Global Communication - '76:14'
No. 24 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Space. Inner space. Mental space. Cyber space. Air space. Outer space. Sound waves traveling in the open to the ear, bouncing through neurons like ocean waves onto the imagination. Ambient, never given the same urgent attention, as the techno beats of Chicago and Detroit, is nevertheless the “space” in which it all happened. Brian Eno, who coined the musical term “ambient,” did not so much invent it, as bring our attention to it. And of all the sonic architects that have come since, Global Communication probably elevated its mystery best — and even highest.
But among their various stellar projects, including Jedi Knights and Reload, it seems few know or understand why Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard’s long-going Global Communication is deservedly their most famous. The most succinct answer why is numerical: 76:14. Released on the shoegazing Dedicated label, their masterpiece bested the lush ambient formulas of the early 1990s, its warm jets and soft beats flawlessly blending sensual romanticism with intellectual acuity. It has few sharp edges, but its cumulative impact, building over 76 minutes and 14 seconds of expansive meditation, cuts deep to the core, opening up the soul to wonder.
In 1993, they presaged the grand ambience of 76:14 with The Keongaku E.P. It included the gentle ‘Incidental Harmony,’ with its little sparkles of melody, two shorter pieces, ‘Excerpts from the Land of the Rising Sun,’ which sampled traditional Japanese music, and ‘Enlightenment of the Augur,’ its eerie synth burbles greeting the masterful ‘Sublime Creation,’ a slow dramatic builder that uses a gorgeous archetypal sample of Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt over chugging train-like rhythms to exquisite effect. Their two remixes, ‘Alpha Phase’ and ‘Epsilon Phase’ are also grand statements of intent, metamorphosing the shoegazing electro-rock of Chapterhouse into galactic drifts.
A year later, with their deeply immersive approach in full swing and signing up with Dedicated, they announced a more organic take with the opening single from 76:14, a release aptly titled Maiden Voyage. It featured the emotional climax of the album, the “Maiden Voyage” ‘5:23,’ which sampled Tangerine Dream’s trance-ambient sleight of hand from the Risky Business movie soundtrack, reconnecting ambient music’s past with the techno present. And on the b-side, they played one of their greatest tricks, sliding ‘Funk in the Fridge,’ a perfect feather-light groover using a flute from Michel Legrand’s ‘A Man’s Castle,’ from a film score for 1969’s The Thomas Crown Affair.
It was this human touch, these memories, that gave their communication its moving, powerful emotion. And while they chose to channel more aggressive or angry energy into their other projects, only letting it into later remixes and compositions after 76:14, tracks like ‘5:23’ and ‘Funk in the Fridge’ displayed a relentless sense of purpose, the incessant yet attentive spirit of their rhythms and melodies, guiding as well as leading, with both making a starring appearance on DJ Food and Coldcut’s masterclass mixing on 1997’s immortal Stoned…Chilled…Groove. What these early endeavors revealed is an uncommon discipline, a fidelity to sound, but also a fidelity to connecting with life.
Interviewing them in the West Country in 1994 — Crewkerne in Somerset — The Wire’s Rob Young described a home studio at the end of a row of cottages next to a field with metal sheds and scraps of chicken wire, Pritchard’s two dogs barking before rushing down the hall, a view looking out at a “knot of trees,” and a parrot prone to “insane hollering.” The nerve center of their Evolution operation, named after Carl Craig’s classic, percussive ‘Evolution’ techno as BFC, they were channelling the beatific English countryside as much as out-of-this-world sci-fi. Because at the spiritual center of their worldview was a search for human connectedness across space.
“There is Global Communication occurring,” Middleton told Young. “It’s a way of encompassing everything, different arts and forms of expression and getting it to people. I want to take the music industry for a ride, take liberties, set up a network, that will help other people out. A lot of our friends are really imaginative people with original ideas, getting stifled and losing faith in life because there are so few outlets. Global Communication can be a chance for the people who communicate with us, to feed back with bits of philosophy and writing, and share that with the world again, and that will perhaps get people to contact each other, get people to talk a bit more.”
