A Year of Music

Mordant Music’s Dead Air is too much to absorb on a first hearing. It meanders through a multitude of electronic music styles and sounds vaguely like a wildly overdone soundtrack for a very technical documentary about the history of British television: many of the tracks feature semi-disconnected bits of media-obsessed narration (by Philip Elsmore, a former continuity announcer for Thames TV), the beats and synths sound like a cross between Boards of Canada and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and there’s a dystopian haze and confusion hanging over the music that suggests the grimy, egalitarian vibe of 1970s instructional films.

Mordant Music seem to have a symbiotic relationship with the idea of the library music they occasionally make for Boosey & Hawkes (as Boomkat astutely notes, Carrion Squared sounds and is put together exactly like a library music album). I would say they remind me of Various Production (who have a similar take on off-kilter electronic music, and with similar detours into glitchy folk and broad pop gestures) if it weren’t for their obsessive focus on mass media and their nostalgic use of raw analog synthesis. They’re using similar elements towards different ends. There’s a dialectic at work in their music that defies easy characterization; their relationship with the old television they base their work on isn’t really direct imitation, satire, or any other kind of ironized commentary. Dead Air sounds like the soundtrack to a dream about television.