"It’s musical theatre, Jim, but not as we know it. Imagine a David Lynch-directed art house post-horror, produced by Andy Warhol, cut-up screenplay by William Burroughs and soundtracked by Nurse With Wound striving to channel the spirit of Eric Dolphy and you’re probably still not close." - Ian Fraser, TERRASCOPE


Murmurists is a group of artists which convenes periodically to perform large-scale multi-media events using texts and graphic-scores composed and directed by Anthony Donovan. This CD, recorded over a significant span of time, draws upon such live and studio performances, channelling these years of diverse activity into a brand new work. Call it music theatre, sound design, documentary – as you will.

I like slow work. This is the third, and I think concluding, iteration in album form of an intense and sprawling project begun in 2005. Trinities always feel replete to me, and to add to that seems an extension. The Internet was young then, and I was wholly new to it, and the project started, equally, as a way to still make music after the displacement and practical exile of moving away to another part of the country and as a means of my using words and creating composed music with the improvisers and voice-artists I was then as now involved with. The album process itself was very much an improvisation in its own right. Its cast of characters, for all their wild variety, in some way speak from my own head, in an attempt to convey the intimate dissociation I felt in this new world of tenuous but meaningful online connections, often anonymous in the strict sense, but at the same time familiar and eliciting emotional responses. This became a way of working. I've left the flaws I hear in, wanting, for whatever reason, to show my workings-out, wanting to retain evidence of the stages of the learning-curve I was on.

During this period, Murmurists became primarily a live venture, building into a series of unique 100 performer-strong events. The whole thing widened out and exploded, as piece after piece was performed from my graphic-scores in strange places by amazing people. Before pandemic struck and silenced us all for a time, it was the realisation of the here-comes-everyone approach I had always wanted, and I hope something of that is captured here, too.

In the meantime, my mother Dorothy died, and the album again became introspective and my grief became its subject, including whether in grief and from grief I could even finish the thing, thus honouring the commitments and efforts of all the fine people who had lent me their time and talent in good faith. This third part had onus written all over it, therefore, and, to my ears, it was the best thing of the three, anyway, and made further sense of its predecessors. I couldn't let it, too, become an orphan, tentatively approaching Martin at Discus Music, not even knowing if what I had put together made sense outside of my own feelings. It has Dorothy's voice on it, you see, my beloved Mater Ort, and even listening hurt like Hell, whilst, at the same time, it cheered me on towards the profundity it would eventually assume for me, not least in being given final form here, and not least, in turn, with my offering being included amongst decidedly esteemed company at Discus. It was good to begin to feel normal again.

I humbly thank everyone who has made this with me from the bottom of my heart. It is what it is. And without you it wouldn't be anything. Grief stalks ithyphall.brel.gory is not the same as you, for sure, but in the end, if it's about any one thing, it is about liberation and the living with that by creating something meaningful from it and through it. My mother made me and I made this for her.

Anthony Donovan / East Lancashire / June 2023