Alexi Murdoch - The secrets of a motionless time

Alexi Murdoch was born and raised in Europe, in London, to a Greek father and a French-Scottish mother, but musically he was shaped entirely in the United States, where he moved to attend university in Los Angeles. His music is in fact clearly the offspring of an American tradition running from the singer-songwriters of the 70s through to the contemporary indie scene. Critics tend to compare Alexi Murdoch's music to that of Nick Drake, and his hushed, dreamlike voice certainly can't help but recall him. His lyrics often carry the emotional force of the great English singer-songwriter, but although the musical structure of his songs is likewise mostly sustained by just an acoustic guitar, his harmonies only partly reach the intelligence and refinement of a musician who managed to build emotional masterpieces using nothing but a guitar and his voice, penetrating the listener's mind without compromising with a pop structure forced into a verse-chorus-verse form.

Even before releasing the first EP of his career on cdbaby.com (a well-known online store specializing in independent artists) in November 2002, Alexi could already boast having one of his songs featured on the playlist of the famous local station KCRW: this alone earned him the top spot on the site's all-time best-seller chart. The song was "All My Days", and the EP bore the simple title Four Songs: three of those four songs would go on to form the backbone of his debut album, and it's notable that they would undergo only the slightest, almost imperceptible transformation in the move from one work to the other.

With just one EP, Alexi Murdoch managed to make his songs famous through film, lending several of his tracks to movies and performing live in 2003 at the South by Southwest Music Conference and the Sundance Film Festival, up to his 2004 appearance at the Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference. The bond between Alexi Murdoch's music and cinema would remain a constant throughout his career, earning him international fame, particularly through television series that, starting in the US, traveled around the world: "Orange Sky", "All My Days", "Home", "Blue Mind" became familiar to the attentive listener's ear thanks to shows like "Prison Break", "The O.C.", "Scrubs", "Dawson's Creek", "Ugly Betty". A fame that nevertheless always remained a "niche" one, confined, as mentioned, to the keen-eared listener capable of grasping the power his songs were able to lend to the images on screen - and not even being entrusted, in 2009, with the soundtrack of a film by director Sam Mendes would be enough to finally make Alexi Murdoch's star explode.

In June 2006 Alexi Murdoch released his debut album, Time Without Consequence, on the Razor And Tie label, which achieved major sales success online (on iTunes and Amazon).

Time Without Consequence is the work in which Alexi Murdoch finally seems to succeed in gathering, into one coherent creation, all the songs written between the 2002 release of the EP Four Songs and 2006. And yet, listening to this record, one immediately senses that it isn't some kind of greatest hits, where songs written individually and independently of one another are brought together in a more or less deliberate order. We could even find confirmation of this by comparing the tracklist of "Four Songs" to that of this album: one song has been dropped, "It's Only Fear" was left behind in the past, as if it didn't fit the idea driving the creation of Time Without Consequence. One immediately realizes that this is a harmonious arrangement of songs, bound together by a well-defined theme, both musical and conceptual: time. The feeling is that every single song on this album was written in relation to the others, in an attempt to tell a story, a condition of life. That's why every track sits in a precise place for a reason: not like a puzzle, but as a whole, a single multitude trying to bring the listener a meaning, through moments of despair, hope, happiness and redemption, lived out beneath the relentless noise of a time that never stops flowing, under the illusion that it carries no consequence.

The album opens, and immediately that plucked arpeggio accompanying the deep, whispering voice carries us into a space that is intimate yet common to everyone's experience: the constant search for someone who can save us from the loneliness to which we seem condemned, an endless search, carried out day after day ("All My Days"). And it's no accident that the last line sung in the opening track connects perfectly to the whole of the following song: "even breathing feels all right" Alexi repeats in "All My Days", and "don't forget to breathe" he begs himself in the claustrophobic "Breathe", as if the hope that once drew a smile on his lips now dissolved within a day from which the sun has been banished, illusion melting into reality and the temptation of some extreme act creeping into the confusion, held back only by this stubborn survival instinct - that of simply breathing.

