percussion.
As for her unique main instrument of choice, Schott first noticed the viola da gamba in the film Tous les matins du monde when she was 15 years old. The instrument, which has been said to be the musical instrument that most resembles the sound of the human voice, heavily resonated with her. However, rather than bowing the instrument in a traditional manner, and heavily influenced by African music from different countries, genres, and eras, Schott tunes the viola da gamba like a guitar and plucks it, opening up a new world of sound that she explores in great depth on Captain of None, an addictive, unconventional pop album.

Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars is Sarah Louise’s most fearless work to date. Louise broadens beyond folk forms on her latest, turning streams of raw electric guitar into entire oceans of aural texture. Her rich playing is warped beyond recognition through inventive synthesizing and digital manipulations. The innovative songs share warmth and compositional tendencies with Deeper Woods; however, remarkably, Sarah Louise’s stunning sophomore Thrill Jockey album breaks through the boundaries of solo guitar, bearing little resemblance to its predecessors.
The pieces on Nighttime Birds mine components of the Appalachian folk music Louise is steeped in, as well as spiritual jazz, contemporary classical, and new age, while drawing intensely personal inspiration from the natural world. “Ancient Intelligence” ruminates on the power of and connection to Mother Earth through wordless, almost alien skitters. For Louise, the natural and the psychedelic are indelibly linked through their ability to provide healing. Drawing inspiration from a profound healing experience she had, Sarah assembled the pieces in dedication to that healing. Compositions exude spiritual relief and exploration, as they are both explorative musically and soothing in their gentle, delicate details. Moments of surreal intensity bubble forth on tracks like “Chitin Flight” which stoke curiosity and provide flares of tension and relief. Pieces like this offer Louise’s unique take on what a guitar solo can be while also whimsically playing with guitar tropes of the psychedelic era.
Technically she approached performance on the album in a patulous manner, improvising on electric guitar in standard tuning, rather than her signature 12-string acoustic guitar and song-specific tunings. This radically different approach for Sarah was in and of itself liberating as well as inspiring. Louise carried this intuitional mindset with her into recording new pieces. Like Deeper Woods, she engineered the album herself, but with a new focus on innovative use of her recording program. With her improvisations as the raw material, she carefully crafted deliberate compositions that are her most painterly and cosmic work to date. Sampling herself, Louise’s approach to composing with guitar magnifies single notes, short patterns and overtones to reveal microtonality and otherworldly timbres. Frayed rhythms flow freely atop and between lush waves of devotional drones. Variations in speed and tone transform the guitar across the album from brassy bellows to the sounds of rustling insects.
Louise’s daring blend of heartfelt stream of conscious playing and bold studio processing demonstrates her unique ability to craft poignant music regardless of what tools she uses. She finds harmony rather than dissonance in synthesizing raw and organic materials with the technological. Sections of electronic bursts swell and ebb with a lifelike pulse, collapsing distinction between the natural and artificial. Each piece inhabits its own biosphere and Louise’s guitar and voice act as the flora and fauna. With Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars, Sarah Louise has reimagined the limitations of guitar music to create a work of sublime resplendence.

ENDON is a band as mercurial as they are ferocious. Comprised of the quintet of vocalist Taichi Nagura, guitarist Koki Miyabe, drummer Shin Yokota, and electronics/noisemakers Taro Aiko and Etsuo Nagura, ENDON’s music is contained chaos, bending and colliding genres into one another atop a bed of thunderous distortion, feedback, and unearthly squeals. Vocalist Taichi’s voice embodies an unreal number of personalities with wordless howls seething one moment, and agonized cries the next, before desperate gasps for air. It comes as no surprise that they have been credited as the most extreme band in Tokyo. Boy Meets Girl finds ENDON relishing in the unexpected and shifting with relentless force from pounding sludge to off-kilter hardcore to synth-driven dance to utter oblivion.
Boy Meets Girl was envisioned as a soundtrack to an imagined horror film about love. Disparate influences such as horrorcore, Dick Dale, Joe Meek and the Dead Kennedys converge and erupt forth over the course of single songs. The warped story of the album unfolds in scattered motifs and references, with the titular “boy” being born from a womb of noise and dealing with the conflicts that arise when recognizing the world, and love, outside his own ego. The record takes an abstract approach to the subject of love and looks beyond the well tread romantic aspects in favor of an altogether more disorienting take.
ENDON set out to make fictional film score with “light music,” played by a much heavier band. The core of the ensemble’s song structures are often built around Koki’s fuzz-laden guitar and Shin’s drum bombast which propel torrents of hisses and squelches from Taro and Etsuo. Taichi’s largely lyric-less screams, moans, and whimpers are potent messengers of the songs’ emotional heft. Recorded by Atsuo of Boris, Boy Meets Girl is not entirely harsh and heavy. Sequencer delicacies are laced into pieces like the mammoth “Doubts As a Source.” The respite of “Red Shoes” lay bare ENDON’s ability to construct detailed arrangements, a trait shared with the album’s more eviscerating songs.
There lies an ecstatic, excited energy amidst the anarchic defiance ENDON’s music exudes. Born of the same Japanese scenes that gave rise to the likes of Merzbow and Boredoms, their sound is equally diverse and abrasive. Boy Meets Girl demonstrates ENDON’s singular faculty to produce music that is at once tortured and transcendent.

