Nebular is not the first collaboration between the experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery and the avant-pop artist Martha Skye Murphy. Montgomery had already featured on Murphy’s highly acclaimed album Um, and it was Murphy who, in turn, accompanied him during his residency at Café OTO in London. This led to an exchange – or rather, an ongoing creative collaboration via email – fuelled by the discovery that both work with the same Tascam multi-track recorder. Nebular is now the resulting album from this long-distance collaboration.
Montgomery’s cyclical, reverberating guitar and piano compositions – somewhere between post-rock, folk and drone – meet here a voice that eludes any fixed language. Murphy’s vocals dissolve into fragments of consonants and vowels, becoming a sonic form that prioritises feeling over any specific word. This contrast is most evident right from the very first track, At Dawn. Murphy’s shimmering vocals cut through the droning guitar textures, whilst everything builds to a seething crescendo and then subsides again. In the 17-minute centrepiece of the album, The Play of Light and Dark – a reference to the artists’ different hemispheres – this static energy condenses into a glockenspiel-like, almost ritualistic pull, repeatedly set in motion by Murphy’s multi-tracked vocals. Created entirely from a physical distance, Nebular is proof of just how close the two artists are in spirit: an exchange that defies all constraints and makes boundaries vanish.