The track that follows, “Home”, is an attempt to redeem himself from this desperate condition, trying to regain control of himself: just a few phrases repeated endlessly, masked beneath the distorted sound of an electric guitar that comes to overshadow the relentless sound of the acoustic one, while the music draws close to psychedelic delirium and the voice all but dissolves into a chant, a swelling lament that seems unable to find peace, until the calm of a favorable current is finally reached (“row, row, row your boat / gently down the stream”).

Listening once again to Alexi's quiet, whispering voice, it seems possible, closing your eyes, to actually see the smile on the lips from which it emerges: in “Song For You” Alexi speaks to someone, trying to convince them that they shouldn't feel alone, that if they sometimes feel the need to fly far away, they shouldn't believe there's no one who can understand. So, once again, he stitches together the gap between two songs, joining them through humanity's deepest dream, that of flying: in “Dream About Flying” he reveals to the listener of “Song For You” the curse of his own life, singing over chords that try to stretch outward without ever managing to, as if giving sonic shape to that powerlessness, to that obsessive attempt to take flight that constantly fails and instead reveals the heaviness of his own wounded body, the prison of flesh in which the dream is trapped, leaving only tears upon waking (“But every now and then when I’m sleeping / I still have a dream that I’m flying / And I wake up crying”).

The familiar guitar carries us straight into the room where Alexi waits for an answer (“Wait”), and his voice takes us right into his heart, into the deepest intimacy, into the place where that waiting holds all the strength of hope: it's the moment his voice rises close to a cry, yet it's still a prayer, “Please wait for me”, repeated obsessively, as if he already knew the answer that seems to arrive in the final line, spoken with no trace of question left, a simple certainty, “Won't you wait for me”.

“Love You More” is a declaration of love that unfolds over a carpet of arpeggios sustained by the light pulse of the drums, dissolving into a haze of strings that forms its coda and its seamless bridge into the next track, “Blue Mind”: the sad mind is the one he reveals he's had ever since growing up, no longer having time, time to live, so that now he's condemned to drift slowly (“slowly, slowly I am drifting”), caught between the beats of seconds that seem to be measured out by the very tempo of the song.

“Shine” opens with the sound of a cracked record spinning on the needle, before giving way to a melancholy, repetitive guitar over which the voice is darker and more intimate than ever: time is once again at the center of the lament, which seems to rise from the very consciousness of this voice, accompanied by sounds, like distorted strings, that disrupt the steadiness of the arpeggio. Alexi sings of a love slowly crumbling under the weight of distance, and what remains of it is threatened by the heavy ticking of time, which the two lovers, together, try to fight, united by hatred for the same enemy, yet both aware of the impossibility of defeating it, and so drawing ever closer to a final, irreversible separation. But all at once every sound is annihilated and the voice takes on another tone, becoming aware, bold, self-assured, swelling as it pulls along the guitar, strings and piano that accompany it to the end, to the final resolute lines: “you don’t need strength to be strong / time to believe in what you know / time to believe before you go”.

“12” is an instrumental piece with strong post-rock accents, built on an exemplary interplay of drums, repetitive arpeggios and electric guitar slides: amid continuous bursts and releases dictated by the strikes delivered to an acoustic guitar to pull chords from it, a drumbeat raises the song's tempo, and over it the electric guitars distort, turning the surges along their strings into slashing blows, while the voice climbs through the registers like a lament, endlessly repeating the word left trapped between its lips since the previous track: “Shine!”.

The final track, “Orange Sky”, seems to be a reconciliation with everything that surrounds this voice: with the world, with the nature made up of this sunset sky, with itself, with a sister, a brother, perhaps distant, perhaps lost, and probably with time as well. A simple guitar sets the perfect rhythm for this redemption, the voice breathes between the chords and, while the sky never stops its wondrous color, as if in a dream, everything that has been shrinks, loses its weight, and can finally be overcome, carried along as a kind of wealth, as the experience of time gone by, perhaps, without any consequence.

A few days after the release of Time Without Consequence, he began his first 34-date tour with the Coalition of Independent Music Stores. But only three years later, in 2009, having finally achieved in the United States the kind of fame that would allow it, he began his first solo tour, during which he sold a limited edition of a long, still-unreleased EP titled Towards The Sun.

