Music Monday: Happy 30th Birthday To The Greatest Ambient Album Of All Time (Maybe)

Can it be 30 years already?

It can, in fact, but Global Communication’s timeless classic 76:14 hasn’t dated a second and is still, after all this time, quite possibly the best ambient album ever recorded.

Global Communication, along with  a slew of other aliases, was the brainchild of English duo Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard. They wanted to create an album without titles so that the listener was invited to interpret the music itself. 76:14 was the supposed – the album is actually slightly shorter – run time of the album. The songs’ titles were just their runtimes.

Sort of.

See, albums like this aren’t just two blokes sitting down in a studio for a couple of weeks and banging out a record. They take circuitous routes. The second track, “14:31” is also known as “Ob-Selon Mi-Nos” as it was originally a remix of a track by Mystic Institute, half of which was Mark Pritchard himself, and released in 1992.

“9:25” is a remix of a tune by Sun Electric which both parties agreed had been so thoroughly altered that it really wasn’t a remix anymore, so Sun Electric didn’t pay them and it was left to appear here.

“8:07” and “5:32” were two halves of a piece called “Maiden Voyage” which came out on an EP after the album had been released. The tracks include guitars from a shoegaze band called Chapterhouse. I mention this because around the same time as this album was being recorded, Chapterhouse gave Middleton and Pritchard the multi-track tapes of their album Blood Music and asked them to use the tracks to make a new album of their own.

Which they, of course, did.

The result was 1993’s Pentamerous Metamorphosis, which was given away with early copies of the Chapterhouse record.

Four years ago Global Communication released Transmissions, a collection of Pentamerous Metamorphosis, 76:14 and contemporaneous remixes, an ambient music lover’s dream.

What makes this record so special? The music is timeless. Being almost entirely beatless doesn’t hold the music back; it is still dynamic, both sonically and emotionally. It swells and drifts. It insists. It is immersive. 

There’s really nothing quite like it.

And a week ago, it turned 30.