Murex Extracts the Purple on Inventio

Murex was born in Kalix, on the tip of the Bothnian Bay, and works in Stockholm as a composer and producer. The legal name stays off the record. What travels instead is a craft already trained on other people’s songs, then turned inward for three years until the material refused to be given away. Piano came first. Bach’s two-part Inventions sat on the stand long enough to leave a habit of voices answering each other. Trumpet was the childhood horn, and it returns here as a raw edge rather than a souvenir. Massacre arrived in May as the first public signal, self-produced in her studio, with Elvira Anderfjärd on background vocals and a mix by Marta Salogni. Young, the London house of Sampha and Jamie xx, took the signing into the open with that single. Then came Hardness Of A Silverspoon, Flock Of Swans Fly in V’s, Mothers Bells, and Puddle, each with a video she directed herself. Inventio is out today, licensed from CAGEMAN AB to Young, on digital, vinyl, and CD. The face is often half-covered. The drawings do more talking than the portrait.

There is an old industrial fact that has nothing, at first, to do with a Stockholm debut. To make Tyrian purple, workshops along the Mediterranean crushed murex snails by the thousand. The animal lived in a ridged shell. The dye lived in a gland most people would never see. One cloak for an emperor could cost a city of molluscs. The colour was never the creature. It was what remained after the creature had been pressed past recognition. Pliny wrote about the stink of the vats. Courts still wanted the cloth. The name of the dye outlived the bodies that produced it.

That is the temperature of Inventio. Murex has said the alias comes from a childhood habit of collecting shells. The record behaves like the workshop, not the souvenir shop. It is interested in what a body gives up when you refuse to display it as product. “It’s not about disappearing or being anonymous,” she has said. “More about loosening the grip of appearance, and letting the work exist without being defined by it.” The album lasts just under twenty-three minutes. Brevity here is method. Bach’s inventions were teaching pieces, compact arguments in counterpoint. Inventio uses the same economy. A thought is stated, answered, warped, and left before it can harden into a brand.

Massacre is the oldest cut and the one that still feels least dressed. Synths throb. Guitars twang out of true. The lyric names a hunger that drags the self toward damage, the wish to master a beast that will not take instruction. Anderfjärd’s voice sits behind her as proof that the fight was never meant to be solitary. Been Here too Long follows at a minute and forty-three seconds, piano looping until the pattern turns mutant. The line is a verdict. She has stayed too long in an excess of sorrows, in a body and a room that no longer generate anything new. The Spire lifts after that, the first real upward motion, a figure of becoming the tower rather than living under it. Past selves walk away. The production allows a cautious lift without pretending the ground has disappeared.

Hardness Of A Silverspoon was tracked in a single urgent pass. Words were written, then mostly abandoned, because a scream into empty air did not want language. Organ sits low and wintered. Her trumpet cuts across it. The press comparison to Björk’s Vespertine is fair in climate, less useful as a map. Vespertine was a sealed room of microbeats and whispered luxury. Silverspoon is the window thrown open in January. Biased freezes the next impulse, the fantasy that a feeling can be stored like ice and kept objective. Isak Hedtjärn’s flute and clarinet arrive as a cold current, then collapse into noise. Puddle is the dangerous warmth. Pelle Westlin and Hedtjärn whirl clarinets around a melody about pouring yourself into someone else so you do not have to assemble a self. “I’m leaking into you,” she sings, and the romance is real enough to be a trap.

Flock Of Swans Fly in V’s holds a title she kept for years. In Kalix winters a flock left the meadow beside the house when the cold became unsurvivable, and returned when spring could be trusted. Soprano harmonies gather. Koto plucks small bright points through them. Instinct is the subject, the animal knowledge she says she wishes she had.

Watch the self-directed clip here: Flock Of Swans Fly in V’s.

Muzak weaponises a word for music designed to vanish. Contrapuntal piano and strings carry the mantra “I’m not looking,” avoidance dressed as background polish. Mothers Bells takes its image from bells hung high in a hallway at her mother’s house, a fixed point when orientation failed. Longing for a wisdom she does not yet own turns into stacked voices, then an electronic weather front. The title track closes with strings that finally stop arguing. She has described it as a lush permission to let go. After nine songs of fracture, the last minute and forty-eight seconds does not solve the body. It stops demanding a verdict from it.

What gives Inventio weight is the discipline of its world. Nordic folklore sits in the grain without costume. Kulning is a reference point, Lena Willemark another, Elizabeth Fraser a third when the voice becomes timbre instead of sentence. The pencil drawings that shadow the campaign, vegetal creatures eating a figure, swans locking into a crest, belong to the same nervous system as the arrangements. Collaborators add limbs, not decoration. Anderfjärd, already a force in Swedish pop production, plays cello and sings. Westlin and Hedtjärn improvise air into the circuitry. Murex remains the centre of gravity, writing and producing from a studio summer split between morning swims and afternoon construction.

The record will be filed beside Björk because that is the available shelf. Fine. The more precise kinship is with the invention as a form. A short piece that teaches two lines how to live in the same bar without one swallowing the other. Inventio does that with personae. The writer who already knew how to finish a pop song for someone else had to learn how to leave a song unfinished enough to stay hers. Control is the beast on Massacre. Release is the work of the last three tracks. In between, the dye happens. You do not get the purple without the crush. Murex understood that before she admitted she was making an album. The work now stands without a face to sell it, and the colour holds.

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Inventio is out now on Young.

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