The many-textured musical mind of Mark Pritchard - part one
To be eclectic in music is to be fundamentally inefficient. Musicians would, in the mind of the algorithm, be far better off relentlessly pushing one particular sound and reaping the rewards, rather than dotting their talents around the genre spectrum.
And yet I have always been in awe of musicians who really spread their wings. It doesn’t seem to happen that often. Most musicians stay in their lane - all the more so in electronic music - with the most radical departure being an ambient opening to their new album of relentless tech-house beats.
Not so Mark Pritchard, a recent Line Noise podcast guest and a musician I have considerable listening history with. In fact, if we go back to Shaft’s 1991 rave hit Roobarb & Custard - something I imagine Pritchard would rather we didn’t but I find myself irresistibly drawn to - I have been listening to his music for 34 years, which is a head-spinning amount of time to consider.
In 2025, Pritchard is set to be bigger than ever by virtue of releasing a new album with Thom Yorke, the kind of collaboration that can only draw headlines. That, in fact, is why I recently spoke to Mark for Line Noise. And it was during this conversation that I realised that many people listening to the duo’s incredible album, Tall Tales, won’t really know who Mark Pritchard is or why they should listen to him.
(Given that the first time I heard Radiohead was when they supported the Frank and Walters at the Norwich Waterfront on September 21 1992, I have a collective 67 years of listening to Pritchard and Yorke’s music. That’s a lot.)
This disconnect is inevitable. But new listeners really should get to know Mark Pritchard, who is one of the most inspiring multi-genre producers ever to have put his fingers to a synth. At last count, Pritchard has mastered rave, techno, ambient, house, jungle, footwork, grime and basically everything in between.
Alongside Tom Middleton, he was half of Global Communication, a duo who were responsible for possibly my favourite ambient album of all time, 76:14, as well as a couple of the greatest deep house tunes of the 90s. The duo also pioneered shoegaze electronica, via their remixes of Slowdive and Chapterhouse; released essential air-y jungle on LTJ Bukem’s revered Good Looking label; and went electro as Jedi Knights.
Pritchard later teamed up with Steve Spacek as Africa Hitech, for a musical mix inspired by the influence of African and Jamaican migrants on British club music; and he has released collaborations with grime icons Trim and Wiley. More recently, Pritchard has recorded a series of fantastic solo albums, on which he has collaborated with the likes of Linda Perhacs and The Space Lady.
Pritchard is diversity and exploration personified. And so it is pleasure to presents 10 tracks that might - just might - serve as introduction to a producer of rare calibre.
Shaft - Bolt Beats (1991)
Pritchard would probably best remember Roobard & Custard as the chart hit that gave him enough money to give up the day job. And, in truth, this cartoon rave song, which samples Johnny Hawksworth’s dayglo heavy metal theme from the much-loved British cartoon Roobard & Custard, isn’t really representative of Pritchard’s work.
Then again, it’s not a bad tune either. Pritchard and his musical partner in Shaft, Adrian Hughes, chose one of the best children’s TV theme tunes to sample and the song also has a rushing keyboard line, sly Kraftwerk sample, hooligan bass and a well chosen vocal from the Jamaica Girls’ rave-sample-staple On The Move. If you took out Hawksworth’s Roobard & Custard theme tune, you’d still have a pretty banging rave number, albeit probably not one that would have hit number seven in the UK charts.
The real rave gem, however, is Bolts Beats, which appeared on the B side of Roobard & Custard’s major label re-release. It is a fabulous piece of work, a growling, acid breakbeat number not entirely unlike Aphex Twin’s similarly grimy Digeridoo, a track that suggest wild nights out in the mystical country, where no one can hear you rave - but no one’s coming to your aid, either.
2. Chapterhouse / Global Communication - Alpha Phase (1993)
The success of Roobard & Custard enabled Pritchard to go into music full time. By this point he had met Tom Middleton at a club in Taunton, Somerset, with the two bonding over a love for Detroit techno, Chicago house, indie guitars, synth pioneers and richly melodic classical composers like Debussy and Chopin.
