Global Communication

No other electronic dance act made so many recordings in such a wide range of styles (and with such impressive results) as the duo of Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton. After coming together in 1991, the pair began recording music whose range spanned all of electronic dance music, though many were recorded under aliases -- industrial techno as Reload, electro-funk as Jedi Knights, progressive house as Link, jungle as the Chameleon, and most famously, ambient and house as Global Communication. Their 1994 LP 76:14, recorded as Global Communication, was a notable high point of the early-'90s ambient house movement. The partnership began in 1991, when Pritchard and Middleton formed Evolution Records (named after a Carl Craig track) to release their own dancefloor-oriented house and techno. (Middleton had previously recorded with Aphex Twin while Pritchard had been half of the duo Shaft, responsible for the British Top Ten rave hit "Roobarb & Custard"). The first three releases on Evolution were EPs recorded as Reload by Pritchard/Middleton in 1992-1993 -- The Reload, The Autoreload, and The Biosphere. The records were excellent Detroit-inspired tracks, brooding and eerie but nonetheless highly danceable. Reload first gained fame on the Infonet label (the brief dance subsidiary launched by Creation Records) with an EP and the 1994 full-length A Collection of Short Stories. Global Communication, which matched the unsettling ambience of Reload but with a focus on warmer rhythms, debuted on Evolution 004, otherwise known as The Keongaku EP. Though Global Communication's full-length debut Pentamerous Metamorphosis followed soon after, it wasn't quite a proper album per se; it was in fact an extended remix of Chapterhouse's Blood Music LP. With the ambient house boom in full force...