Julie Murphy
Album: Mermaid EP
Label: Bandcamp
Tracks: 4
Website: http://www.juliemurphymusic.com

For a while now, Julie's been busy with various collaborations with a host of other musicians, most recently Robert Plant (on his lullaby… And The Ceaseless Roar album) and of course Fernhill, whose magnificent Amser CD was one of the most satisfying releases of 2014. So it's a minor miracle, I guess, that she's found time to record this three-track EP, not least in order to maintain a profile on her continuing solo career.

She describes the project simply as "three folk songs I love, recorded in beautiful places", and at the same time it paves the way for her new solo album proper, a work-in-progress which is due for release some time in 2015.

The sea itself pervades the current EP; in the obvious sense of the thematic import and preoccupation of all three chosen songs, of course, but also in the sheer force and physical presence of the water and the elements, which can be felt in high-definition on the final track, Shells In The Ocean. The preceding pair of songs were recorded by Julie seated at - and accompanying herself on - the grand piano (on location in a friend's house on the Teifi Estuary near Cardigan Bay). These are superbly intimate, pindrop-dramatic Lieder performances which demonstrate Julie's peerless control both of melodic line and narrative development. Lyric-wise, they derive their inspiration from, respectively, an 18th century sea ballad and an Appalachian ballad. The EP's title track is arguably the most straightforwardly handled, although Julie's treatment is anything but routine and would in any context or company be rated a very persuasive account of the song.

Sparrow, on the other hand, makes capital of a quite impressionistic mode of delivery to transform the text (often better known as Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies) into an admonitory invocation of almost magical power; the recording of Sparrow also features an interesting incidental counterpoint in the chirping of a caged bird within the room, adding a further dimension to the juxtaposition of the piano's bare block chords and Julie's ornamented vocal line.

Shells In The Ocean is a stunning field recording made in a cave on the Atlantic seashore near Llangrannog in West Wales, where Julie's a cappella voice reverberates in response to the natural acoustic, the eternality of the breaking waves forming a roaring backdrop that proves surprisingly unintrusive and clothes the sung lament (based on the 17th century English/Irish song The Sorrowful Lady's Complaint) in somewhat unaccustomed yet quite natural garb. This track especially leaves the listener with the deep and telling resonance of the concept in Welsh Celtic mythology of those liminal spaces between land and water which acted as doorways to Annwn, the Otherworld, a kind of idyll. And all three tracks here add up to a significantly powerful aural experience.

David Kidman