Mediums by Anonymous Murphy

What can you say about Anonymous Murphy that hasn't been said before, by Anonymous Murphy?

This project looks the way it sounds. Chaotic, colourful, densely textural, and inherently mixed-media. A combination of physical and digital, found and original elements.

The new beat selection from Anonymous Murphy represents a sort of glimpse in the sonic sketchbook of an artist operating at the crossroads of ambition and experience. It is a time capsule of a brief creative hot streak in the midst of a crisis, as these songs are all from March and April of 2020, effectively made to celebrate the release of Epoch Ellipsis, the elusive beatmaker's previous effort before an unofficial hiatus. It is also a conversation between two very different producers: the songs were exhumed, fine-tuned and expanded upon a full year later over the course of about a week.

These songs weren't necessarily even made with the intention of being published, and in a way it shows. These are the sort of loose, fun beats you make when there's nothing to prove or anyone to impress. The music is impressionistic, amorphous, highly experimental, and usually unquantized. There are microcosmic prog-like song structures, wandering loops that don't loop, tempos rise and fall unpredictably, and time signatures shift beneath the elements like quicksand.
"Kaleidoscopic" is the most apt word for what's going on here.

"It's experimental because I don't always know what I'm doing. For a while there, I didn't know how to mark the time signature changes in the DAW, so I'd just go off the grid and then find my way back, quick maths," the artist elaborated when spotted Sasquatch-style on an LCBO run, in a floral half-mask made of canvas and muddy winter coat.
"That's where you learn the most the fastest, anyway: working at the limits of your ability."

Half of the drum patterns feel like a frantically panicked thought process, just to distract oneself from the outside world and the omnipresent terror of late capitalist imperial decline. The others sound like the laboured heartbeat and breathing of lumbering around the house with that extra weight on.

The textures of the sound world are flowy and echo-drenched, reminiscent of attention deficit channel-surfing and internet rabbitholes. The song cycle is punctuated with snippets of narration, archival interviews of process talk, and the occasional meme. Comparing new music to being "like the internet" was a cliche over a decade ago, but it is generally rare for that comparison to actually hold weight.

"Talking about it feels kind of pretentious, so I thought I might as well go all the way with it. Fuck it, Tommy Wiseau of the rap game. One man's impossible self-regard is another's self-preservation."

This is lo-fi day-glo hyper-pop on horse tranquilizers. This is the vertigo of glitching through the floor into the unknown, this is Madlib meets Daniel Johnston, a VHS fever dream by way of youtube on caffeine and no sleep. This is folk art readymade with a cut-up technique, writ miniscule; a spirit-world cyclone in a trembling steel cage.

Always first-listen my shit on headphones,
you gotta have the stereo spread...

Artisan beats and ramshackle freak-outs, designed for headphones...

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