A PROPER old-skool British IDM general, Mark Pritchard, the man behind Reload, one half of Global Communications (just buy 76:14, OK? Just … buy it), Harmonic 33, so many other greats of the British tronica and dance music scenes over the past …no, I’m not gonna count actually; well, he’s back wearing the guise of MP Productions, and he’s releasing an EP this Friday for who else? Warp, of course.
And in order to pipe you pied towards what should be a very fine half-dozen tracks indeed (yeah yeah, there’s digital too), entitled EP 1, he’s released the misty, eerie downbeat atmospheres of “In My Heart” today; just a sixth of what you can have spinning on your deck come Friday.
“In My Heart” begins in a decayed electronic wash, picking up a fractured, propulsive melody, and the best use of the otherworldly abstractions of the vocoder we’ve heard in a damn good while.
It has absolutely bags of atmosphere, rhythm, deep space to fall into past the dominant rhythms, down beyond where the melody lies. It’s the sweetest of sonic traps. It’s a late breaker for one of the tunes of the year in the electronica genre, for sure.
“In My Heart” follows an earlier drop, the deconstructed, warped grime of “Be Like Water”.
Elsewhere the EP features a track by the name of “LFO Special”; now that’s something that’s gotta be a techno treat, surely.
The EP, we’re told, “provides a salient moment of techno and euphoria to hold on to in these times of club closures and 10pm curfews.” It makes me want to hear music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats in a woods somewhere at about 2am, that’s for absolute certain.
Most, but not all, of the tracks on MP Productions EP 1 were first played in his WXAXRXP NTS mix last year.
The EP’s artwork – see above – comes courtesy Jonathan Zawada, befits perfectly the flesh-machine symbiosis at work across the record. Using AI software, he created the preternatural image of a plastic-wrapped, suited human, somewhere between the hyper-real and figurative abstraction – obfuscated by a computer that has learned the imprint of a human, but is yet to understand them. Eeep, weeerd.
MP Productions’ EP 1 will be available on digital download and 12” via Warp on November 13th; order your copy here.
