After a decade in gestation, Tall Tales doesn’t arrive. It descends — or perhaps it unfolds in fragments, like a memory fractured by time. A collaboration between electronic innovator Mark Pritchard, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and visual artist Jonathan Zawada, this is no mere album. It’s a world. A sonic and visual environment as disorienting as it is meditative, wrapped in a narrative that remains just out of reach.
Pritchard, known for his genre-hopping mastery from Global Communication to solo ambient excursions, builds much of this record using obscure synthesizers —machines exhumed from the depths of analog archives and pressed back into service. These sounds don’t strive for retro fetishism; instead, they feel displaced, atemporal, guiding the compositions down pathways that often feel more discovered than designed. From layered ambient swells to fractured rhythmic pulses, the production resists easy categorization. There’s a crackle, a grit, a sense that these sounds have been unearthed rather than composed.
Yorke’s contribution isn’t so much vocal as spectral, threading ghostly melodies through the cracked circuitry of Pritchard’s soundscapes. His vocals—processed but not obscured—drift through the album like warnings from a half-remembered future. There’s a palpable continuity with his solo work and Radiohead’s more electronic leanings, yet Tall Tales feels looser, more exploratory. The lyrical tone is oblique, introspective, and often unsettling—touching on themes of technological saturation and ecological disquiet without resorting to explicit commentary. Often, he’s buried beneath layers of noise or smeared across the stereo field. Notably, some of his vocals are processed through an Eventide H910 Harmonizer — a rare and legendary piece of kit. Known for its unpredictable, slightly surreal pitch-shifting, the H910 doesn’t just distort Yorke’s voice; it destabilizes it, turning it into something uncanny and emotionally fraught. He sounds less like a singer, more like a broadcast — flickering between signal and silence.
Two tracks stand out as immersive emotional cores: “The Spirit” and “A Fake in a Faker’s World”. Without the accompanying film’s visual prompts, these longer compositions open out — enveloping, ambiguous, heavy with the sense of something unsaid. The Spirit pulses quietly, as though trying to hold onto a fading thought. Its melancholy doesn’t demand attention; it creeps in slowly, like regret. Meanwhile, A Fake in a Faker’s World suggests heartbreak refracted through distortion — a break-up song processed through layers of denial and digital decay. Both pieces resist resolution. They linger in that vulnerable space between realization and release.
Zawada’s visuals in the film component of Tall Tales, bring a hyperreal aesthetic to these sonic meditations — lush but uneasy, merging the organic with the digital, the natural with the broken. Lush but uneasy, merging the organic with the digital, the natural with the broken. Even without them, the tone of the album remains cinematic. It’s the kind of record that feels like it’s observing you as much as you’re listening to it.
Across 12 tracks, Tall Tales explores themes of collapse and progress, artifice and memory. It’s not interested in tidy arcs or easily digestible emotions. Instead, it invites you into its atmosphere, lets you get lost, and trusts that you’ll find meaning in the drift.
If this is a story, it’s one told sideways — through texture, repetition, and erasure. Through machinery that breathes. Through a voice that flickers. Through a sense that whatever we’ve done to the world, and to each other, is echoing louder than we know.
