Mordant Music has teamed up with the British Film Institute for a new DVD release, MisinforMation.

The DVD is made up footage sourced from the BFI-managed archive of the Central Office of Information. The COI is the UK government’s marketing and communications agency, founded in 1946 and responsible for, among other things, the commission and dissemination of public information films.

Baron Mordant was given access to the archive – “hundreds of musty time-coded VHS compilations”, according to the BFI – and invited to compile and edit his favourites, creating new soundtracks to accompany them. Here’s his own explanation of the process:

“The cordial gentlemen of the BFI led me blindfolded onto the roof at the BFI HQ Stephen Street and left me propped against an obsolete Steenbeck with instructions to sniff my way to the nearest nitrate room, ruMMage through the VHS mountain and not leave until I’d misinformed at least one reel of usable DVD in earnest…in the midst of ruptured telecine transfers and squealing reels a selection of COI films, redolent to my youth, unearthed me and I duly smeared them with my detritus…I imagined sounds & characters leaving one film & cropping up in another and that’s the way it eventually spooled…a narrative manifested itself and ‘a return to the sea’ would appear to be the iMMediate answer for future spores…”

The results are what constitute MisinforMation, officially released on Deember 6 but already available to preorder here.

Like their allies over at Ghost Box, Mordant Music and the artists signed to the label of the same nave have long been rummaging through the bargain basement of the British popular imagination and moulding their findings into strange new shapes, so this project seems like a very natural undertaking.