“We’ve had feedback from a 50-year-old guy who’s been into electronic music for years; from a Russian radio station; and from a school where the students had to write down their feelings while listening to 76:14,” added Pritchard. Feelings. The energies, the synaptic waves that percolate. Or as they believed, the waves of experience, blooming and warping and communicating, through the human community; the intellectual and philosophical reflections to be empathized, tempering the big articulations of sound, the emotional feedback, echoing on through the body.
“Personalizing the listening experience for the listener to derive their own plot and narrative,” Middleton told FACT Magazine in 2011, explaining the album’s philosophy. “Evocative and inspiring soundtracks without movies, for the listener to direct in their own minds. It was never about making an album of music to dance to, but an inclusive listening experience for sharing with friends, family and lovers, bypassing gender, age, race, language, religion and sexuality, hence the name: Global Communication.”
A quick favorite of aficionados and newcomers alike, Global Communication’s landmark album is also the perfect first dip for those wary of “repetitive” beats. It’s easy come, easy go. Yet for all of its pretensions to heaven on earth, Middleton and Pritchard’s vaporized techno also lives on a sly tension between restraint and danger. The epic ‘Obselon Minos,’ a sleepy paradise of gentle piano chords and deep bleeding bass, is their ultimate paragon and perhaps the best ambient track of the ’90s, riding the very edge of disquiet, its vibrational frequencies quaking open consciousness.
Deep deep down in those currents that flow throughout ‘Obselon Minos’ and 76:14 was a history of lived electronic experience that began with Middleton’s journey to the town of Taunton, where he met Pritchard at a night out, homing onto his taste behind the DJ decks. Middleton hailed from Cornwall and was a friend of Richard D. James — the Aphex Twin — so he was fast, and early, on his search for the sublime, promoting James’ first record as the Aphex Twin and collaborating on ‘En Trance To Exit’ on the first Analogue Bubblebath release. But connecting with Pritchard would lead to an electronic body of work equal in potency, one based on a high human fidelity.
“He came and introduced himself to me,” Pritchard recounted years later about how the two first met. “Told me he did some stuff with this guy called the Aphex Twin who no one had heard about at that point…and talked about their scene down in Cornwall. We hit it off, and started hanging out. He played me loads of Aphex’s stuff off cassette and I was like fucking hell – what’s this?! Fucking nuts! Tom — born on the same day as Aphex and they were part of that scene with the Rephlex crew, people like Grant Wilson-Claridge, Manuel who now does artwork for Hyperdub; this little crew who played in Truro and around there.” So began their partnership in ambient bliss.
That early taste of do-it-yourself music production gave them the fire to push fast and hard into the underground music scene, inspired by Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk and Detroit techno legends like Juan Atkins. “I remember going to London on the train with boxes of white labels, and taking them round the record stores on a sale or return basis,” Middleton told Red Bull Music Academy in 2012. “That was my introduction to the actual physical distribution of music, and it was interesting that we both did the ‘schlepping it’ on the train to London with boxes of records, and selling them.”
It’s that toil combined with musical know-how that one hears deep in the tides of 76:14. Middleton’s classical training is in evidence throughout, including Pritchard’s guitar-player poise, giving their seamless audio journey perfectly timed injections of drama and wakefulness. From Claude Debussy and Erik Satie to Eno, Herbie Hancock, Vangelis, Talk Talk and Tangerine Dream, the pair would bring a wealth of influences to their work. Pretty ornamentalism hangs over big minimal waves of sound. Swoops, drips and gaseous harmonies evoke a dream cloud that rains and washes away hardened emotions. The pair described their attitude as “Emotions in Sound.”
“You gather inspiration from hearing how other people tell a story in sound,” Middleton noted in the same interview, explaining how Peter Gabriel’s spiritualist Last Temptation of Christ album was a particularly strong influence. “We were really excited by what we could do in that context. That led to these Global Communication explorations, finding the ‘Emotions In Sound’ concept, using the natural rhythms, like the heartbeat for the very first track, as the backbone to the track rather than a drumbeat, and then exploring dub reggae echo patterns, cinematic textures, and…bingo!”