It's a very intimate, homely work, made up of simple songs built on an essential acoustic-guitar foundation, on just a few chords, on sweeping, repetitive arpeggios, beneath which the sound of some strings expands to stretch out the sonic carpet over which Alexi's voice, quieter and warmer than ever, slips whispered between humming and choruses.

In the title track there is all the fragility of a memory the mind refuses to let slip away, revealed with the deep sweetness of a voice that remains whispered, almost dreamlike: it pushes all the way to the edge of the memory itself, to its image, no longer real by now, and lets itself be carried off completely into the dream, allowing the words to give way to a faint lament. “At Your Door” opens with a chord progression borrowed from Nick Drake's guitar, intertwined with the harmonic arpeggio of another acoustic guitar: caught in the web of this sonic construction, Alexi's voice tries once again to escape a present weighed down by loneliness (“I will never let you down”). In “Someday Soon” the guitar's rhythm gives the song the feel of a country ballad, time stamped out with a foot on the floor and, once again, the painful play of memory (“And you know that, mother, I'd be lying / If I didn't tell you I'm afraid of dying”), the suffering of an absent father and the urge to leave with the hope of finding him again, as if this search concealed within it the whole will to keep on living.

“Slow Revolution” is the track in which, perhaps more than in any other, Alexi Murdoch most clearly shows his gift as a songwriter, bringing to mind that rebellious Bob Dylan who shouted out his accusations and his illusions: it speaks of violence, of death, and of that slow, seemingly futile revolution that imperceptibly grows, through the strength of humanity, until it manages to change things: “It’s a slow revolution that quietly turns / As the true word burns / And all of the people marching dancing out cross the floor / And all of this matter soon won’t matter much anymore”.

The voice expands, lending an ethereal force to the five simple guitar notes on which the foundation of “Through The Dark” is built; its depth is comparable only to that of certain songs on Time Without Consequence, and it reveals the full measure of its love in an unprecedented tone, never so close to tears as here, where one almost seems able to detect it in the closing humming. In “Her Hands Were Leaves” we're certain that those tears have finally arrived, even if not on the same face from which the words emerge: tears streak the mother's skin, while the voice stretches out over a sparse arpeggio and sings of the illusion of a freedom in which even the body's heaviness turns to light, managing at last to fly (“Now my momma she is crying on the stair / Her hands are leaves, the light is in her hair / As she prays she thinks that no one heard / Mother you are a bird / And all around the light”).

The plucked sound of a banjo once again accompanies the voice through memory, but this time the passage of time is met with the innocent tone of happiness, in a calm resignation to the fate of one's own solitude (“the night is close and you must leave me / and empty all the places where we used to go”), in which even the notes seem to slip down like rain through rays of sunlight, like tears through a smile: “Crinan Wood” seems to carry the listener all the way to that Hong Kong forest where the protagonist of “In The Mood For Love” hides the voice of his secret love inside the hollow of a tree, and as we put our ear to that hole in the bark, it feels as though we can hear this very song.

Compared to the album Time Without Consequence, this EP clearly lacks a strong connecting thread able to bind the songs to one another. This is perhaps the most obvious factor that sets apart these two works by Alexi Murdoch, giving the impression that, with Towards The Sun, we are faced with preparatory work for something more complex, elaborate and rich — something like a second album.

And yet, listening closely to this EP, one notices that here too a recurring theme shines through the lyrics, repeated by the artist like an obsessive topos: that of memory. There's no need to point out that these are less elaborate songs, typical of the modest production values of an EP, to be certain that this theme carries an entirely spontaneous weight. The past, nostalgia and, above all, time are in this work the true spark driving Alexi Murdoch's artistic expression, since it is here, far more than in Time Without Consequence, that time becomes the true protagonist, breaking through into the artist's mind to summon memory within him, to set his lips moving and give voice to the sound that accompanies the gesture of his hand on the guitar, a voice that seems able to find the very expression of nostalgia in the humming Alexi Murdoch so often gives himself over to. Whereas in Time Without Consequence the past was a presence that never quite had consequences on the present, standing merely as the foundation for a future yet to be built, in Towards The Sun the past is motionless and spreads over every emotion, invading the very space itself, becoming present and future alike, as though reopening a wound that still has so much blood left to spill. And this blood does not merely soak the songs of Towards The Sun — it creates them, in a way that, perhaps, once Murdoch reworks some of them for inclusion on a future album, it will be impossible to taste the same bitter edge they managed to convey in this bare, essential, intimate guise of guitar, voice and little else.

