Biography
Mordant Music was the project of British artist Baron Mordant (Ian Hicks) that lasted from 2000 to 2019. For part of that time he was joined by Admiral Greyscale (Gary Mills), who left somewhere before the 2009 song collection SyMptoMs. Hicks has stated that he will continue to make music.
Notable releases by the Mordant Music project were the 2006 album Dead Air, The Tower trilogy (2005 to 2009) and the 22 part Travelogues series that ran from 2007 to 2019.
Mordant Music shared similar hauntology aesthetics with the roster of the Ghost Box label (on which it has released a single together with Belbury Poly):
Electronic music flitting between eerie and whimsy, baleful and jaunty; discernible influences from library music (the band have apparently done some work for Boosey & Hawkes)… then there’s a trace of the Skam/Boards of Canada end of things…. and when it gets more beat-y and driving, early 90s UK techno: Ubik and Holy Ghost and stuff on Network and Outer Rhythm… pirate radio tunes before it all went totally breakbeat… the Survivors theme tune: that shudder-ripple of electronic sound just when the bacterial-warfare scientist drops the vial of plague…. and ooh, that’s descending reverb-trail, that’s from Another Green World, “Sombre Reptiles” maybe … and the clincher for the Ghostbox comparison is the involvement of Philip Elsmore, whose warm, soothing tones will be recognizable to anyone who grew up in the UK in the 70s, on account of his being a continuity announcer for all the ITV regional franchises like Border, Tyne Tees, Southern and Thames… the mysterious Baron Mordant informs: “we tracked him down and interviewed him on the South Bank…he was delighted and mildly bemused to provide our continuity… originally it was slated to involve continuity only but the actual interview yielded so much that we cut and pasted him all o'er the tapestry… he was an abbo perb gent on all fronts”.
Mordant Music was also the name of the label run by Ian Hicks, which besides releasing the material of the project Mordant Music, also released other artists such as Shackleton, Tod Dockstader, Ekoplekz, Pyramids of Space, Leyden Jars, Glass Isle, Some Truths, Sexton Ming, Vindicatrix and Thanet. The label was also discontinued in 2019.
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