Murmer - Songs For Forgetting LP

Label: Gruenrekorder

Our Review:

The American ex-pat Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) has now taken up residence in a rural village in Estonia after many years of wanderings and explorations. To this day, he continues to roam any and all environments, collecting field recordings and his own interventions with a particular place. It has been almost five years since his last solo work, but McGinley remains a steadfast champion the field recording within composition through his weekly Framework radio series, broadcast on Resonance FM and beyond through numerous radio and online outlets. Songs For Forgetting highlights McGinley's talents in molding and shaping tone and subtle melody from deep within the fundamental sounds of a particular environmental sound. At the same time, he'll interject actual instrumentation. The playful clatter of McGinley tinkering with a zither ringing in the vein of Harry Partch set in motion against a humid chorus of cicadas and spellbinding dronescaping. Witness the psalter-like halo blossoms on the second half of the record, where we find McGinley bowing a Soviet era antenna mounted at the top of an near-space observational telescope. The resulting harmonics and pastorally minimalist drones are drop-dead gorgeous, as richly sonorous as anything Pauline Oliveros and Charlemagne Palestine would compose through more conventional means. Songs For Forgetting manifests into a beautiful record, packaged in an suitably rough-hewn, embossed sleeve that was fabricated at the Rapina Paper Factory in southeast Estonia. McGinley has included considerable notes and ephemera, turning this into an wondrous objet d'art.