With each release, the duo of Lee Buford and Chip King continue to defy the constraints of what it means to be a “heavy” band, seamlessly combining composition or production approaches from hip hop, pop, classical, as well as rock and electronica resulting in a rich and utterly singular sound. Equally at home on festival stages, art spaces, or in DIY basements, they transcend musical boundaries. Their ambitious creativity shapes their bleak worldview into propulsive, affecting, and even danceable music often drenched in distortion. On I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer The Body challenged themselves again by turning their compositional approach on its head, choosing to build the record on their own samples rather than recording the basic tracks of drums and guitars and processing those. The results carry the listener towards the brink of emotional and musical extremes. I Have Fought Against It… conjures the sublime from an unexpected and incomparable variety of sounds.
The Body are known for their intense, abrasive live shows, whose waves of dissonance create an abiding dread or an overwhelming sense of terror. They create a volume of sound almost unfathomable from a duo and are unaffected by instrument choice: guitar and drums, or keyboard and synthesizers. Inventive producers, the duo expand their recorded sound palate with regular contributions from the likes of Chrissy Wolpert (Assembly of Light Choir), and Ben Eberle (Sandworm), arranged with help of longtime engineers Seth Manchester and Keith Souza (Machines With Magnets). Wolpert’s ethereal calls and Eberle’s vicious growl are augmented by Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter, whose impassioned voice features on the viscerally emotional “Nothing Stirs.” On “Sickly Heart Of Sand,” vocal tradeoffs between King and Hayter’s are punctuated with the howls of Uniform’s Michael Berdan. With The Body’s keen sense of balance, the ferociousness of these extreme performances are underpinned by the elegance of string swells and pensive, even melodies from a lone piano.
For The Body, any source of inspiration is fair game to achieve their distinct atmosphere of unbearable dread, pain, and sadness. “Partly Alive” places rolling drum figures, commonly found in pop, and transforms them with a backdrop of horns, skittering synthetic hi hats, and pitched feedback. The oppressive groove of “An Urn” pulls beat arrangement and melodic ideas from disparate electronic influences. Their eclectic sampling choices are both musical and literary from singjay star Eek-A-Mouse to a reading of Bohumil Hrabal to the Clarice Lispector quote on the album’s artwork and beyond. The album title, an excerpt of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter, is an apt moniker for the pervasive themes of loss, desperation and loneliness throughout. Carefully selected samples and literary references bolster the album’s emotional heft. I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer proves how truly adventurous and diverse a creative force The Body has become. The Body continue to push the boundaries and definition of what is heavy music, their ingenuity unparalleled.

In just over a year since their initial inception, Eye Flys have established themselves as a force beyond reckoning. Their debut full-length Tub of Lard is stunningly potency full of piss and vinegar, scientific in its ability to pulverize everything in its path. Due in part to the considerable pedigree of the band’s lineup (including members of Full of Hell, Backslider, Triac), the east coast-based quartet chew through steel-barbed riffs and off-kilter rhythms with exponential force. Their 2019 debut EP Context set an early precedent for just how lean and ruthless they can be. On Tub of Lard, Eye Flys launch that potential into 10 songs of maximum impact that find both raw power and subtlety in their simplicity.
credits
releases March 20, 2020

At just 22 years old, Sequoyah Murray is crafting the kind of concise, singular musical statements that many artists strive for their whole careers. His mutant brand of modern soul is as deeply eclectic as it is instantly arresting, a quality that drew early comparisons to Arthur Russell. Like Russell, Murray has a boundless, playful approach to composition; an incredible breadth of vision balanced by concise editing. Futuristic electronics, West and North African influenced polyrhythms, gospel vocals and psychedelic Tropicália textures blend seamlessly, anchored by his astounding three-octave baritone. Before You Begin, Murray’s debut album, demonstrates the immense scope of his artistry. Composed, played and produced almost entirely by Murray himself, the album takes the listener on a deeply personal journey through youth.
Before You Begin traces Murray’s “historical fiction of his own life”, as he puts it. It is as sensuous and blissful as it is blue, mining memory to craft vivid, dreamlike pieces that feel instantly relatable yet otherworldly. The album is influenced by Murray’s experience growing up in one of the world’s music capitals. Atlanta’s hip-hop and trap heritage finds its place in his inventive lyricism, future-seeking sonics and DIY approach to music-making. Although Murray points to rap as one influence, he cites Atlanta’s lesser-known jazz and free-improv scene as facilitating his development as an artist. Growing up in a musical family, his parents being active musicians, Murray often joined them in improvisation sessions. His frequent exposure and involvement with such a creative environment helped nurture and develop Murray into an adept improviser.
Murray’s approach to writing Before You Begin mirrors his experience in free-improv circles, fearlessly exploring a myriad of ideas and sounds without focusing on form and then meticulously arranging each track that would eventually make up the album. A great example is “I Wonder” a song that evolved from sessions with his sister experimenting with medieval chanting, which Murray later re-sampled and manipulated into the instrumental bed for the track before adding upright bass. “Sublime”, with its propulsive synth and distorted new-wave drum loop, was written on an iPad with a friend while working in their day job at the Rialto Theatre. Such a joyful, open approach to composition gives Before You Begin it’s immediate appeal a considerable depth.
Before You Begin distills an enormous wealth of ideas, emotion and detail into a stunning debut. Murray’s joyful energy is infectious on his bravely intimate self-portrait, painted with an inventive and unexpected collection of sounds.