About

A TAV Curator’s Pick.

Mark Pritchard’s ambitious and immersive album ‘Under The Sun’ was released in 2016 under Warp Records, featuring collaborations with Thom Yorke and Bibio amongst others.

“Deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic, Under the Sun is an easy album to disappear into. Alternating short sketches with long, immersive tracks like the sumptuously droning "EMS," and balancing emotional vocal tracks with more abstracted moodpieces, it never feels scattered; instead, each piece leads into the next, like the segments of a maze.” - Pitchfork

“Under The Sun is Mark Pritchard’s most consistent piece of work in some time, one that is beautifully conceived and produced with restraint and an overall vision that, most of the time, only an artist of considerable experience can muster.” - XLR8R

“Released by Warp, Mark Pritchard's first album under his given name follows records from Brian Eno and Bibio and a soundtrack from Clark. Incidentally, those releases offer a decent primer for Under The Sun, which applies ambient, folk and cinematic tropes to heaps of electronics over a circuitous and enchanting 67 minutes. And, in order to fully enjoy its transportive properties per Pritchard's design, it deserves your attention for the entirety.

Zeroing in on Under The Sun's individual elements makes its range instantly apparent. The transitions between tracks feel just as important as the tracks themselves, floating from one frame to the next or bleeding into each other. With "Infrared" and "Falling," tough-nut EBM, bristling with feedback and drums, segues into weightless synth modulations, which drift into the woozy electronica of "Beautiful People" with Thom Yorke. Such genre leaps should be jarring, but Pritchard lands them with ease.

Under The Sun's prevailing sentiment is a kind of folksy fantasy, mobilised by contributions from Yorke, Bibio and Linda Perhacs. Worlds apart from Pritchard's club-based music, those three songs offer some of the album's most emotive moments. "The Blinds Cage," a spoken word piece with Beans, sits in stark contrast to the effeminate, romanticised voices that come before it. The song's angular, dissonant composition makes it more of an outlier in the album's buttery second half. But "Hi Red" might be the most disruptive of the lot, unsettling the introspectiveness of "Cycles Of 9" and "Ems" with playful nonsense.” – Resident Advisor

Watch the stunning music video of Beautiful People (ft. Thom Yorke) below:

Item description: