If a title like 'Tall Tales' happens to bring to mind the offbeat, whimsical and occasionally sinister aura of a children’s storybook then consider for a moment the effect that a ‘fairy tale’ might have had on you or those you know. Much of the development of our ability for critical thinking is attributed to the tall tales we immerse ourselves in early in life. After all, these stories (as with all art) are a way of allowing us to inhabit the mysterious and sometimes uncomfortable feelings and personae that we often obscure from the view of ‘polite society’. Fairy tales ‘model behavior for children and provide a context in which [they] can evaluate their own emotions’. When viewed from this vantage, it seems like we could use a few new tales for the adults among us. 'Tall Tales' is set for release on the 9th of May via WARP.

These stories need to be built of pretty strong stuff to cut it in these strange days, and yet they must also be liberally laced with enough gallows humor to reflect the circus in which we all find ourselves constantly performing. Cue the emergence of Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke as a dual proposition. Continuing on from Pritchard’s sublime past remixes for Radiohead, the pair struck upon an otherworldly synergy with the lilting masterpiece ‘Beautiful People’, a centerpiece of Mark’s 2016 solo opus Under The Sun. This would prove to be a spark that would not reach full flame until 2020 when work on Tall Tales started in earnest. Over the subsequent years, especially with the addition of visual collaborator (and effective third member) Jonathan Zawada, the process would take on the aura of a guild of craftsmen working towards a shared, overarching vision.

This picture of bygone craftspeople calls to mind the past in many ways, and yet the music and imagery seem to reach at once back into a shared history and forward into a puzzling, unknown future. How better to illustrate the feeling of being cast adrift in an ever-collapsing present? Shaped with the tricky and often archaic machines Pritchard had previously unearthed in synthesizer archives across the globe, he mentions these analog interlocutors as almost another presence unto themselves, guiding him down pathways he never could have anticipated. Accordingly, Yorke has found a fresh and elegantly unhinged route into these sonic tunnels. Surfing across his already impressive range, warping his voice with OK Computer-era digital FX and giving the impression of peering dangerously deep into the psyches of the good, bad and the ugly who inhabit these songs. The long-form nature of the collaboration produces something at once wild in its eclecticism and yet deeply cohesive, almost like an album, novel or film from some other, indeterminate, era.

A trio is completed by Zawada, a previous collaborator of Pritchard’s. A multi-disciplinary visual artist and designer renowned for his hyperreal environments that toy with the space where the organic and digital intersect, his work here embodies the songs in suitably tangible and uncanny ways. Juxtaposing uneasy landscapes of natural beauty with the brutal aesthetics of a world that has landed well short of the utopian future it once dared imagine. It is in these imaginings, grown like a fungus from the mulch of Yorke’s lyrics and Pritchard’s atemporal compositions that a profound perspective begins to reveal itself. Through a fragmenting of reality our intrepid tall-tale-tellers approach a questioning of where our insatiable appetite for ‘progress’ might have landed us.

This seems to be no simple skepticism of our queasy modern condition. Perhaps it is a re-tracing of the steps that led us here - following breadcrumb trails into a past that ultimately leads to a few cryptic clues about our future. Amongst them, the realization that rather than the individuals we’ve been told/sold to be, we’re in fact bound together in fate and fortune. The tall tale being told is that of a more human way of progressing, and the question is whether this is one of those rare tales that could become truth.

"Mark sent me a large file of Mp3s of ideas during lockdown,There were so many great ones I knew straight away that I had to drop what I was doing. It felt very much that I had not been anywhere like this before both as soon as I put my headphones on and started trying to find the vocals, words, and sounds, but also, as it progressed, watching Jonathan respond so freely and spontaneously with all his video and artwork ideas. It was mental, and I feel lucky to have been involved. I am looking forward to this finally coming out, Tall Tales is very important to me.

I hope people get it, and get to hear it!"

- Thom Yorke