Since being launched in 2001 by two mysterious London-based characters calling themselves Baron Mordant and Admiral Greyscale, Mordant Music has built a cult following for its mysterious excursions into the darkest reaches of electronica, injecting a healthy blast of lunacy and maintaining the record collecting tradition with multi-hued vinyl and extravagantly strange packaging, catalogue numbers even given to badges and graphic prints. The mood throughout this collection of singles and unreleased tracks from the last few years is relentlessly unhinged and beautifully weird. Tracks are divided between the likeminded Skull Disco label’s dubstep renegade Shackleton [all huge bass, unearthly melodies and micro-percussive sandstorms], Vindicatrix [whose super-dubbed mini-masterpiece Private Places sounds like it was recorded in a radioactive sewer] and Mordant Music themselves, who whip up new strains of alien space-funk on ‘The Hauntological Song’ while unleashing a raging torrent of screaming racket on the ‘previously disabled’ ‘Marston Moore’. The ominous rumbles, spectral momentum and disembodied crooning of ‘Olde Wobbly’ and ’24 Million Or Sell Neverland’ sound like nothing else out there, except maybe early Mothers Of Invention [although the cavernous dub sensibility and ever-present mischief sometimes recall The Orb]. For a genre which often takes itself too seriously while rapidly losing individuality through digitalisation, Mordant are an eccentric blessing.
5 Out Of 5
Reviewed By: Kris Needs