Mordecai "What Is Art" 7"
Side A: Seeing In, What Is Art
Side B: Spite, What Is Over
The songs on this 7" are from two different sessions.
The songs "What is Art" and "Seeing In" were recorded around the summer of 2015. We had just returned to Montana from our first tour of the East. We had asked our friend Clark to record us in this pretty nice old studio space. He had a working reel to reel and a mixer with far too many channels and cords and such. This was the first time as a band that we were recorded by someone else on different equipment than a tascam 4 track and some damaged microphones. We set up our small practice amps and three piece drum set and proceeded in a pretty haphazard manner to spend about two weeks recording what turned into 8 or 9 songs. The bulk of these songs appear on the recently released Abstract Recipe record on Richie. These songs have the "classic" mordecai line-up Eli on Bass, Gavin on traps and myself on guitar and vocals playing live in the studio.
The songs "Spite" and "What is Over" were recorded at Gavin's house in Boise and in the living room of Bodish HQ in Butte contra-respectively, around the winter/spring 2016. The inspiration for "What is Over" comes from listening to a lot of Ego Summit and being relatively sick after drinking tequila for three days. The inspiration for "Spite" comes from reflecting on how much we would like the world to "fit" into the categories that we bring to it and the insane and unjustified anger we feel when said expectations are not fulfilled. During both these sessions we started to deconstruct our musical gear as much as possible. Spite in particular derives much of its charm from the integration of a cooking pan into our drum gear. Soon to replace any drum we would ever need. These songs feature the truncated mordecai line up of Gavin and myself alternating between various instruments, with Elijah's ghost there for spiritual guidance/taste. In this incarnation Gavin usually plays the melodic guitar while I spray dissonant guitar sporadically over the song.