We present our guide to Mordant Music.
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PLAYLIST:
- Elephant Chords (“Filthy Danceheng” Mordant Music, 2004)
- We Are The Mean (“Dead Air” Mordant Music, 2006)
- Transmission Start-Up (“Dead Air” Mordant Music, 2006)
- Olde Wobbly (“El Din” Mordant Music, 2008)
- Warning Maps (“The Tower VIII-XVIII” Mordant Music, 2007)
- The Tower Part VII (Sun Shard) (“The Tower” Mordant Music, 2005)
- S’porchard (“Travelogue 2″ Mordant Music, 2008)
- A Baud With You(“A Baud With You/Shot Away” Mordant Music, 2002)
- Widing Ourselves Into The Ground (“Dead Air” Mordant Music, 2006)
- Pocketeer Orphans (“Petri-Dish” Mordant Music, 2004)
- Fading Font (“Carrion Squared” Mordant Music, 2007)
- Elton Impaired (unknown source)
- Plant Room (“Dead Air” Mordant Music, 2006)
- Obituaries (“Dead Air” Mordant Music, 2006)
Baron Mordant and Admiral Greyscale (who are the duo behind Mordant Music) have, since 2001 been infiltrating electronic music through a number of mediums.
Mordant Music are a germ pair reared in chilling unbeknownst at opposite ends of a royal borough. Having merged through mutual ‘Research’, they embarked upon a scheme of unpleasantness through which they have been creating a nuance now for eight years.
The first musty despatch, a colour CD bereft booklet, ‘Nijmegen’ (MM001, 2001), contained stills from their first and only TV appearance to date, and was unsuccessful enough to prompt a protracted assault on the catalogue number. This covert outpouring, achieved mostly through the medium of the recorded arts, has included such fetid sensations as the bastard-pop classic ‘Dark Side Of The Autobahn’ (MM003, 2003), the thrilling electro contagion of ‘Petri-Dish’ (MM008, 2003) and the training shoe freakout ‘Filthy Danceheng’ (MM010, 2004).
MM have occasionally sought to smear their coagulated artistic strain across a range of other media as well, with the stereoscopic lewdness of ‘View-Mastur’ (MM007, 2003) featuring comedy mensch Simon Munnery an unreasonably limited highlight. Catalogued references have also been afforded to various intangible events, vibrations and open lesions.
Other dank meanderings have included such collaborative audio successes as Shackleton’s ‘Stalker’ (MM011, 2004), a nervous brand of gritty dub plate peril, and the ethereal avant-death experimentation of the long-playing ‘The Tower (Parts I-VII)’ (MM012, 2005) with Lord Klattr.
Throughout 2006 Mordant Music nailed their greyscale to the mast with MM013 – ‘Dead Air’. This sprawling broadcast – with legendary Thames TV continuity announcer Philip Elsmore on lead – raved like Koumas over 20 tracks and drew praise from the Wire, Plan B, The Sunday Times and Alan Biley. MM’s rumination on the romance of obsolescence, the folly of fear, and a uniquely British tone of despair and decay finally trumpeted them into nodes sundry and onto the twitching frond of several end-of-year charts.
As ‘Dead Air’ formed a musty hue, Mordant skirmished once more with Skull Disco player-manager Shackleton on the lauded wand of MM014 – ‘I Want To Eat You’/'Hummdrumm’. This split double ‘A’-side 10″ fused farm-reared grime with a pulsating Balearic ode to Elmyr de Hory, a sumptuous sump of plastic which met with a visceral punter’s tumult.
Weaving askance this bulbous period came an approach from the esteemed library music publishers Boosey & Hawkes. An eventual commission bore nuff spore in the shape of 22 tracks for a Film & TV industry-only album entitled ‘The Drone Continuum’, released via the Strip Sounds imprint (STRP03).
Summer 2007 found MM sifting and sandblasting the remains of this furtive experiment to release 40 malformed off-cuts under the name ‘Carrion Squared’ (MM015). As a simultaneous broadside, ‘The Tower’ loomed once more through parts VIII-XVIII (MM016) and an arch misted arch’s exit into the moss of Lord Klattr’s metallurgically walled meadow.
Mordant finally pissed out of another rhomboid year with a sprawling digest of numbers from misplaced magus, Dennis Greenidge. This 66 track binge entitled ‘Giant Man, Giant Plan’ (MM017) funnels years of prancing at the rear of the songwriter’s art from a specialist in portraiture & game design, as well as lopsided MC-ing. As a buttress to this emission, MM mounted the mp3 hind in earnest with the first of a slow-release series of ‘Travelogues’, the opening gambit being ‘A Beautiful Vesta’, the sound of a no-frills no-fun day-trip to Avebury, Wilts with Commodore Meniscus.
Early 2008 has seen the ‘Travelogues’ Datsun wheezing on via two more instalments, comprising a detour through a departure lounge lunge in Singapore (MM019 – ‘S’porchard’) and back home to the fallout of a windswept Kent (MM020 – ‘Mum Prepared The Piano (Agony & Ivory)’).
