Graphically and musically, The Four Worlds is clearly an extension of Mark Pritchard's previous album, Under the Sun, which returned the producer to the U.K. album chart after a 22-year absence and was sampled for DJ Khaled's "On Everything." This is only half the length of Under the Sun, just over 30 minutes in duration -- roughly the same size as the supplemental remixes and outtakes set that preceded it, in fact -- but it has a similarly big-screen and disparate, primarily beat-less approach to ambient music. Each track evokes a distinct scene. The first third of the grooves is occupied by "Glasspops," a percolating number that could pass for a muscled-up remix of an early-'80s horror theme inspired by Martin Rev and John Foxx and excavated by the Finders Keepers label. Its guiro scrapes are at first kind of amusing, but as multiple creep-out synthesizer lines swarm around them, they start to take on a sinister quality. Eerie all the way through is "Come Let Us." It could be the sound of being slowly flown to a zone that's in a state of emergency, with an alarm-like drone gradually coming into sharp focus. The effect is all the more disquieting beneath a repetitious sample of Gregory Whitehead reading from the Book of Genesis like a malfunctioning cyborg Catholic priest. The album's other voice is courtesy of the Space Lady, who takes the surrealism to another level with a fraught, ecologically minded dispatch over melodramatic organ and radar pings. At that point, it wouldn't be surprising to hear a cover of Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft," but the set is finished off with a gently escalating miniature and a series of decayed gongs struck on barren windswept land. ~ Andy Kellman, Rovi

1		Glasspops
2		Circle of Fear
3		Come Let Us (feat. Gregory Whitehead)
4		The Arched Window
5		S.O.S. (feat. The Space Lady)
6		Parkstone Melody II
7		Mên-an-Tol
8		The Four Worlds

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