At this point, the next step in Alexi Murdoch's career — and perhaps the decisive one for his fame — came with an opportunity offered by director Sam Mendes: to use some of his songs, and select others by different artists, to put together the soundtrack for his film "Away We Go". It's a road movie across the United States, telling the story of a couple struggling to decide where to raise their future child. Most of the soundtrack is made up of tracks from the album Time Without Consequence, which was reissued around this time to reach a wider audience: "All My Days", "Blue Mind", "Song For You", "Breathe", "Wait" and "Orange Sky". Alexi Murdoch picks two songs from his latest EP: "Towards The Sun" and "Crinan Wood". Murdoch also includes an unreleased track of his own titled "The Ragged Sea", unusual not just for being new but for its style: Murdoch's voice sounds breathless here, not the usual quiet whisper, but chasing the notes in a high, rapid register, almost evoking in its very form the waves of the jagged sea he sings about. The choice of the other tracks, written and performed by a range of different artists, offers glimpses — never entirely certain — into this artist's musical background: Murdoch's debt to a songwriter like Bob Dylan is obvious, though here represented by an unusual track, "Meet Me In The Morning" (from the 1975 album "Blood On The Tracks"), a blues number far removed from the folk sound Murdoch seemingly draws on; also significant is the choice of a George Harrison song, "What Is Life" (1970, "All Things Must Pass"), whose solo work certainly enriched Murdoch's musical education; the highly distinctive "Golden Brown", by the legendary Stranglers, seems for Murdoch to carry the weight of a link to an ante litteram indie production; and finally "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'", taken from "Loaded", the last Velvet Underground album before Lou Reed's departure — a record with a clearly commercial bent, yet one that reveals all the songwriting flair Reed would go on to show in his solo career.

Yet the film was not a great success: in Europe no distributor managed to get it into theatrical release, and it came out only on DVD. Once again, it seems Alexi Murdoch's music was destined to remain the private property of the attentive listener, the dedicated seeker of new artists, of an audience that, internationally, is strictly "niche" — so much so that his rare European appearances (the last concert in March 2010 in Berlin) amount to small gatherings of devoted fans in venues devoted to indie music. The intimate character of these concerts mirrors that of his music: all of this seems to shield it from any commercial contamination, keeping it pure and, indeed, independent from the consumerist machine of the majors, so that Alexi Murdoch faces no pressure in terms of output (just two EPs and one album in seven years of career) and can take all the time he needs to shape his music in the best possible way.

Comparing the first EP, Four Songs, with the album Time Without Consequence, one notices that the tracks carried over from the former — though they form the basic backbone of the latter — are the ones that lean most on pop structure, and are elevated by the other, more experimental songs, stretched between post-rock and psychedelic territory, that Murdoch builds around them. It's through this comparison that one can truly grasp this musician's artistic quality, and perceive, beyond surface impressions, the distinction between his music and Nick Drake's: while Drake seems to found his output on intimacy, turning his music into a cathartic, confessional revelation, Alexi Murdoch starts from the attempt at a similar revelation only to experiment further, moving through a broader territory that can take in folk, post-rock, psychedelia, and more generally the indie sphere. The burden this young songwriter has to carry on his shoulders is thus a lighter one, if, rather than being compared to a giant like Nick Drake, he is instead linked to artists closer to him in age and output, such as Elliott Smith, Badly Drawn Boy, Kings Of Convenience, Sophia, Mojave 3 — artists who, to varying degrees, pick up the thread of acoustic singer-songwriter music, in the vein of Nick Drake, and push it in a new, experimental direction.

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