Ecka Mordecai

Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. 

Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.  

Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraint and somewhat undoes the limits of genre, allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes composed from soundscape listening, or Promise & Illusion, the album in which Ecka explores internal emotional states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (charniére). 

In recent years Ecka has performed regularly alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ex-Easter Island Head and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, and inside a Berlin wasserturms, amongst others. 

She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019). 

Her debut solo album Promise & Illusion was released on Cafe Oto’s OTOROKU label in 2022, with previous collaborative projects put out by Faraway Press and Another Timbre 

Ecka works a day job as a sound technician at University of the Arts London and is also the inventor of the Eggflute, a sounding instrument made from hollowed eggshell. 

https://www.eckamordecai.info/

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Ecka showed us her egg flutes, something I had not seen before and for good reason as Ecka says that she ‘may’ be the inventor of such instruments as she couldn’t find any existing examples of

I listened to Ecka’s album Promise & Illusion when it came out last year and was impressed. I enjoyed the first track, la charniere, pt. 1 in particular.

At the time I didn’t have any background on the piece, and with very little knowledge of French, did not know the link to the idea of a creaking door hinge. I think that at the time I instead thought of the creaking that plays during the piece as that from floorboards. I really enjoyed the sounds of footsteps and movement in the track, as it made me imagine a virtualised place where the music was occurring.

Study of a flame also made me think of candle light, the properties of candles as a performance and will maybe relate it to my game.

I also found the link between scent and sound to be interesting, both in their spacial and temporal nature. The lingering of scent, the idea of noise and some scents being superior to others is maybe similar to the properties of soundscapes.