Thursday 16 May 2019

Mordant Music - Mark Of The Mould



It says this:
'Baron Mordant bows out with MM’s last full-length emission as eMMplekz meet an EMS Synthi-A 'Out of Town'…IBM' at bandcamp. Does that even make sense? More to the point did you expect that to make sense?

While there may not be a forthcoming eMMplekz LP as far as I know, Mark Of The Mould is close enough. It's Baron doing his thing with words and voice, only this time he's doing the music himself. That's no bad bad thing either as this is the gentleman who brought us one of the few all time classic albums of the 00s in Dead Air (2006). He IS a sonic technician as well a man crazy with his use of language. Mordant has a sharp insight into the absurdity of his/our lives. The word onslaught isn't quite as dense as that on those four great eMMplekz LPs as there's breathing space with longer stretches of sonic interludes. Also included in the album release is an entire instrumental version of the LP. Which I must admit I haven't listened to yet so I dunno if he's remixed or dubbed the fuck out the original tunes.

Still Baron Mordant is our modern day melange of Ralph Hutter, John Cooper Clark and Ian Dury except his lyrics have been encrypted into a microchip and then spat out randomly and wrong. We get to picture his/our fragmented decaying minds and attention spans. A bunch of useless/mindless/alienated snippets are heard emanating from Mordant's vocal chords. There are snapshots depicting our ridiculous relationships with the modern urban world and all the weight of technology that goes with it. While Baron remains belligerent, he's slightly more focused, poetic and even melodic compared to eMMplekz like he was on some of the more song oriented tracks from Mordant Music. Musically there's a hundred years of electronic sonic debris spilling out of an infected computerised music machine. However there is no doubt Mark Of The Mould is a 21st Century concoction albeit of the delirious, combustible and noxious kind. Somewhere on the internet they laughably tagged this as dance music, I'd like to see you try.

'There's thousands of LPs like this.' says Ian but there isn't though that's why this is probably THE sonic document of 2019...well It's looking likely.

*I've written about Mordant previously here & there & everywhere & this one.

**Thanks to Simon @Blissblog for alerting me to this in the comments section of that Ekoplekz review.

***I'll probably do a proper review with a deeper dissection of the album at a later date, hey I'm only 10 listens in.


Thank you for the music IBM (Baron Mordant, Mordant Music and eMMplekz)

No comments:

Post a Comment