haunt a murphy

‘haunt’ is an album about grief written and performed by a murphy in his homeland of South Wales.

The record begins with what sounds like the click of a tape recorder. Maybe it’s the creak of a stool on hardwood floor, or a window pane cracking as the wind cools outside. Either way, this is an intimate affair.

Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons in Glasgow, the loss of my Grandfather or the sun still nodding down at me as I leave work in the evenings now, but I’ve found myself longing for the quiet moments in music. Most recently my discoveries have been groups like the Horse, the often quietly beautiful hush of Kiran Leonard, the old favourites of Low and Sparklehorse and Vashti Bunyan and early Bon Iver.

a murphy – whose real name is Andrew James Murphy – has spent the past few years releasing music using the moniker ‘amateur theatre group’, but haunt represents a debut effort under this new name. Recorded and produced at home in South Wales, haunt is a collection of 8 mostly short songs, coming in at just over 20 minutes.

“I was struggling to work out what was next for me when I started writing what became haunt as a bit of an a-side,” Murphy says about creating the album. “In brief, I essentially realised I was coming to the point in my life where I had lived as long without my dad as when he was alive, so this small collection of music became all about grief and its more or less never-ending cycle.”

Fittingly, I’m reading Hood by Emma Donoghue, which follows the story of a woman in Dublin grappling with the loss of her partner of 13 years and the various forms of grief that come with losing someone who is part of your make-up. haunt is about grief too – the loss of Andrew’s father and the ways in which grief quietly spills into everything. For me, when I lost my Grandfather, I found it difficult to comprehend the feeling of losing someone who was physically part of me: my DNA, my genes. The red hair I had when I was a newborn that although eventually turned brown, ‘reminded everyone of my Grandad’, says my Mum.

“Oh, my twisted spine, A plaster cast of yours, Same blood, more alive.”

Sonically, the songs are made up of fragments of mostly vocals and nylon stringed guitar. Occasionally, a horn or something brass breaks through the surface and for a moment there’s light piercing through the mist. Andrew leaves a lot of room but it’s with intent: this is a record which really melts into one long song, a journey through the difficult map of losing someone and how that looks, feels, sounds.

“Lord, leave a light on, Just to help me in the dark”

- Lauren