First track from startling new pairing
Mark Pritchard is responsible for one of the best albums of the 1990s with Global Communication and ‘76:14‘, a peerless electronic masterpiece. Thom Yorke, of course, as the frontman of Radiohead, has overseen that band’s journey from decent rock band to experimental behemoth. That the two have come together for a new project on the Warp label is quite the thrill.
The video for the first fruit of the collaboration come with this eye-popping video from artist Jonathan Zawada.
”On first hearing the original demo of ‘Back In The Game‘,” Zawada says, ”I was immediately struck by the deranged bassline that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets but I saw it with a more sinister overlay. Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.
”Ultimately the film for ‘Back In The Game‘ ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilisation slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression. Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.“
