Continual Inspiration: Mark Pritchard

Legendary producer veers into ambience, with a little help from some sought-after friends...

Mark Pritchard isn't an artist to be understood quickly. Sure, the producer's club work – frenzied techno, wonky dancehall, and every shade in between – is all encompassing, uniquely physical in the sense only system music can provide. But even in that space there's confusion in the rave, the ocean of sound milling around in ceaseless toil.

In that sense, new album 'Under The Sun' is definitely not a one-listen record. At almost 70 minutes long it's one of the most complex aural experiences you'll have this year, yet curiously it's an open, inviting listen, drawing you in on ever more precocious journeys.

Unsurprisingly, it's taken a long time to complete. Some of the sounds on this record go back almost a decade, while the process behind 'Under The Sun' as an entity has taken almost as long. When Clash is patched through to the producer he sounds audibly relieved: “It's actually celebration day for me! Two and a half years, or more, of work has finally entered the world today. It's been long overdue.”

Despite it's length 'Under The Sun' retains a remarkable coherency, with Pritchard demanding that the listener imbibe it in its totality. “I knew that I wanted to make an album where you'd sit down and hopefully, ideally, listen to it all the way through. If you put in the time, and you're in the right headspace to go with some of these emotions that are happening, then you can just drift off. And that's the exact reason why I make the music; when I'm making it I do drift off into thoughtlessness and don't stress, don't think about other things in the world. And hopefully once you listen to it you can get to that place as well.”

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In contrast to Mark Pritchard's more club-centric work the new album dwells more on texture and colour than rhythm. “I mean, this one I knew was going to be nothing to do with club music,” he insists. “I didn't quantise anything, I played a lot of stuff live, I wanted to have a certain feel, with all the melodies and riffs that come in. And I also didn't want it to be grid-based, I wanted it to have things coming in a bit randomly. Just to surprise you in different places.”

“It's quite nice to have a break from focussing on drums, actually. I mean, I love making club music, but there's certain issues you come up with every time, there's certain things you have to deal with. And then, with this stuff at least… I wouldn't say it was easier, it was actually much harder! They're all challenges, but at least they're different ones to focus on all the time.”

Mark would find himself engrossed in his work, throwing down ideas in lengthy recording sessions, then painstaking going through these recordings to hone and refine his output. “Actually I start tracks – and that could be four hours, or it could be eight hours – and then I leave them. Sometimes I feel like I want to do something, and I just see what happens, and then things sit there and I kind of live with them. So that always happens, and I've always got lots of ideas, but then there was a period where I'm now going to try and make this album, work out what's going to go on it, write new stuff, mix everything… mixing around everything. That was like a two year period. And through that period I wrote new stuff, I mixed down every track, arranged every track, wrote loads of stuff that didn't make it, that wasn't maybe right in the end.”

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The writing process, the creation of the track, is usually really quick…

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“The hard bit, the really time consuming, long, hard bit, is because I mixed it all myself. The writing process, the creation of the track, is usually really quick. I get the ideas and I move really quickly – sometimes fully formed, sometimes at least a vibe that I know I can develop. But I did try and balance it out by writing new ideas through that period, because… just doing the finishing stuff is one part of your brain being used, and it's good to get into that headspace but at the same time I like doing the other parts that actually fund it.”

Gathering together the material, Mark Pritchard then invited a select batch of guests into the studio. Vocalists Linda Perhacs and Bibio feed into the hazy, impressionistic elements of the material, with their delightfully English contributions allied to some pastoral electronics from the producer – imagine a Constable painting replicated pixel by pixel. Rapper Beanz, though, had a rather different approach – one that left the producer himself stunned.

“I'd written the instrumental, played it to him once, and he went straight in the vocal booth and did that in one take. And that was it,” he says, still audibly astonished. “Which is pretty… I couldn't really believe it as it was happening. I thought I was playing it to him and he was going to take it away and learn the track and write to it, but he had something that he'd written seven years before but he'd never found a way of using it and he just went: oh, I'm going to use that. He knew straight away. He knew that it fitted the music.”

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'Beautiful People' meanwhile, finds Pritchard once again sparring with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. “I'd written that maybe 2010, that instrumental. But then I wrote a couple of things, sent him four different things – I wanted to give him a variety of different styles – see what he'd be into, and he did vocals on two and that was one of the ones.”

“He also said, 'You might want to take just a part of it and then loop it, write to it, and then we'll add stuff into it and put other stuff back in'. It was like a real collaboration. He did his thing with it, he edited stuff, I changed it around.”

Tantalisingly, there is another Thom Yorke vocal sitting on Mark Pritchard's hard drive. “He put ideas down on a couple, and then I said: let's just focus on this one, and then we can go back to the other one later. Obviously, he's a very busy man! I was like, I know that you've got a lot going on, so get this one done. Then once this is done, and you've got your album finished, and you've finished touring and there's another gap then we'll come back it whenever you've got time. No pressure, or whatever.”

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I've been meaning to do this album for a long time…

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Giving himself space and time to operate, Mark Pritchard allowed 'Under The Sun' to gently ease out into its own, unpressurised boundaries. “It did definitely evolve organically. Originally it was probably going to be more avant garde, and probably darker in mood, and then certain tracks came along and it kind of evolved. More musical tracks came in and I thought, this feels right to do this.”

Remarkably, despite its huge length 'Under The Sun' isn't the end of a process but a beginning; Mark wants to make yet more music, in many different styles. “I've been meaning to do this album for a long time, but because I like doing other styles of music those other things have their own lives, their own timespans. But then it got to a point where I was like, I need to stop and just do this now.”

“I make that kind of music as much as I make club music but I haven't managed to get much of it into the world which is why I thought, I just need to do it under my name now. Try and make it less confusing, try and get more styles of music out into the world more regularly. So that's the game plan.”

“I think I'll just do it all under my own name, and then I think I'll try and use artwork to try and differentiate what the things are. I need to work out a way of making it clear that I am going to make more music like this, and I'm going to carry on making club music… because I love both.”

Passing, we wonder if the producer can take his own advice: there's room for everything under the sun.

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'Under The Sun' is out now.

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