How Thom Yorke, Mark Pritchard, and Jonathan Zawada produced ‘Tall Tales’ in a Miro boardWhen Thom Yorke, Mark Pritchard, and Jonathan Zawada started creating their new collaborative audiovisual album, Tall Tales, they did not set out to thematically bind it to the real world like a traditional tall tale. In fact, their approach serves to reject any sort of salient meaning.
As the musicians behind the project, Yorke and Pritchard leaned into their decades of experimentation with instruments and techniques. They’ve crafted alien marching band suites in Back in the Game, melancholy progressive dark wave on A Faker in a Faker’s World, and alternative minimalist synth pop on This Conversation is Missing Your Voice.
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Zawada, who has created imagery for notable artists including Flume, Röyksopp, and The Avalanches, directed a melange of random visual pieces for the accompanying film. The first shot after the opening credits is a lighthouse piercing the dark with prismatic frequencies. Later on, viewers see children playing in garbage dumps and robot arms painting on canvases in unison. The only uniting factor between these sporadic depictions is a psychedelic avian-human hybrid navigating a virtual floating island between clips.

“When I think about what the film is about to me, from the very beginning, the feeling I got was one of disorientation or confusion,” Zawada says. “It’s quite tricky to construct something to get a feeling of confusion and disorientation across, because in making something, you have to do something concrete. Then, especially once you start talking about it, all of that confusion sort of dissipates.”
Zawada was right in anticipating that the shroud of confusion would be lifted from the project. As the work has been finished and shared, an underlying meaning has begun to form between its elaborate layers. The ostensible story is artistically incredulous, just as in tall tales like that of the giant Paul Bunyan, who dragged his axe across the southwest to form the Grand Canyon. As outrageous as that is, the Grand Canyon is real.
Tall Tales was written and visualised completely uncurated, delineating a profound truth: the world is uncurated. There is no one way forward. Everyone is doing their best to make sense of the insanity every day.
“The tall tale is that anybody is in control of anything,” Zawada continues. “When I was doing research for stories with the videos, it was during COVID. So everything felt like it was about COVID. Everybody’s telling you this is a completely unique time. Then that period faded into the past, and as I was working on other stuff, uncovering all these other crazy stories that were informing what I was doing. You slowly realise it’s like this all the time. The world is just a swirling mass of craziness.”
Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard. Image: Pierre Toussaint
To create an album that represents the absurdity of the world, the three contributors worked through a unique process that was both separate and collaborative. Yorke, Pritchard, and Zawada were never once in the room together over the several years they spent on it, and they only had a handful of Zoom calls to align their progress.
They trusted each other’s creative abilities because they had all worked together in the past. Zawada designed visuals for multiple projects from Pritchard, including his 2016 album, Under The Sun, which features a co-production between Pritchard and Yorke entitled Beautiful People. Pritchard had also remixed one of Yorke’s solo productions, Not The News.
With that preexisting trust (and a lack of deadlines from their label, Warp), the trio were free to let the project evolve at its own pace and lean into its uncurated nature. On Pritchard’s part, creating much of the backing music while Yorke mostly handled lyrics and vocals, he explored a vast range of synths. Some were rare and esoteric, such as the Korg PS 3100, Roland CR-78 drum machine, and a Triadex Muse.
While Pritchard does own a Minimoog, Arp Odyssey, and other impressive synths after over 30 years of producing music, he accessed many of the more obscure synths through Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio. By paying a membership fee and then a separate fee for each studio session, anyone can experiment with the same arsenal Pritchard used to create Tall Tales.

“You get a chance to play on these synthesizers that are really hard to keep working, let alone afford,” Pritchard says, also being sure to mention he used numerous bits of tech that were very cheap. “You could pick up Casios, old Yamahas, cheap toy things for between $30 and $100. There’ll be something in there. There’ll be a sound. There’ll be a source. It’s good to limit yourself to something [and think] ‘I’m going to make something out of this today’. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but it’s fun to try things out.”
As Pritchard tried these different synths, he would place new ideas in their shared Miro Board, an online collaborative workspace often used by corporations. All three of them would populate the board with updates, allowing each other to see everything evolve in real time, both taking and fueling inspiration.
“It was really useful to me to see the world growing, even though I might not know what some of the imagery was on the Miro Board,” Pritchard says. “It helped keep me excited because when you’re doing weeks of technical, painstaking work, it’s nice to have a lift where you see Jonathan working on a clip, and I see something come to life.”
Zawada adds, “So much of the time, nobody shows me anything until [the album’s] been mixed. In this instance, working on everything while Mark and Thom were working on the music, even if we weren’t necessarily feeding back, the outcome of the work, because it was all evolving in tandem, all felt much more meshed together. It gave me an opportunity to hear the layers of the songs build and respond to those with more nuance.”

Before the music came together, Zawada didn’t even intend for Tall Tales to have an accompanying film. He only knew he wanted to make a separate visual piece for each song, but as the musical layers built up, one core narrative that was in Zawada’s head was a protagonist washing up on an island where all the absurdity in the songs was taking place. This character would make its way through the madness and come out on the other side.
That’s where the floating island and the avian lead came from. They were the last pieces of visuals Zawada created for the project, and they bound it all together into a singular visual piece.
“It was based on something that Thom said when we were watching videos. He didn’t make the suggestion of the island, but said something about the way they all connect. That made me think I need something to give people something to latch onto, so you’re not just floating in space amongst all this material. But at the same time, we’re not forcing a connection between these things that may or may not be there,” Zawada says.
The connection is for the listener and the viewer to decide, which emphasises the prevailing sentiment of the project. Everyone is doing their best to make sense of all the craziness in the world. Tall Tales is what happens when three artists create the space for one another to make sense of it towards a common goal.
Learn more about Tall Tales at warp.net.
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