With “Memento Vivre”, a musician conjures a storm to tell her story

When Murky Anyango started to record what would eventually become her debut album, she wanted it to be a solo endeavour in every respect.

“I wanted to have a project that was just completely me,” she said while sitting outside Keogh’s Cafe on Trinity Street on Saturday afternoon.

She had mostly collaborated with other people in her art up to this point, she says. “I wanted to have something where, like I’m just gonna figure everything out entirely myself.”

The result is Memento Vivere, a 12-track record that brings together a plethora of disparate alternative, left-of-field and underground genres, from hyperpop and jungle to shoegaze and math rock.

It is volatile, hopping between walls of high-octane, pounding bass drums with heavily processed, high-pitched vocals floating through cacophony, and stripped back, hazy guitar-driven numbers with Anyango’s voice rawer in its delivery.

The whole thing is like a collage of musical styles she adores, she says. “The idea was to get over a lot of the ideas that I had. In the end, it became like me putting a little ribbon on all the music I’ve ever made.”

No two tracks really fall within the same category. Some take sudden shifts as delicate guitar melodies are consumed by the bombastic onslaught of drum ‘n’ bass, only to re-emerge on the other side. 

“But all of them are linked to a certain style of music that I loved, and for whatever reason, wanted to learn how to make, and offer my take on it,” she says.

Fundamentally though, she wanted it to be a record that captures the different stages of transitioning, she says. “I wanted this to be my ‘transition album’, and say ‘I’m trans’, but kinda not do anything like this again.”

Monsters and maths

Anyango was always immersed in music. But it wasn’t her initial pursuit, she said in Keogh’s on Saturday afternoon. “I guess, as a teenager, I was pretty insane and wanted to do, like, the most difficult artform.”

So she decided to study animation at Ballyfermot College of Further Education, she says. “It involves everything. You know, you have to draw every frame, and then I’d make the music. They always went hand-in-hand.”

She first emerged as a videographer and frequent collaborator with the performance artist Venus Patel.

Their creative partnership began with Patel’s 2022 short film, Eggshells, in which the artist revisited when she was attacked and pelted with eggs, and for which she won the 2022 RDS Taylor Art Award.

The following year, the duo paired up again for Patel’s sophomore short, Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse, a surrealist mockumentary about a street preacher who assembles a cult-like following, all of whom are transformed into monsters.

Patel captured a part of her own experience that she hadn’t seen other people articulate, Anyango said back in April 2023. “I think, being people of colour and trans, to see her be out in Ireland was great. We pretty much hit it off instantly.”

Anyango’s cinematography captured Patel’s surrealism in a very raw manner.

It veered between guerilla-style candid camera as she filmed the artist bellowing her manifesto on Henry Street and College Green, and highly stylised surrealism, as Patel crawled about as a snail in a Tesco, and danced in a Luas carriage dressed as an eyeball monster, while passengers tried to pretend nothing was happening.

But Daisy also saw Anyango branch out, contributing five songs to the film’s score, and capturing the “Queer Apocalypse” by beginning with sombre droning synthesisers that transformed into a distorted hurricane as the characters on-screen transformed into monsters up at the Hellfire Club.

Music, more than any other artform, is the one she is most attached to, she says. “I think a lot of the artforms I’ve been in take so much time that by the end, it loses a lot of the emotion. Music is different in that way. It has a very quick release.

“It’s very mathematical,” she says. “So maybe it’s a little easier.”

Twelve stages of peace

Memento Vivere was a deliberate step away from collaboration, with Anyango performing everything recorded, including synthesisers, guitars, drums, and layers upon layers of vocals.

It reached such a level of intensity during the recording that, while singing falsetto on “Wishing Well”, a dreamy, math-rock driven track, she passed out, she says. “It’s all there. You can hear it. I’m not a trained vocalist, and just went way too hard.”

That intensity carries across the album’s 45 minutes.

Opening with the appropriately named “Hard Exterior”, a mish-mash of hardcore dance beats that leap between wildly contrasting tempos, but melt together seamlessly.

Anyango almost gleefully challenges the listener to persevere as harsh noise becomes confidence with her asserting on the next track, “this is the century of Murky/ it gone hit you like a truck”, before she slowly sheds the bravado for something more vulnerable and heartfelt.

“There are tracks where there is a very desperate feeling, like a desperation for femininity,” she says, “with this childlike thing where it needed to have this high-pitched voice thing to be both ultra-femme and also try to reclaim a part of my childhood.”

The less processed vocals are for those moments when a person is trying to be less performative, she says. “It’s when you let yourself down a little. It’s intimate. It’s a natural tone.”

Originally, it was supposed to be 13 tracks, Anyango says. “It was going to be called Thirteen Stages of Peace, and kinda about the journey you go through as you transition, with each song tied to a different emotion in that.”

But, that felt like too rigid a frame, she says.

She dropped the title, and switched it out for the Latin phrase “remember to live”, she says. “It just felt like, as a trans album, an important message. Being trans is just overly politicised, and it makes people’s lives so hard.”

“Surviving, staying true to who you are is like all you need to do, y’know? We’re not going away,” she says. “It’s nice. It’s a reminder to enjoy every day.”

She pauses for a moment.

“Also, I can’t believe nobody’s called an album that,” she says, laughing.