Fabled English record producer Mark Pritchard, luminary songwriter Thom Yorke and groundbreaking visual artist Jonathan Zawada present Tall Tales – a debut collaborative visual and audio cinema experience a decade in the making. A fairy tale for the modern world, Tall Tales depicts rising tides, kings & queens, amazon logistics and robotic arms under iridescent skies. We wanted computers to do our accounting – instead, they try to paint our pictures and sing our songs.
Like all good fairy tales – this work edges light with the dark as Thom’s echoed chants intertwine with Mark’s shimmering electronics on top of Jonathan’s hyperreal environments. Pritchard showcases his mastery of archaic machines, guiding the music down unexpected and experimental paths whilst Yorke delivers a haunting and expansive vocal performance, evoking Radiohead’s OK Computer-era digital FX while delving into dark, introspective storytelling.
Director Jonathan Zawada’s artistry blurs the line between the organic and digital, juxtaposing uneasy landscapes of natural beauty with the brutal aesthetics of a dystopian world. Through Yorke’s lyrics, Pritchard’s atemporal compositions and Zawada’s visuals, Tall Tales questions where our insatiable appetite for ‘progress’ might have landed us. A prophetic visual album, Tall Tales has been years in the making, but delivered right on time.
Before playing in select cinemas for one night only, preceding the release of the same-named album, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the visual album’s director, Jonathan Zawada, on the relationship between AI and art, and the excitement about collaborating with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
Nick: I can only imagine how exciting it was to work with Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke on this project, especially after Thom has done things like Anima with Paul Thomas Anderson that I loved! I’m curious to know how both of their own careers have played a role in your own artistic journey.
Jonathan Zawada: I’m a massive Thom and Radiohead fan from way, way back. I think in terms of their output, it was definitely a spectre that was over me the entire time making this project. ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’, all of the work from that period, and even the stuff they did with Shinola Studio who were animating video clips around that time, I remember being massively influential on me.
And, you know, that visual world that they created was so impactful, let alone musically. The impact of Radiohead in general, and Thom, on me personally, has been massive over the course of my career.
Then for Mark, I’ve been lucky to work with him for 10 to 15 years now. And in the line of musicians I’ve worked with, I feel like I’m lucky enough to call him a friend now as well. But prior to becoming a friend, I’ve just been constantly impressed and in awe of his ability to change shape and explore such a massively wide variety of sonic spaces. His approach to the way he makes music just so… I don’t know. I’ve never encountered anybody with more of a sense of craft, or anybody that I would just legitimately call an artist from start to finish than him. He sort of lives, breathes, and everything’s in his art.
Nick: I read that the oldest track on this album is around nine years old, and Mark and Thom began going back and forth on creatively on this during COVID. When did they approach you to being working on Tall Tales?
Jonathan Zawada: Mark sends me music as he’s working on it all the time! All types of music. Little demos of stuff that he’s made in half an hour, and proper demons as well. He’s always sharing everything he makes with me, which is lovely.
I think from the very beginning, when he first got some of the tracks back from Thom where he had put his vocals in, he was sharing them straight away, and we were chatting about it, and I was taking notes and having thoughts.
It’s one of those things that I’ve loved doing, and it has been a really amazing project. I’ve come to value it massively, the ability to work on the visual material alongside the development of the music. It’s been a real eye opening experience for me because I’ve done that before, but not to this extent.
Nick: I feel like the best way to describe Tall Tales as a whole is a synaesthesic meditation. The music makes you feel like you’re floating in this void, and the visuals are very entrancing and engaging. What was the creative process like in finding the visuals that would play along with the album?
Jonanthan Zawada: Mark and I have always been particularly sensitive in all of our collaborative work. I think it has been that correlation where Mark creates the music, which has this incredible sense of emotion to it, and then I pick up some aspect of that and create something visual. But it has been something I’ve been trying to work on for a long time, and that’s to make sure the visual aspect doesn’t take away from the music or switch up the viewers’ attention too much.
If that happens, I feel like they’re no longer listening to the music, and no longer allowing that space to move. Mark’s very aware of creating uncomfortable sonic spaces, and then it’s about how I’m either going to reflect that or play against that with the visuals. Occasionally, I’ll just play along with the music, but there are times where I might nitpick something that’s sort of buried in the track and focus on that. It’s not really about balance or not balanced, but trying to make sure that the feeling and mood and intention is coming across as clearly as possible.
I’m very lucky that Mark doesn’t come into the process with any pre-defined ideas. He was very happy for me to respond to his music. There were definitely times where maybe I was working on the visuals to a song that wasn’t complete, and there was a bit of a wrestle back and forth about it, but it was always great creative conversations.
Nick: Thematically, Tall Tales is a very interesting exploration of community reacting to art, AI’s relationship with art and artists, and how cultural shifts can determine people’s viewpoints on these things. I’m curious to know how much of your visual work in this film was an introspective analysis of your stance on AI in art, and how much was based on the cultural reaction to it over the last few years?
Jonathan Zawada: I mean, honestly, I’ve only sort of been realising this over the last few weeks, and the amazing thing for me to come out of this project is the lens of time. I’ve dabbled with AI and various things like it going back 10 years now. I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT before it really exploded.
So, I think one of the interesting things with this has been examining AI as part of my work process, and how that reacted to the global consciousness, and that definitely became a part of that exploration, for sure. But, because we were working on this project for a while by the time ChatGPT had it’s big moment, which was I think like two-and-a-half, maybe three years into it, Mark and I had long conversations about whether it was actually okay to be doing this.
From day one, the themes of Tall Tales are exactly as you described – how do we value art? How do we tell stories about the value of where art comes from? AI has become a dominant part of culture, and then there was push back against it. I’ve had lots of conversations with fellow artists and other people about AI in this space, and I think this project has really enabled me to have this long less look at what the role of AI is in a piece of artwork. Some of my projects on this subject have been reactionary, but some have been meditative. But there is still a far larger context overall, I suppose.
Thank you to Jonathan for his time, and to Pivot Pictures and NixCo PR for organising the interview. Tall Tales is playing for one night only, on May 8, in select cinemas. Check your local listings for more information.