In 1992, Pritchard and Middleton launched their Evolution label, which debuted with the duo’s first release as Global Communication, the Keongaku EP. They made their breakthrough the following year with Ob-Selon Mi-Nos (Re-Painted By Global Communication), their remix of a track by Mystic Institute, which would eventually become Global Communication’s classic 14:31 (more of which later).
Opportunity came knocking, however, in the unlikely form of shoegaze band Chapterhouse, whose guitarist Andrew Sherriff asked Pritchard and Middleton to remix the new Chapterhouse album Blood Music in its entirety. The result would be given away as a bonus disc with the initial CD release of Blood Music, which was the kind of chart-busting move that labels were doing a lot of in the early 1990s.
The result of this seemingly inauspicious experiment was Pentamerous Metamorphosis, perhaps the defining work of shoegaze electronica, a short-lived but fertile genre of music, where guitar wash and mumbled vocals met the more laidback side of electronic trickery and got on fabulously.
Chapterhouse afforded Global Communication considerable leeway in their work, with Pentamerous Metamorphosis not so much a remix album, in the end, as an entirely new album foraged and forged from Chapterhouse’s work. “They gave us the stems of all the parts and there was no straight brief,” Pritchard told me back in 2020, when I wrote sleeve notes for the reissue of 76:14. “He [Sherriff] was pretty much saying, ‘Take what you want. Even if it is just a very incidental part that we didn’t really make a main theme of. Just take this stuff and make whatever you want.’ Which doesn’t really happen.”
You can find Chapterhouse’s work in Pentamerous Metamorphosis if you know where to listen. But it is infinitely better to sit back and enjoy the gorgeously sprawling work. The album is all gold - but why not start at the beginning with Alpha Phase, the opening song, where the duo’s astral synth trails eventually explode with the ecstatic energy of a collapsing star? Global Communication’s 76:14 is renowned as the duo’s classic album - but Pentamerous Metamorphosis is probably its equal.
3. Slowdive - In Mind (The 147 Take) (1993)
Slowdive’s embrace of ambient electronics on their Souvlaki and Pygmalion albums is well known. Less celebrated - but even better - is the 5 EP, which the group released at the end of 1993, after Souvlaki’s critical bath. Three of the four tracks on 5 - In Mind, Good Day Sunshine and Missing You - consist largely of synth washes and echoing drum machines, with Rachel Goswell adding vocals on In Mind.
The accompany remix EP is the gem, however. Bandulu’s take on In Mind is interesting enough, adding electro beats and sub bass; but Pritchard and Middleton (operating as Reload, another of their many aliases) knock the ball out of the orbit on their remix of the same song, offering up the celestial combination of Goswell’s vocal and Global Communication’s beatific production skills, all twinkling synths and scuba dive drums. The result is probably my favourite song in the whole Slowdive cannon, although it does make me sad that the two forces would never again join together.
4. Global Communication - 14:31 (1994)
14:31 might last 14 and a half minutes but it could happily run to triple or even quadruple that, so utterly enveloping is its sound. As mentioned above, the track has its origins in Ob-Selon Mi-Nos, a song by Mystic Institute, AKA Mark Pritchard and Paul Kent, to which Pritchard invited Tom Middleton to contribute a melody.
This melody, it turned out, was so strong that Pritchard scrapped his and Kent’s initial work and rebuilt Ob-Selon Mi-Nos around Middleton’s contribution. And you can see why: 14:31 has that note-perfect mixture of melancholy and euphoria that the best ambient music does so well, an Escher's staircase melody that seems to climb and fall at the same time, yet so natural you would swear it has always existed, just waiting to be beamed down to earth to make us all fight away the tears with a chill-out room breather. (A little like The Sabres of Paradise’s classic Smokebelch II - but way better.)
14:31 really is that beautiful. And to this, the duo add the most ambient of all noises: the ticking of a grandfather clock, a sound both melancholy and consolatory and - as I wrote in the sleeve notes - “a reminder that life goes on, even as we are wrapped in our own little bubbles of interests and preoccupations”.
