The many-textured musical mind of Mark Pritchard - part two

Plus Simo Cell, Tertia, Bruk Rogers and more

Odalisque sipping beer, Anna Jane McIntyre, etching, hand-colouring, gold & silver leaf.

This is part two of my guide to the brilliance of British producer Mark Pritchard, whose collaborative album with Thom Yorke has sent him skittering into the spotlight.

You can read part one - which includes tracks from Shaft, Chapterhouse, Reload, Global Communication and The Chameleon - here. And we move on to part two, where Pritchard initially continues as a duo with Tom Middleton, the other half of Global Communication, Reload, The Chameleon, Secret Ingredients etc.

6. Global Communication - The Way (Secret Ingredients mix) (1996)

How do you follow up one of the most dearly beloved, critically acclaimed and commercially successful ambient albums of all time? Well, what you absolutely don’t do, according to any kind of logical career plan, but what Global Communication very much did do, is release a 12 inch of abyss-deep and very funky house music, that may just about draw from the same melodic well as 76:14 - if you look at it funny and with a very open mind - but basically sounds very little like it. Especially at a time when house music and ambient tended to view each other with lingering suspicion.

OK, this line of succession wasn’t quite true. After 76:14 Global Communication released the deeply brilliant remix collection Remotion, which included a couple of their Chapterhouse remixes as well as the duo’s takes on songs by The Grid, Jon Anderson, Warp 69 and Nav Katze, as well as the shimmering Le Soleil et la Mer, taken from Reload’s 1993 album A Collection of Short Stories.

Also, if you’d been paying attention to Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton’s work as Secret Ingredients - essentially two fabulous deep house EPs on the duo’s Evolution label in 1996, entitled New York, New York and Chicago, Chicago - you would have known that house music was on their admirably open minds.

But still, no one was really ready for Global Communication to come strutting out of the traps with The Way / The Deep, a two-track 12 inch of ultra-deep house that spoke to the duo’s love for Todd Terry and New York, much as The Chameleon’s Links spoke to their admiration for LTJ Bukem and jungle.

They Way would become the duo’s biggest track internationally, slaying clubs from New York to Nantucket. And you can see why: it is gloriously addictive, a kind of velvety tough house track that teases and rewards at its own glorious whim, eventually unfurling the majestic vocal sample from Dexter Wansel’s R&B classic The Sweetest Pain that it has been tantalising you with all along. I remember hearing the song a lot in Paris in 1997 and there is something distinctly French Touch-y about The Way, like an English Mortorbass or Daft Punk’s Musique tidied up into an elegant suit.

7. Jedi Knights - Big Knockers (1997)

Mark Pritchard’s music has frequently come to me in unexpected ways, be it strapped to a Chapterhouse album as a bonus disc (see: Pentamerous Metamorphosis), mixed in towards the start of a seminal jungle mix (see: The Chameleon’s Links) or - in the case of Jedi Knights’ Big Knockers, opening possibly my favourite house music mix in the world: Derrick Carter’s The Cosmic Disco.

Jedi Knights - who, if I remember rightly, met their end when they remixed Depeche Mode and George Lucas saw their name on an LA billboard - were Pritchard and Middleton’s short-lived electro-ish, P Funk-esque project, intended as a way to bring humour back to the po-faced electronic music scene.

Big Knockers (with due apologies for the name) was released on the two-track The Big Ones EP (ditto) from 1997. It is basically one excellent, rattling house beat, all swinging hi hats, snare funk and sonically extreme bass drum, that the duo filter in and out of existence over its six minutes of life. That made it an extremely effective DJ tool and Carter takes advantage of this on The Cosmic Disco by sticking it under the accapella of Jepthé Guillaume’s The Prayer, the note-perfect mixture highlighting how exquisite the two elements are.

Pritchard and Middleton aren’t necessarily known for their drums. But Big Knockers shows they really should be. Incidentally, The Prodigy apparently sampled Jedi Knights’ Incredible Bongo Band cut up Air Drums From Outer Bongolia on their own Climbatize track, to the Knights’ evident displeasure.

8. Pritch & Trim - Stereotype (2011)

Global Communication went their separate ways (in a very amiable fashion) after the release of The Groove 12 inch in 1997, leaving the duo free to concentrate on their bewildering variety of other projects.

There followed an embarrassment of riches from Pritchard, with collaborative projects including Harmonic 33, Pulusha, Chaos & Julia Set, Africa HiTech, Vertigo, Use of Weapons, 28 East Boyz, as well as solo projects as Harmonic 313, Troubleman, N.Y Connection, Link and under his own name.

There is so much to check out from this period that it pains me to jump straight to 2011. But jump we must, for it was then that Pritchard made his leap into grime - or perhaps better said, to grime-ish production - courtesy of a two-track single, Stereotype / Kiss My Arse with the former Roll Deep MC Trim.

