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This debut album from Ian Hicks of Portion Control 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 latest album "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, populist notions of "the scene" nor are they wasted with 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. PETER MARKS |
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