Mark Pritchard - Under the Sun

Pitchfork 76

When Mark Pritchard first released "?," that question mark made perfect sense. It was 2009, and the track—six somber minutes of gelatinous, pitch-black drones and a doleful, harpsichord-like synth melody—didn't sound like anything else he had ever done. And that's saying something, because Pritchard has done a lot: Between his time in iconic early-'90s groups like Global Communication, Jedi Knights, and Reload, plus an array of solo aliases including Harmonic 313 and Troubleman, the UK producer made ambient, electro, house, acid, instrumental hip-hop, and broken beat, among other styles and hybrids. Not long after "?" appeared as the A-side of a 10" single (the B-side cut, "The Hologram," sounded more like a lost Mo Wax instrumental from the mid '90s), he embarked upon his career's wildly prolific second act, making dancehall, grime, footwork, trap, ragga-jungle, and throwback rave tunes in the duo Africa Hitech and under his own name. Throughout it all, "?" felt like an outlier among outliers; in an oeuvre full of left turns, it was the only one that didn't seemed to have steered him full circle.

Seven years later, that stray puzzle piece falls into place as the opening track on Under the Sun. "?" has always had a liminal feel to it—a number of DJs, including the Gaslamp Killer, Manuel Tur, and Oneman, have used it to open mixtapes, and a few more have closed out their mixes with it—and here it also plays a scene-setting role, establishing the base notes of one of the most curious and idiosyncratic records in Pritchard's catalog. For the most part devoid of drums, Under the Sun is loosely ambient in feel, but it's a world away from the lushly psychedelic chillout-room tropes of Global Communication. Many of its tracks feel like soundtrack cues, and its blippy analog palette often suggests the influence of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There are nods to Boards of Canada, particularly in the vocoded recitation of colors in "Hi Red," the shortest of a number of sketch-like, interstitial cuts. But the album's most unusual aspect, and its unifying thread, are the thin, quavering synthesizer patches suggestive of flute and clarinet and recorder, which, playing quiet, contrapuntal melodies, imbue the album with an almost medieval air.

Against this atmospheric backdrop, a few key vocal features help give the album its shape and sense of movement. The first, immediately following the ambient intro of "?," is the Bibio-sung "Give It Your Choir," which pairs chiming synth parts with richly colored vocal harmonies that whirl like the beads in a kaleidoscope. For much of the warm, woozy "Beautiful People," Thom Yorke's voice is processed nearly beyond recognition, and even when the effects are stripped away, it sounds like he's singing through clenched teeth, his words reduced to something like pure tone. But the odd phrases that sneak through ("Angels stroke your head," "I can't go back") reinforce the song's dream-like logic, forever on the verge of pulling into focus. "The Blinds Cage" also bobs on the surface of consciousness, as Anti-Pop Consortium's Beans narrates a stream-of-consciousness report from the border between life and death over a blippy backdrop of electronic abstractions.

In the album's centerpiece, "You Wash My Soul," the folksinger Linda Perhacs is accompanied by delicately plucked acoustic guitar as she sings mournfully of elemental forces and spiritual connections. At once chilly and pastoral, it's evocative of a strain of gothic folk that stretches back through Jarboe, Current 93, and Nick Drake; it's the polar opposite of "Infrared," a nervous synth'n'roll number that's reminiscent of Suicide. On paper, the two songs might not seem to have much to do with each other, but part of the beauty of the album is how it pulls such contrasting moods together into a coherent whole.

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. I put it on for an hour-long perambulation through the city and found myself cozily cocooned in its folds. I was surprised, when I finally took my headphones off, to be confronted with the lively din of an outdoor café I had been idly watching for 15 minutes; it felt as though I had been zapped back to the heart of the city, transported from a faraway place that was green and warm and ancient. The only question was how music so simple, and almost naïve, had done such a thorough job of erasing the traces of the modern world around me.