Mordançage - Mordançage (2018)

Mordançage: an alternative photographic process that alters silver gelatin prints to give them a degraded effect. The mordançage solution works in two ways: it chemically bleaches the print so that it can be redeveloped, and it lifts the black areas of the emulsion away from the paper giving the appearance of veils.

Mordançage creates a degraded appearance by physically altering the film. The excellent new collaboration from Andrew Tasselmyer and Tobias Hellkvist has experienced the same process of slow alteration, its grey-washed ambient emerging from the recesses of a dark room. Standing in a rectangle of light, its music is a new being that’s experienced its own process of development.

Behind the scenes, Mordançage’s original audio has been manipulated with subtlety, but its smooth ride belies a deeper process of titanic shifts, slow-moving arcs, and tweaks as soft as perfumed air. Its seven aural prints are bleached and edited until its slow drones show signs of glossy lamination, giving the segueing ambient the impression of glassy film.

In order to level-up and grow, people must go through their own trials of fire, roaming through dark tombs and dark rooms of the heart. And as the heart matures, the old self degrades. Mordançage’s elevation can only come about through its degradation, its apparent reduction heightening its quality rather than lessening it or turning it towards inferiority; music made perfect through its imperfections.

The sound design is womb-like, protecting and shielding the outer layers of its ambient troposphere, undergoing its own transformation as it leaves its original home behind and bends into the universal, the eternal. The grey passes, and in its place comes an ember of light. Mastered by Ian Hawgood, Mordançage is an excellent and all-encompassing ambient experience wherein the music is alive to the consistency of change, experiencing birth, subjugation, and decline on its way to new harbours.