Baron Mordant and Admiral Greyscale (who were the duo behind Mordant Music at the time) had previously been infiltrating the cultural landscape through a number of mediums: singles, EP's, View-Master slides and mini-albums presented in a petri dish were some of the clever ways through which they communed with the public. A small, tuned in public, that is. 'Dead Air' changed all of that irreversibly.This debut album from Ian Hicks and his comrade is best listened to with minimal background noise, or if absolutely necessary, an all-encompassing set of headphones so not one iota eludes you. The more surrealistic tendencies of Portion Control's "Well-Come" come to mind and I could sum up what this album is to me with the following phrase: through the eye of the onion. This is a reference to the cinematic brilliance PC achieved with their "Onion-Jack" serial on "Well-Come". Beyond the outer regions of Portion Control's aural nebula, exist the Baron and the Admiral. This music is cerebrally contusing! Some tracks are placid, dreamlike affairs like "Plant Room" and others, yes well, others such as "Interdependent Authority" exude a technologically nightmarish bomb blast aftermath that is pure menace. No, that was not meant to be clever.Mordant Music are not aimed at a dance floor, they do not concern themselves with charts and populist notions; nor are they interested in making publicity courting videos. Fans of PC (or even Solar Enemy as I am) would do well to look into this exercise in electro couture. The narrative, provided by Thames TV legend Philip Elsmore, is perfectly timed to follow this most unusual of audio broadcast. At times heartfelt (when discussing his own origins in the business of television) and indignantly throwing a spanner into the entire mechanism (such as the time he makes no apologies for the content of the program and suggests if one cannot handle it, they'd best look elsewhere).Veering wildly from synthesized nihilism into some otherworldly segues and off into clicks, beeps... the sounds of machinery collapsing under the strain of visionary excess, this is Mordant Music.Keep your nerve.

I found Mordant Music through a link from a forum to their Myspace page. The extracts their got me intrigued, and I lined it up to buy from Boomkat. Now I have it, it's a very interesting release. The packaging is excellent (yet can be troublesome if you're playing it in the car, etc.) and I was looking forward to listening to it. Mordant Music present Dead Air as a string of broadcasts introduced by Philip Elsmore, an ex-TV announcer for various regional channels. This gives the release a strange, almost fake somehow, feel to it. The tracks themselves cover a wide range of genres, but I feel that the better ones on here are too short, and the more boring tracks are too long. Also, having twenty tracks on the album does seem to be too much. I find the middle of the album (which sounds very much like The Orb) a little boring with only Philip Elsmore's voice backed by some synth experiments. However, the start and end of the CD are excellent. Fallen Faces is definitely the best track on here, but if you think that the album is going to consist of the powerful synth-pop of that track, then don't go for this, but buy the 7" picture disc instead. This is a good album in my opinion, but I do feel that parts should have been cut out, and others extended. Buy it if you want something that will change from IDM to electro to synth pop to grime.