When London avant-pop artist Martha Skye Murphy asked experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery to contribute to her 2024 debut record, Um, he sent a recording of himself revving the engine of his 1968 Chrysler: the sound of a life in motion in another hemisphere. His playing on that record sounded like long-awaited sunlight finally emerging from her cloud cover, conjoining two existences that never physically touch. After those suggestions of distance, their new album Nebular—the pair’s first full-length collaboration, pieced together from stems emailed back and forth under the cover of night—feels like the next logical step in their remote partnership, a postcard stamped repeatedly through the course of a never-ending twilight.
The pair initially bonded over their mutual fondness for Tascam multitrack recorders, and their “sonic sign language,” as Murphy calls it, takes the form of a stirring wall of ambient sound. Despite Montgomery’s cult legacy—he led the band that cut Flying Nun’s inaugural single in 1981, emerged from semi-retirement to make a record with Grouper in 2010, and released his own archival collection of solo work just earlier this year—Nebular reveals a novel facet of his playing, here stretched to its most maximalist ends by Murphy’s own theatrical impulses. In their near-wordless exchange, the music feels more like an unraveling of emotion than it does a fully constructed thought, where the layered guitar and Elizabeth Fraser-like Siren song are both inscrutable and all-encompassing.
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Opener “At Dawn” presents the most severe version of their instruments’ pairing; Murphy’s glossolalic coo cuts through Montgomery’s guitar drones, and it all builds to a churning crescendo. The track doesn’t so much progress as expand in place, as ideas swapped between partners accumulate into a roar. As Murphy bends her voice to the record’s abstract contours, often eschewing discernible lyrics altogether, she shows a more intuitive facet of herself that she only hinted at previously.
Even the shortest songs here feel like mini-epics. In the sense-deprived haze, other senses sharpen, forcing focus onto Murphy’s layered, effects-laden vocalizations until they grow into an almost alien groan. Nebular is a game of patience. That’s particularly true of “The Play of Light and Dark,” a buoyant raga pierced by stabbing strings deep into its 17-minute run; in “Satellites Against the Milky Way,” a marching keyboard line rising up from the murk feels like a revelation.
Their work together defies containment and dissolves borders: Montgomery’s strummed chords and fuzzy drones blur into a fog, while Murphy’s piercing tone tests the limits of her tape recorder. Both artists’ distinct voices push just enough into the other’s world to reveal a new side to each musician’s playing. Nebular is a durational meeting of the minds that leaves the physical realm behind; in these postcards from the infinite, all they have is time.
