Anthony Donovan‘s Murmurists is a real labour of love; composing, scripting and then surrounding himself with suitable collaborators to do justice to his dystopian, disorientating visions.
This final section of a possible trilogy also coincided with his mother’s passing and her spirit looms large over the proceedings, her recorded voice appearing at points, warmly recalling past events and putting the future into some perspective. Live, Murmurists can number as many as 100; but here for ithyphall.brel.gory is not the same as you, the players either cast as orators or musicians number into the thirties with some doubling up in both roles.
There are many names familiar to regular Discus listeners and a few like Fred Longberg-Holm and Jeremy Gluck (what, that Jeremy Gluck?) familiar to a wider group of listeners. With an incredible array of voices as well as a veritable army of instruments acoustic and electronic, the three pieces presented here are awash with dizzying and disparate musical palettes, moving surreptitiously to internal rhythms that are not immediately obvious but guided by the streams of consciousness delivered in varying degrees of lucidity by the orators.
The cover of the album contains some terrifying visions and these are translated to the amorphous industrial sounds that creak and groan, somnolent but with static bursts that disorientate amidst the random noises that skulk and glower in shadowed, abandoned spaces. Voices appear from the static, sometimes agreeable, sometimes distorted, intoning, deliberating with abstract observations that carry dire warnings. A slow circulation, storm-like and seething gathers around dystopian directives giving them a considered desperation. The scoured soundscape is awkward and uncomfortable yet strangely compelling, its progress constant and restless, at points upset by the screams of children and surprising mechanoid beats that echo against the unfolding cataclysm. Shimmering double bass does a little to smooth things; but it is a difficult pill to sweeten.A creeping dread propels the second piece that feels like a travellator from which you can’t escape. There are voices in your ear, wordless, sinister and subliminal, and the aura creates more confusion, while a mellow American voice tells us: “Your broken neck was always an overworked superlative”. What can we make of this and why is it so freely delivered? There is more motion here and a sense of recycled angst, with repetitive voices enmeshed in circling guitars, growling horns and a piano dreaming of yesterday.
A stiff wind across an abandoned settlement introduces the final piece, shorter and more succinct yet more abrasive, horns clamouring, letting loose while voices trade lines, upping the ante with the vibrancy of vision and hoards of tired beasts shift and shuffle in the background. Things turn gradually more urgent, until a final flourish and this extraordinary journey comes to an end.The death of Anthony’s mother was the crux of this album, but the work completed by the assembled cast is an amazing legacy, a time-travelling epic that sounds like nothing else.
-Mr Olivetti-
