COMPANION
TALKING CIRCLES
RELEASED: 8.01.2025
Companion kicks off without any preamble, diving immediately into a dark yet groovy vibe, and descending even further into kaleidoscopic madness. The album serves as a spiritual sequel to Cursed Image, sharing the same collage-style dissection of acoustic elements and gritty digital effects. It possesses a folkish heart and an almost medieval charm that is upbeat and adventurous. The album itself moves like an invertebrate creature, with each track marking a different stage of its metamorphosis before finally burrowing itself into the damp undergrowth to restart its own life-cycle.
"This all started as a series of demos meant to complement Cursed Image, but none of the original ideas even made it to the finished product. Instead, those early ideas were repurposed for Murphy Mast projects. Still, the concept and the name 'Companion' stuck with me. I had just moved to Richmond and it felt like I was carrying this idea from home into a new space. I wanted to keep the place-feel approach I had developed in Cursed Image where the ambient sound seeps into the music. The final conceptual layer came from making the song 'Proserpina' which is about the story of Persephone and Hades. That song caused me to re-shape the structure of the album in order to mirror Persephone's descent into the underworld. I decided to make the first half of the album more natural-sounding, and the second half more harsh and dark."
