Global Communication is the moniker created in 1992 by Mark Pritchard
(also known as Link) and Tom Middleton (a founding member of
Aphex Twin),
who first released techno grooves as Reload on
A Collection of Short Stories (1994).
The single Universal Harmony was their Global Communication's manifesto
and 76:14 (Dedicated, 1994), recorded between 1991 and 1994, was their
debut album.
(The album's title refers to its total length and each song's title is
its length in minutes and seconds).
Despite the ostensible adherence to a dance movement, this masterpiece showed
that the duo excels at soundpainting, at penning abstract electronic poems
and keeping them alive through subtle, bionic mutations.
The vast, dramatic, multi-tonal slabs of galactic drones of 4 02,
creating a symphonic counterpoint of an almost gothic intensity,
are very similar to Irrlicht-period Klaus Schulze.
Even more creative and free-form is the haunting soundscape of 9 39,
drenched in ghostly echoes and neurotic ticking, shrouded in a thick blanket
of hisses.
The celestial closing track, 12 18, harks back to medieval and
baroque church music, although the vocal parts are only sketched.
With these tracks the duo joins the ranks of the post-cosmic and quasi-newage
generation of electronic avantgarde.
The minimalist mini-opus 14 31 opens in the same sideral spaces, but
populates the electronic nebulae with an array of rhythmic artifices:
first a distant tribal beat, then a mechanical pattern, then a piano-based
music box, and finally a dub-like thud. Melodic elements and rhythmic elements
are locked in a dance that is both geometric and romantic.
When it enters the realm of dance-music, the duo is clearly less self-assured
7 39 merely repeats a beat and a chord, something like a loop of the
beginning of OMID's Enola Gay.
The insistent polyrhythm that rises out of 9 25's storm of wails
is their most obvious concession to the day's ephimeral dance craze.
Again, the duo fares best when it experiments with new forms, especially in
8 07 (that borrows a beat from African tribal ceremonies and propels it
to almost Neu-ian paranoia).
Track 5 23, a cosmic, tribal and atmospheric techno summary of their
lighter side, was reissued in 1994 as Maiden Voyage.
Global Communication is a gifted duo that occasionally produces mesmerizing
music, but is faced with the usual dilemma whether to follow the trends or
to find its own voice. Several of the most abstract (and therefore least
danceable) tracks hint at a new, ambitious, electronic genre, stradling
the border between minimalism, ambient, ethnic and cosmic.
In the meantime, several singles were published under the moniker Jedi Knights.
Remotion (Hit It, 1996) is a remix album.
Pentamerous Metamorphosis (Dedicated, 1998) is the reissue of a techno
symphony in five movements that was born out of a remix of Chapterhouse's
Blood Music.
Troubleman is Mark Pritchard's electronic bossanova project, that released
Time Out Of Mind (Far Out, 2004); although
The First Phase (Far Out, 2005) is a collection of dance singles that
mine a variety of styles.
Tom Middleton launched his solo career much later, with Lifetracks (2007), that contains the classic house romp of Shinkansen but is mostly
devoted to ambient house.
Pritchard launche the project Harmonic 313 with
When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence (Warp, 2009), basically a
tribute to Detroit's techno movement.
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Global Communication è la sigla inventata nel 1992 da Mark Pritchard
(noto anche come Link) e Tom Middleton (membro fondatore degli
Aphex Twin)
dopo i primi esperimenti di ballabile techno pubblicati come Reload.
Il singolo Universal Harmony fu il manifesto delle loro complesse
armonie.
76:14 (Dedicated, 1994) è costruito attorno a
Obselon Mi-Nos (l'unico brano
ad avere un titolo) e alla sua mania malinconica.
Il loro stile, cosmico e minimalista, e comunque ultra-
etereo, li pone subito all'avanguardia del movimento neo-ambientale.
L'ottava traccia, quella più
vicina alla musica cosmica tedesca, è stata riedita nel 1994 come Maiden Voyage. Diversi
singoli del duo sono usciti sotto gli pseudonimi Jedi Knights.
Remotion (Hit It, 1996) raccoglie remix.
Pentamerous Metamorphosis (Dedicated, 1998) e` la ristampa di una
sinfonia techno in cinque movimenti che nacque da un remix di
Blood Music dei Chapterhouse.
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