14:31 is the second track on 76:14, the debut Global Communication album, which was released in 1994, cementing Pritchard and Middleton’s place in the ambient techno firmament forevermore, a work that rivalled the best of Eno, Aphex Twin and The Orb. It is an eternal record, one that I want to listen to from now until forever.
5. The Chameleon - Links (1995)
If more producers don’t make jungle it is because jungle is really hard to make, a genre in thrall to its own forensic technical abilities. Which makes it all the more amazing that Pritchard and Middleton, just one year after destroying the ambient world with 76:14, released one - and one only - stunning jungle 12 inch, on LTJ Bukem’s none-more-credible Looking Good Records.
The duo were always huge music fans and, in the early to mid 90s, they viewed jungle as the most interesting music coming out of the UK. They also saw a link between the sonic spectrum of jungle and their work with Global Communication on 76:14, with both relying heavily on sub bass and huge low end. So maybe Good Looking, with its focus on airy and yet bass-heavy ambient(ish) jungle, was an obvious place for the duo to land.
All the same, the standard of the two tracks on the Links EP is incredible, as if Pritchard and Middleton sauntered into the top echelons of jungle production for two perfect songs then decided to leave it there. The vocal-led Just Close Your Eyes & Listen, on the AA side, is wonderful; but the real classic is Links on side A, a perfectly judged epic of teary synth wash and jazz-y samples that graced the first, the essential, Logical Progression compilation, holding its ground among legendary jungle tracks like Bukem’s own Demon's Theme and Music.
… And here ends part one of my guide to many-textured musical mind of Mark Pritchard. I hope you enjoyed it. Part two comes next week. Why not sign up to the Line Noise substack to get it direct to your email?
Some listening
No More Words initially appeared on Carl Craig’s first release under his own name, back in 1991, and yet it sounds immaculately modern some 34 years on. The track’s rhythm has subtlest trace of a breakbeat to it, courtesy (I think) of a tiny lift from the Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache, which sets it apart brilliantly from the techno horde, while the melody is warm, inviting and intriguing. The track is getting its first digital release as part of the soundtrack to the the upcoming documentary, Desire: The Carl Craig Story, which makes me happy because Carl Craig - of all Detroit producers - definitely merits a documentary.
You suspect that gyrofield neither knows, nor gives a toss, if people consider their work to be drum & bass. Akin, the latest in a long line of storming singles for a variety of on-point labels, slinks along on a rhythm that suggests someone familiar with - but not that bothered about - the rules of D&B, its combination of airy melody and dubby effects like somebody opening a window in the musty bedroom of teenage jungle and realising the sun is shining bright.
For personal reasons I am very keen on a Catalan / Irish crossover like Cushla, who bill themselves as “a dynamic artistic collective, a fusion of talent from Barcelona and Ireland”, bringing together the art of sean-nós singing with contemporary electronics. I am very far from an expert on sean-nós singing but - on the evidence of the band’s recently released debut album Tech Duinn (which roughly translates, I believe, as “tech for us”) - it sounds a lot (to the uneducated ear) like a clubbed up and eased out take on Lankum. Which is a pretty fantastic, unusual place to me. Album highlight 7 Years is gorgeous.
Jorja Smith - The Way I Love You
Well I certainly didn’t have bassline soul next up on my Jorja Smith bingo card but that’s what we’ve got from the open-minded English singer, after (checks notes) a Brandy-sampling collab. with AJ Tracey and a festive cover of East 17’s Stay Another Day. Actually, you could definitely put together a soulfully banging playlist of Jorja Smith’s best dance tracks after Little Things and some essential remixes, which is a mark of the singer’s excellent versatility. And The Way I Love You, insouciant bass-line wobbling personified, would be right in there.
The playlists
“We don't stop playlisting because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playlisting.” So said George Bernard Shaw and who am I to disagree with the great man? Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest (unharried by time). Do follow them for all the best new music.