The result was an auditory odyssey both vast in its ambitions and dense in its emotional content. Every melody, sound and groove was carefully placed. Like any great film or story, 76:14 is no cakewalk. Like a good fairy tale or mystery, it keeps its dark places and loses you in a maze of fantastical dimensions. And underlying every second is an air of anxious discovery: ‘9:25′ begins with whispers and makes its way into a ghostly valley, a will-o’-the-wisp melody guiding you over trickling beats to ‘9:39,’ a throbbing wasteland of lonely prettiness, trailing off into the night mist.
A European flavor is all over Global Communication’s gorgeous concoctions. But Pritchard and Middleton were keenly devoted to Detroit techno too, especially the epochal melancholy of Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Kenny Larkin. (Their invincible remixes and work as Reload is proof positive: Reload’s ‘Amenity’ remains perhaps the greatest techno paean of all time.) Rhythm, while understated here, is the prime guest even when only in spirit: ‘7:39’ taps along at an exciting pace, swooning to flashes of light while ‘8:07′ builds on a direct reinvention of Tangerine Dream’s ‘Love On A Real Train’ with aching devotion, its skittering high-hats rising to ‘5:23’ with its whirling strings and the bittersweet sighs of heartsick synths gliding to the album’s climax.
The final ’12:18’ puts an exclamation mark on these sacraments, pushing us off into the last horizon, like Charon‘s boat at the shores of the River Styx. But, it’s not really sadness here at the gates to infinity. The angelic gasps and heartbreaking beauty of its ever expanding gestures brings to mind what one believes must be a true vision of the sweet hereafter. This is life-affirming stuff, the sonic equivalent of a desert oasis. For latecomers, a 10-year anniversary remaster in 2005 included bonus tracks of the English duo’s other towering moments as Global Communication: the epic space house splendor of ‘The Deep,’ the awestruck twinkles of ‘The Biosphere’ and the immersions of ‘Sensorama,’ ‘Incidental Harmony’ and ‘Sublime Creation.’
Global Communication also made huge marks over the years with their remixes and subtle interpretations of other artists, making the Global Communication “treatment” the ultimate sought-after stamp of approval or reinvention. Remixes of Lamb, Warp 69, Azymuth, The Grid, and Japanese band Softballet — their dub mix of ‘Ride’ reigning as the supreme low-slung sky-high soul tripper of the electronic era — reveal a band with no match in the more meditative reaches of the electronica revolution; or Pentamorous Metamorphosis, their “retranslation” of Chapterhouse — the indispensable companion mini-album to 76:14, with its ‘Gamma Phase’ remaining one of electronica’s most epic and uplifting moments — is another mind-blower on a trip out of this world.
More than 15 years after the release of their magnum opus, Back In The Box commissioned a Global Communication double album DJ mix. A standout in the series, including an expert selection of Detroit and European techno, from Kevin Saunderson’s ‘Just Want Another Chance’ to Mixmaster Morris’ remix of ‘Barbarella’ and Robert Leiner’s ‘Aqua Viva,’ it was a muscular manifesto; which sparked a reunion tour for Middleton and Pritchard, and helped connect techno’s future with its timeless past. And yet their ambient trip persists — the drift destined to seduce and amaze.
In 2007, The Guardian newspaper included 76:14 as one of their “1,000 albums” to hear before you die. Given its zero gravity tears, Global Communication’s contribution would in fact do well right before any great passage, from birth to death. It’s not dolorous. It’s liberating. For their communication is not just an ambient or an interstellar space thing. It’s a human thing — a deeply emotional thing.
Track Listing:
1. 4:02
2. 14:31 (Obselon Minos)
3. 9:25
4. 9:39
5. 7:39
6. 0:54
7. 8:07
8. 5:23 (Maiden Voyage)
9. 4:14
10. 12:18
Bonus tracks on 2005 re-release:
1. The Groove
2. The Way
3. The Deep
4. The Biosphere
5. Incidental Harmony
6. Sublime Creation
7. Sensorama