It was, perhaps, an odd time for Pritchard to make his grime debut, with the genre enduring one of its periodic lows, before Skepta, Stormzy etc lifted it up again in commercial and critical standing. But, well, timing be damned because Stereotype is an absolute gem. Pritchard’s work with Wiley the following year, Scar / Money Man, is closer to what you might expect of grime, thanks to the two songs’ tough electronic burbles and chirps; but Stereotypes’ waltzer-sick production and wobbling bass perfectly complement Trim’s nonchalant style and surreal lyrics, making you wish, once more, that Pritchard would do more of this stuff.

9. Africa HiTech - Out in The Streets (2011)

Of all Pritchard’s collaborations post Global Communication, Africa HiTech, his duo with Steve Spacek, had perhaps the greatest impact. The two musicians initially worked together on Pritchard’s 2004 Troubleman album Time Out of Mind and, after both men moved to Australia in the 2000s, they started to work together in earnest.

“Steve came up with the name Africa HiTech,” Pritchard told XLR8R in 2014. “We'd been talking a lot about how UK club music had been influenced by African and Jamaican people moving into the area - rhythm, feel, timing, the way bass lands - but then we kept it on an electronic, futuristic tip.”

This, you’ll agree, is an excellent idea for a musical project. And Africa HiTech’s debut / only album, 2011’s 93 Million Miles, was highly acclaimed for its dizzying mixture of everything from grime (the title track) to weirded-out jazz funk (Cyclic Sun). It was the footwork-indebted Out in The Streets that really captured the attention though, taking the sample from Ini Kamoze’s World A Music - “Out in the streets etc…” - and running extremely roughshod over it, the song’s frantic pace showing us all very much who is in charge.

10. Mark Pritchard & The Space Lady - S.O.S. (2018)

My last choice on this list takes me right back to the start of Mark Pritchard’s career - well, almost - with a song of tear-duct troubling ambience that could have fit snugly on Global Communication’s 76:14.

S.O.S, taken from Pritchard’s 2018 album The Four Worlds, seems to skirt around the idea of being warm and cozy but ends up tremulous and troubling. Pritchard brings in Susan Dietrich aka The Space Lady, a former street musician whose Greatest Hits was named by The Guardian as one of the 101 strangest records on Spotify, for an ode to our troubled Planet Earth / plea for alien intervention.

There is very little to the song - moody chords and a far-off synth melody that sound as if they have been recorded from a 1950s broadcast, plus Dietrich’s impassioned vocal - but each element is perfect in its own modest way, creating a song so beautiful it makes me genuinely angry about how we have corrupted our little earthly paradise, when human beings are capable of this.

It is a sad way to end our Pritchard quest but a telling one, from a musician who has always put emotion and feelings above the restrictions of genre and taste.

Some listening

Verraco - Basic Maneuvers

Verraco’s debut for XL sounds like Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo being roughed up by some robotic scruffs at the entrance to a club, just outside Medellin. Basic Maneuvers has nailed the noble art of taking a riff and putting it through abstract sonic torture; and more importantly Verraco know that this, sometimes, is enough. Stick a beat under it and we’re done.

DJ Haram - Voyeur

…. in which DJ Haram simultaneously invents (I think) and perfects Middle Eastern industrial gabber, a haunting string line (the press release calls it a “sour violin”) being overrun by juddering, intense drums, to cathartic end. Haram describes the track as “the voices in my head screaming wordlessly while I’m at the centre of a mosh pit on research chemicals” and I find it hard to improve on that.

Tertia - Near

London singer / songwriter / producer Tertia is a big fan of Boards of Canada and you can hear that in the perfectly eerie chords and fuzzy drum machine rush that run through Near. Of course, the risk in coming up with such a perfect chord sequence is that you then need to compose some equally inspiring vocals, which, remarkably, Tertia does, her melody both vaguely reminiscent of - and absolutely nothing like - Kelly G’s remix of Tina Moore’s Never Gonna Let You Go.

Duval Timothy - sleep

Sleep, taken from Duval Timothy’s surprise-released new album wishful thinking, sounds exactly like listening to the Beach Boys on a hammock, strung up on a slightly rickety boat, while the afternoon sun dips into the sea, the piano line perfectly wobbly and woozy, in a way that could genuinely rock me to sleep.

Simo Cell - Circuits

What’s the name of that thing we used to do as kids, when you opened your mouth really wide and made a weird groaning noise until your voice cracked? I don’t remember. But Simo Cell’s new song Circuits essentially sounds like someone doing that for six freaky minutes as snare drums roll excitedly in the background. Ol’ Dirty B*stard also featured that weird throat noise on one of his albums, which means Simo Cell is stepping into elite company with this rather strange, very brilliant, utterly stomping tune.

Bruk Rogers - Get Low (Zero T remix)

If you happen to pass by and see me staring at the sky with a strange expression on my face, my thoughts will, inevitably, be focused on the Zero R remix of Bruk Rogers’ Get Low, which has a supremely satisfying hooligan breakbeat behind it, one that stomps in, demands your attention, then sees absolutely no reason to lower its level of intensity. Fierce. Oh and extra points to Cian McCann - aka both Bruk Rogers and Zero T - for remixing himself into such violently amusing shapes.

Things I’ve done

No Line Noise podcast this week but an absolute doozy coming next, I promise.

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.