Under the Sun album cover
Under the Sun

Mark Pritchard

2016
Warp Records

To have been releasing music for 25 years and still be this fresh is some achievement. As part of Global Communication, Jedi Knights and a dozen other aliases besides with Tom Middleton, Mark Pritchard had been a major pillar of 90s underground music. And latterly, with his Harmonic 313 and Africa Hitech guises he’d incorporated grime, footworking and other 21st century sounds into his palette. But this, his first album under his own name from 2016, expands in all directions — future and retro. There’s Suicide-style electro sleaze (“Infrared”), there’s acid folk (with some extraordinary guests — Thom Yorke on “Beautiful People” and Linda Perhacs on “You Wash my Soul”). There’s ambient intense enough that dubstep forefather Mala used it as a set intro (“?”), there’s beatnik poetry from a very high place (“The Blinds Cage” with Antipop Consortium’s Beans) and there’s hypnotic dub techno with angelic voices (the closing title track). This is how you stake out elder statesman status.

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