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.

While nursing my newborn obsession with all things Mordant Music, I appear to have found a whole new rabbit hole to fall down.

When I was poking around Boomkat looking at Mordant Music’s releases, this little bit of the Carrion Squared listing jumped out at me:

Apparently made up of offcuts from a Boosey & Hawkes library music album which the duo of Baron Mordant and Admiral Greyscale were commissioned to produce, Carrion Squared is the perfect record for followers of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop desperate for a fix.

I know a little bit about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Delia Derbyshire, White Noise, the Dr. Who theme song, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc), but what’s this “Boosey & Hawkes”? What’s “library music”?

It turns out that knowing a little about stock photography and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is extremely helpful when wrapping one’s head around the wide world of production music. Most photographers and designers know about royalty-free creative asset companies like Corbis, Getty Images and (on the hipsterish end) Veer. You want a stock photo of, say, a generically beautiful vaguely ethnic professional woman staring off into space while holding chic glasses in one hand in front of a blurry sunlit background, you go plug keywords into a search engine, add two or three images to your shopping cart, and buy a license to use them in your annual report or douche ad and you’re good to go. I have more than a couple friends who have sold pictures to stock photography agencies. It’s decent money if you have a knack for thinking like a corporate art director.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was the department responsible for music and sound effects for use in the BBC’s shows, and the reason so much of the stuff that came out of the BBC in the 60s and 70s sounded so futuristic and awesome is entirely due to their crazed improvisers, who were capable of extremely creative work on a tiny budget. Douglas Adams is funny and all, but without the Radiophonic Workshop (and, oddly enough, the Eagles, whose “Journey of the Sorceror” was the Hitchhiker’s Guide theme song) there wouldn’t have been a show.

Boosey & Hawkes is a company that allows production agencies that don’t have the BBC’s license fees to outsource their production music needs. They license music and musical cues to production houses for use in advertising and documentary work, mostly. Music libraries intend for their material to be licensed, so they make it straightforward for producers and broadcasters to work with them – instead of talking to separate publishers and labels and performance rights organizations, everybody just talks to the music library. If you’re making a David Attenborough documentary about cormorants on the Isle of Man, it’s a lot more cost-effective to license a couple discs from a music library than to send a production assistant on a wild goose chase to nail down all the rights to Coldplay’s “Clocks” or whatever.

Boosey & Hawkes own one of the largest production music libraries in the world, and my awesome discovery for the evening is that they’ve put a nice search UI on the front of it, and you can listen to pretty much their entire catalog online. The clips tend to be under two minutes and are organized by concept, description and keyword. Plug in “dark aggressive” and you get back four tracks, at least one of which is a brilliant miniature darkcore epic (Nick Tidy’s “Bad Situation”). The way everything has to be squeezed down to its essence brings back the old days of rave for me, when every song mutated every 4.7 seconds and there were more ideas per track than there are on most modern mix CDs.

In fact, most of the stuff I listened to tonight was pretty good. I’d pretty much like to have a copy of everything on Drone Continuum, which contains most of the Mordant Music tracks made for Boosey & Hawkes (one of which has the delightful title that heads this post). I’m a sucker for drone music to begin with, and the utterly synthetic short songs are tasty bits of ear candy. The combination of short tracks and analog synthesis also makes it sound startlingly like a less damaged version of Omit, and Omit is one of the most compulsively listenable purveyors of weird music out there. Which also helps explain why I respond so strongly to Mordant Music, actually, because they definitely have the Omit vibe, especially on Carrion Squared.

Writing this blog is leading me into interesting terrain, as this recent batch of additions to my library shows:

• The second half of Mordant Music's The Tower has been banging its way into my head far enough to make me take a leap of faith and buy the rest of their diverse and aggressively eccentric catalog.
• I realized that I was entitled to download a bunch of Severed Heads' Op series outtakes due to having bought Op 2 a while ago, so I grabbed those.
• Talking about Surgeon's awesome DJ sets reminded me to check his site to see if he had a more recent set than the ones I have, and indeed he did.
• Finally, I've been accumulating a pile of crud from Mutant Sounds, so I added all that to my iPod so I could get to know it better. There is some amazing music that's been dug out of obscurity by that blog:
  • Tappi Tíkarrass, Björk's first foray into the post-punk sound that she refined in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, before she decided to become the most avant garde pop star ever;
  • a bunch of long out of print Hirsche Nacht aufs Sofas (HNAS) records from a parallel universe where Nurse With Wound were actually German, instead of merely being obsessive fans of Krautrock;
  • a whole pile of European art-damaged gothic post punk (Claustrofobia, Dark White, Epitaphe, Tango Luger);
  • some early records by the fucking tremendous Wall of Voodoo, whose Call of the West combines the miserably American, empathy-drenched humanity of Raymond Carver or Robert Stone with Ennio Morricone's expansive sound and Kraftwerk's electronic pulse – anyone who thinks the Wall of Voodoo story starts and ends with "Mexican Radio" is very much missing out;
  • a couple completely sui generis Japanese electronic / prog / jazz / avant garde records from the 70s, one of which was a collaboration between most of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the one Japanese Pop artist whose work I know well (Tadonori Yokoo – there was a semi-exhaustive survey of his work up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when I was there);
  • and a pile of random singles from the Mutant Sounds archives, including an awesomely out of character John Duncan track and a deeply weird couple of tracks by Duppi, a Japanese band I'd never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Mutant Sounds is so awesome that there's no way it's going to last.

