“What attracted me to synthesizers in the first place was the Buckminster Fuller idea of doing more with less.” David Borden(1)

David Borden formed Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company as an electronic ensemble in May 1969. With the encouragement and blessing of Bob Moog himself, Borden began to explore the possibilities of the Moog Synthesiser for making minimal process music.

The fact that Mother Mallard’s were the first all synthesiser group, looked after, cajoled and helped out and personally instructed by the king of parps and bleeps himself, Bob Moog, should prick up the ears of anyone interested in electronic music. By his own admission, Borden was the test idiot who, by his initial hopelessness at understanding electronics, caused Moog and his team to rethink and redesign his components and modules into more user-friendly forms.

This album is a collection of three pieces, two coming from Borden’s ‘The Continuing Story of Counterpoint’ which eventually stretched to twelve parts and was finally completed in 1987, and one, C‑A-G‑E composed in 1974 and influenced by Philip Glass and the new minimalism.

The sound of Mother Mallard’s is positioned, as you might expect, exactly between the New Classical of Steve Reich and Philip Glass and what we now recognise as the roots of techno in Kraftwerk and colleagues. Structurally, small blocks of notes play against each other gaining force be repetition and variation in drones. Sound wise, the clean, glassy synths feel futuristic and driving, soundtracks to autobahns or neon cities.

At times, it’s like The Human League playing with Michael Nyman, emotive held notes underpinning repetitive machine phrases, like robots crying themselves to sleep on an unmanned production line at night.

Anyone with even a passing interest in electronic music or minimal compositions will be delighted by the pieces on this album.

A real find, and an historic one.

(1) Interviewed by Piero Scaruffi 1999 http://​www​.scaruffi​.com/​a​v​a​n​t​/​b​o​r​d​e​n​.html