September 2025
Ecka Mordecai
Ecka Mordecai is an artist and musician based in London , a songwriter and performer who plays the cello, Ecka works across multiple disciplines, deconstructing traditional performance and songwriting structures. She has also a created a line of perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape. This conversation was recorded in Summer 2023 following her performance at Surfeit event at Cafe Oto, an evening where mutliple performers choose 1 piece to perform . It also came shortly followed the album launch for her release ‘promise and illusion’ on Cafe Oto’s Otoroku label. Both events are referenced during the conversation.
Ecka mordecai - Interview , after performing at Surfeit at Cafe Oto in 2023
Ecka - For the evening, I performed a piece from my recent album, Promise & Illusion, It's the final piece of the album, and I played the horse hair harp and really closely mic’d vocals.
Thames - I really enjoyed it because I really liked the melody. Where does something like more traditional melody fit into what you do?
Ecka - In the past, I was quite resistant to working with things that were obviously melodic. And then I asked myself why that was for quite a long time, why I was resistant to using obvious melody? Did I think that it was less clever, or less valuable, or less meaningful, or too obvious, or something like that? And I realized that it was just quite an honest expression of certain things that I was trying to say. I think melody is a really good way of saying certain things. And that piece itself is, for me, a really intimate piece. So in the performance that evening, I wanted to try and perform it in a way that was really, really intimate. Um, so I sat in the audience and with the harp. Quite discreetly, and I was the last person performing before the break, so I was in the dark. And then before I performed, I just switched the light on next to me, a little lamp, and started playing just with the audience. Really, I play. I tried to play as quietly as I possibly could.
Thames - When did you decide that you were gonna do it that way? Was just on the evening?
Ecka - Well, because you invited me to do something a bit different. And I thought, well, that's a very different approach for me. So I had planned in advance, I thought, I wanna try a piece that I've already written in a completely different way. It felt closer to how it was written in the first place because often when I write pieces, I'll sort of write them very intuitively when I'm playing around at home, and then they'll go through a process of refining them, and like recording and refining and changing. And that performance felt like it kind of swung back round to the starting point. And I actually think the performance wasn't a very good performance in terms of it being of a high quality but I think the feeling was the same as in the beginning, which for me is kind of more important.
Thames - Did you get nervous before performing? It was so intimate
Ecka - I usually don't but I did, I did it that time, I wasn't nervous beforehand, but as soon as I turned the light on, maybe because I could sense people's energy change because there was an element of surprise. I could feel people become a little bit alarmed by this sudden change of scene, change of focus. Everything else had been in the central part of the room. The piece was inspired, or I came up with it after going for a cycle ride in the summer during the lockdown, and I kind of got into this rhythm of cycling on my own, and when I got back from the cycle ride I made that harp peace. It just goes round and round. It doesn't change at all… The harp part, it's just variations on a really simple part.
Thames - It was really nice and I actually think it was really nice in the context of the evening, because it seemed quite different to everything else that had gone before.
Ecka - I was very happy when I saw that I was playing before the break. I do prefer to play in the middle of the night. I hate playing last, you just have to wait. It's funny that often the least experienced performers often go first, I think that's really cruel actually, because you can feel quite nervous because the audience haven't relaxed yet, they’re probably still feeling quite judgmental. They're probably still letting go of what they've been doing before. So the middle slot's always the best, cause you've kind of gaged how the audience reacted to the first one. They've relaxed a little bit. You've relaxed with them a little bit and then, but I just don't like going last,. And I also don't play very loud so it's often not appropriate for me to go last anyway. I used to be very particular about where i played because I don't like loud environments very much and I don't like chaos environments very much when I'm performing. I’ve stopped saying yes to so many gigs now because i was doing, one a week, and it was a bit much, a bit tiring.
Thames - Well thanks for saying yes to ours!
Ecka - To be honest, being offered a five minute set is really attractive!
Thames - Ha ha - Okay, I actually wanted to do 2 min performance time for each person rather than 5 .. but it was deemed a bit unworkable.
Ecka - I really like the idea. Did you ever see the series that David Toop and Rie Nakajima did called Sculpture?
Thames - Hmm , No
Ecka - For a few years, they were doing, maybe it was that you play for 20 min, but after 15 min, the next person comes in. So there was this kind of constant overlap, and there was never a break. Having the overlap there is something quite interesting.
Thames - Absolutely. I feel like there’s alot of scope for editing performance formats in an interesting way.
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Ecka - The album that I'd released was composed around, an ongoing thinking about, or concept of Charnier, which means hinge, or pivot in French. And it was a French writer that told me about this way of thinking about artists, or even movements of art, where there's, there's a point where it changes from one style or approach into another. And there's this little period in the middle, which is this like a charnier moment. When I was making the album, I was thinking about like, hinges and pivots and doors into things and I watched the documentary about Penny Slinger. She did a piece where she staged little performances in different rooms of an abandoned mansion, and they represented parts of the subconscious. It was quite sixties, you know a psychedelic type thing. Alsp I wrote that album during lockdown, and I was working in a big old factory studio complex, and no one else was there, I was actually working as the janitor so I was often going into these different spaces, recording myself, walking through the spaces. I was very, just very interested in hinges and entering different spaces, whether they're real or imagined.
So when it came to performing for the album launch, I wanted to explore what the hinges of a performer / audience divide might be, and what kind of ways we could get into each other's spaces. Sometimes people call this like the, all the, you know, the audience perform a divide but I was thinking of it less politically, I suppose, and a bit more creatively. Also actually, I was quite playful I induced my own applause as well. I went into the audience and induced my own applause because at Cafe Oto people are so polite, and they were really, wait and wait and wait to applaud and, and it can become so uncomfortable. So I thought I would even like start.
Thames - I remember that. Now!
Ecka - It's really cheeky.
Thames - No that's good, it's got a couple of levels to it.
Ecka - And also, you know, I really believe that the audience is an extremely important part of a performance. You know, the audience really make it, their behavior will change a performance completely because without them listening, I don't exist as the performer. If you're happy, I’m happy