Here's the full list. I've appended links to sources for most everything. Downloading the albums posted by Mutant Sounds requires you to deal with quasi-filesharing services like Rapidshare, Zshare, Bodongo and Megaupload; these services' wack-assed stabs at business models make getting at the archives a pain, but I assure you that if you like boundary-pushing music, it's worth jumping through the requisite hoops. A lot of this stuff is begging to be put back into print, if only by somebody like Hyped2Death.

• Claustrofobia: Arrebato (Fobia) [ms]
• Dark White: The Grey Area (private) [ms]
• Epitaphe: Syndrome (private) [ms]
• HNAS: Melchior (United Dairies / DOM) [ms]
• HNAS: Music für Schuhgeschafte (Dragnet) [ms]
• HNAS: Willkür Nach Noten (Dragnet) [ms]
• Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo: Cochin Moon (King) [se]
• Mordant Music: Baud With You / Shot Away (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Carrion Squared (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Fallen Faces / Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Filthy Danceheng (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Petri-Dish (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: The Tower: Parts I-XVII (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Travelogues: A Beautiful Vesta (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Severed Heads: Op 1 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.3 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.9 (sevcom)
• Surgeon: Neck Face (www.dj-surgeon.com)
• Tango Luger: s/t (Invisible) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Bítið Fast í Vítið (Spor) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Miranda (Gramm) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Ring of Fire / The Morricone Themes (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Tsutsui Yasutaka & Yamashita Yosuke: IE (Fiasco) [ms]
• whacked-out singles from the Mutant Sounds archives:
  • Drinking Electricity: Shaking All Over / China (pop:aural)
  • Duppi: Velvet Night / はつねつのみやこ (Night Gallery)
  • Électric Max Band: Mick and Max / Knives, Feathers and Fire (Reprise)
  • Electro Static Cat: Lethologica (Freedom in a Vacuum)
  • Eskaton: Musique Post-Atomique (Eskaton)
  • John Duncan / Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann: The Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem / Old Hive (Die Stadt)
  • Kevin Dunn: Nadine / Oktyabriana (dB Records)
  • v/a: Earcom 3 (Fast Product)

Stuck in my head this morning: Mordant Music’s “XII – On Cracked Hooves” from The Tower: VIII-XVIII, a song that somehow manages to remind me of Swans, “Small Time Shot Away”-era Massive Attack, and most of the good bits of mid-90s ambient techno. Mordant Music are really growing on me, to the point that I just went to Boomkat and bought the rest of their catalog as digital downloads. So far I am not disappointed. It’s all very different.

Ursula K Le Guin, a very wise author, critic, feminist, anthropologist, and all-round God Who Walks, once wrote a spirited essay entitled Genre: A Word Only the French Could Love. At some point, I’ll discuss this essay in depth, especially as it pertains to music, but for now, the title is enough. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my time on earth trying to file the art I like into little boxes that are partitioned into subboxes that have little halo-like graphs of signifiers and tags rotating around them in a complexified hyperdimensional paraspace. It’s always been lots of fun, but I eventually decided I wasn’t sure how edifying it all was.

These days I’ve shifted to cleaving to another notion stolen from literary critics, which is that an interesting piece of art is a finished work that has something wrong with it. This notion of the problematic comes to me from a quote of Randall Jarrell’s (“a novel is a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it”) cited in an interview with Samuel R Delany, who was using it to point out that even The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin’s most successful novel – was flawed, but it really gets to the heart of what is special about the music that has stayed with me the longest: it exerts a kind of Lovecraftian hold over my imagination because there’s something going on that just doesn’t quite work, signs of a reach exceeding a grasp.

Smoosh all that together and you get Mordant Music’s The Tower – Parts VIII-XVIII. They don’t seem to have any idea what they want to be when they grow up. There’s some bathtub electronic experimentalism in the vein of early Tangerine Dream, a hint of Mogwai’s bombastic instrumental post rock, some bass-heavy dubstep miserablist isolationism (Shackleton once put out a record on Mordant Music’s eponymous label), a lot of Glenn Branca’s rigorous and tendentious guitar drones, but none of it’s in the service of any kind of structured program. The net effect is as if they’ve somehow captured on disc music in the raw, a protean cloud of sound, but it’s more beautiful and affecting than most of the outsider electronica it superficially resembles. It’s remarkable, and surprisingly accessible, even though it’s far from perfect. It would be far less interesting if it were perfect.