Earlier this year I issued the first Products by Mortality Tables, the collaborative project that I’ve been working on since lockdown.

The ethos of Mortality Tables is simple – I come up with an idea and invite infinitely more creative people to respond to those ideas. You can read more about the genesis of the project in an interview I did recently for Pooleyville.city here.

For the second sound-based Mortality Tables Product, I wrote what can loosely be describe as a manifesto for the project. I was recorded reading the manifesto at the artLab by Gareth Jones, after which sound responses to the text were recorded. One version of ‘On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives’ was by the anonymous sound artist venoztks, and the other was by Erasure‘s Vince Clarke. The digital single can be found at the Mortality Tables Bandcamp page or on Apple Music, Spotify etc.

To accompany Vince’s version of the track, film-maker Marco Porsia made a short film. Marco will be familiar to Mute fans as the director of the acclaimed Swans documentary Where Does A Body End?. His excellent Rema Rema film What You Could Not Visualise arrives in 2023. You can watch Marco’s brilliant film for ‘On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives (Vince Clarke Version)’ below.

More Mortality Tables Products will arrive in 2023, including a collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner. To get announcements about new Products, click on the ‘follow’ button on the Bandcamp page or our Instagram.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Mortality Tables