Skill Games
Murphy Mast
RELEASED: 1.31.2025
Conceived in the final days of 2024, Skilll Games came about as a series of three rapid-fire instrumental demos for a hip-hop collaboration which were subsequently repurposed and supplemented by two additional demos bookending the EP. Each piece is threaded together by the process of using only found-sound percussion samples in place of a traditional drum kit.
MURPHY: “This EP kind of came out of nowhere. It started as a challenge to write just one song for a different project that didn’t end up happening. When that project fell through, instead of scrapping the song we decided to make a few more like it and turn them into an EP. Terrill thought we could get it done in less than a week. I thought that was a bit overly ambitious but I indulged him and we got to work. I was hanging out at my mom’s house for the holidays and Terrill asked me to send him some sounds to use for a drum beat so I recorded a bunch of different objects around the house on my phone. There’s a bag of Legos for a snare, a table for a kick drum, nail clippers for a hi hat, I used pretty much everything but an actual drum or cymbal. I sent the sounds over to Terrill and he cut them up and made beats out of them. We started in late December and a month later we were done. I think the turnaround was so fast just to prove to ourselves that we could do it.”
MAST: “The three interior tracks [2, 3, and 4] all incorporate samples from Patrick’s mom’s house, and the outer songs we put together in my basement sometime during the summer. We thought the old demos fit perfectly within the themes of these three new songs, and it was a great opportunity to give them a home. Much of what we’ve been doing this past year is tweaking and refining old songs, so it was great to get back in the songwriting headspace for that short burst of time. It also felt important to start the new year with some new material as we plan to revisit many overdue projects in 2025.”
In just a little over 10-minutes Skilll Games spans a variety of song-feels, from bouncy-grooves to brooding-beats, but at its core is dark industrial bedroom pop, haphazardly thrown together with care. Like Frankenstein’s monster, pieced together from leftover parts to ponder its own identity, it stands on its own despite its rough edges, offering a simple question to the listener: are you entertained?
