Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $12.00
First edition of 300 released: December 2007
Second edition of 175 released: March 2009
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 the 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 Jonathan Coleclough), 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.
As Murmer, Patrick McGinley has produced a handful of
releases on ICR, Ground Fault, Drone Records, and Absurd;
and he has performed in venues both large and small
across North America and Europe. He is also the host
the Framework radio show on Resonance FM, dedicated
to the consecration of field recordings and their use
in composition.
We Share A Shadow features hand water-coloured artwork and letterpress
printing.
