Oh this is good. I didn’t get quite what I expected when I clicked on the video link. It’s like entering a strange, darkly comic world. Thom Yorke is no snob when it comes to genre hopping and this is a hop into a mind-bending genre all of its own. A body gyrating bassline drives it all along. Some scratchy electronic elements are along for the ride.
Thom vocals drift above, all slightly distorted and otherworldly. Altogether it’s a great piece of work that transports you from the here and now. Not a bad place to be, at the moment, I’d say. The video is a blast of colour and headfuckery ably created by Jonathan Zawada that adds to the strange beauty of the song.
This is ‘Back In The Game” by the pioneering electronic musician and producer Mark Pritchard and The Smile and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.
Pritchard is a luminary of 90s UK electronic music with his projects Reload, Link and as one half of the production duo Global Communication alongside Tom Middleton. In 2011 he released two remixes of Radiohead’s “Bloom” and across an eclectic career that has incorporated many styles and various guises, he has remixed further material from the likes of Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode, PJ Harvey and Slowdive.
As with “Beautiful People”, “Back In The Game” sees Yorke’s vocals digitally distorted by Pritchard, this time using the H910 Harmonizer, one of the world’s earliest devices for audio digital effects, surfing across his already impressive range, another malleable instrument in the greater make-up of the track.
The song is paired to a video by Jonathan Zawada, a visual artist known for his multi-faceted approach that incorporates both analogue and digital techniques. Zawada also has a working history with Pritchard going back over a decade and created imagery and an installation around the release of “Under The Sun”.
He had the following to say about the visuals:
“On first hearing the original demo of Back In The Game 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 civilization 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.”
‘Back in the Game’ is out now on Warp Records.
