An established New England artist, Murray has worked in the framework of "drone" for quite a while now. Before it was the trendy thing to do, I might add. In that respect, it is no surprise that his work transcends the "let's see how long we can sustain this note for" school, but more of the pure, dissonant minimalism akin to the old masters like Niblock and Xenakis. What comprises this album then is therefore dissonant and difficult, yet compelling and hypnotic in its brutish subtlety.
     Indexed as a single 49 minute piece, Commonwealth is apparently based on a combination of guitar and analog synthesis, all of which was subject to heavy digital processing and manipulation. It is hard to discern the actual instrumentation, however, because the sound resembles a consistent, never-ending machinery hum. The mechanized din never relents throughout, yet it becomes hypnotic in its superficial simplicity. Listening closer, the subtle shifts and changes in tonality become more and more apparent.
     The fact that the piece has that constant mechanical quality lends greatly to the listener developing their own interpretation of the sound. At times the track reminded me of a well used, contact mic'd air conditioner, and at other times it could have been the last remaining echos of a symphonic orchestra, held and repeated for infinity. It is the sonic equivalent of staring up at the clouds and finding various shapes that other cannot see.
     The style of the disc stays pretty consistent throughout the duration: the rumble never really lets up, though the shifts in pitch and tone are drastic enough that it never feels overly repetitive or dull. Instead, it becomes entirely captivating in its ceasing to relent. The most dramatic shift is towards the final half of the piece in which the volume slowly begins to drop, and the rattle becomes more of a hum, going from machinery clanks to the peaks and valleys of a sine wave.
     Murray's meticulous attention to detail is what makes this disc such a compelling work. Although it has that seeming level of simplicity, a close inspection reveals so much more to the work, and a level of structure and composition that puts him squarely in league with the likes of Francisco Lopez and Achim Wollscheid and other big names on the scene. -- Creaig Dunton


The Phoenix
April 1, 2008

     For Brendan Murray, heaven often lies in the smallest of details. Commonwealth, which comes out this month on the San Francisco experimental music imprint 23five, is a single 49-minute drone that unfolds at a leisurely pace. It's devoid of the sharp bursts of noise and rapid accelerations of tempo that characterized his previous full-length, 2006's Wonders Never Cease (Intransitive), and yet a drama emerges in subtle slow motion through extended, tension-filled shifts in texture and harmonics.
     Murray has always labored over his releases, often working on individual pieces for months, if not years. Even so, Commonwealth took an unusually long time to come together. As he explains over the phone, the album went through numerous drafts, and the finished product bears little resemblance to his initial experiments — "It was the first album where I completely threw everything out." He says that what ended up as one massive drone began as a series of short, guitar-based pieces inspired by bands like Labradford and Flying Saucer Attack. It was an attempt to pay tribute to the music that had inspired him early in his career, but he came to see this experiment as "a side street that maybe I didn't need to follow. . . . I took about a third of the material that was in that first draft, and I started taking it apart and stripping it down to its basic elements until I had about 78 minutes of material."
     After Jim Haynes of 23five (a label that Murray describes with typical self-depreciation as "way too classy for me") expressed an interest in releasing the finished album, work began in earnest. "From there I continued distilling and expanding and distilling and expanding until I came up with the final version, which took an additional six months to finish."
     Commonwealth marks a departure for Murray in its use of traditional instruments like guitar and organ as opposed to the electronics and field recordings of earlier albums. "I'm kind of going backwards," he says with a laugh. "I've been dealing exclusively with electronics, processed sound, non-musical sound. Now I'm sort of pushing back toward the instrument world." This impulse has manifested itself in some of his collaborative projects as well, among them his post-rock band Paper Summer (who open for Mystery Palace at the Middle East upstairs on April 15) and his slo-mo improv trio Ouest with Howard Stelzer and Jay Sullivan. Whatever the project, however, he continues to tinker and experiment and sweat over the minutiae. And he says of Commonwealth that "it's my most personal record, although there's no extra-musical structure. I think I'm going to continue trying to find myself in all of this, but I don't want it to become something that I feel that the listener has to decode. It should be something that you can just listen to and appreciate for its musical qualities." -- Susanne Bolle