Pandora

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Mark Barrott releases the first single ‘Pandora’ from his upcoming 2024 album ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’.

‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’ is a profound and deeply personal exploration of life, love, and loss. The album reflects the life Mark had with his late wife, and the harrowing experience of her illness and eventual passing. It stands as both a tribute to her memory and a reflection on the profound impact she had on his life and music.

Mark has been a constant innovator throughout his nearly four-decade-long career and has never been one for sitting still musically. His first album Time and Bass in 1996 paved the way for breakbeat futurism within Drum and Bass. His downtempo, introspective 2007 album Memories From A Fading Room featured archival recordings of his family’s aural history and he founded International Feel in 2008 while living in Uruguay, before arriving in Ibiza and releasing the aforementioned Sketches… albums. In 2022, after several years working relentlessly as a producer for varied artists like South African DJ Themba and the late Virgil Abloh, he released 'Jõhatsu' on Anjunadeep’s sister label Reflections.

Unlike his previous works, ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’ is a completely new experiment for him in its choral and orchestral grandeur but one that happened almost without thought. “I absolutely had no intention of making an orchestral album at all”, Mark recalls, “I just started adding orchestration and choral elements and it instantly felt right”. Mark had been writing throughout Sara’s illness, which was the only way he knew how to cope with coming home from the hospital to an empty house.

Lead single ‘Pandora’ is the album opener; with warm orchestral swells that glow like a fleeting smile crossing the face at a happy memory, before choral chanting tinged with fear and anxiety threaten to drive these moments away. ‘Pandora’ was the first track he started working on, just laying an arpeggiator on a synthesiser as he so often would. Then he began, for reasons unknown to him, to add the aforementioned orchestral and choral elements and quickly realised it was something more than tinkering. “It just felt like these were the tools and the sonic pallet of the story that I wanted to tell. I can’t be more descriptive than that”, he says, “you’re not consciously aware of this, you’re just trying to authentically portray what you’re feeling or what’s going on in your life, or in my case what had just gone on in my life. I think consciously I was portraying more that part of the journey than the grief I was feeling at that moment”. From there things took shape very quickly, “without sounding like a cliché, the music just started to flow and to flow and to flow”.

What emerged was a journey, not exactly linear nor anything that would be so naive as to give grief any kind of structure or resolution, but rather one that allows life and death’s many shades to coalesce and diverge naturally. ‘Pandora’ sets the tone, and is followed by a series of tracks that traverse the lines between ambient, jazz and classical music.

“I realise now that I had to tell this story and it wasn’t just one of three months – Sara’s diagnosis to death – it was a life”, Mark says. “It’s intensely personal and it’s more than just a journey of diagnosis, death and grief, it's two intertwining lives as those people navigate their way through. That’s really the story of the album”.

'Pandora' is out now on Reflections.

Tracklist