Mark Barrott announces new album ‘Everything Changes, Nothing Ends’

MARK BARROTT ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM EVERYTHING CHANGES, NOTHING ENDS, OUT 29 NOVEMBER VIA REFLECTIONS

SHARES LEAD SINGLE ‘PANDORA’

Listen to ‘Pandora’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOkkRNLXHZM

Mark Barrott has today announced his new album Everything Changes, Nothing Ends will be released on 29 November via Reflections. Along with the announcement he has shared lead single and album opener ‘Pandora’ which received its first play today on Mary Anne Hobb’s BBC 6 Music show.

“Thank you for teaching me how to live”, a handmade sign hangs in a makeshift hospice in Ibiza.

Towards the end of the 90s, Mark Barrott was at a crossroads, staring down a path with a dead end. In his late 20s, coming out of a loveless marriage with a steady job in insurance looming over his future, he felt that there had to be more. A chance meeting on an aeroplane led to a remarkable romance, one that would ultimately be the making, breaking, and remaking of him.

Sara was the catalyst Mark needed to cast aside the path set out for him and follow a new one of joy, of freedom and excitement, of music and mavericks. When she died in 2023, the glowing fragments of a life together – one that contained within it more than Mark imagined possible for a boy growing up in Sheffield – would ultimately lead to the creation of this album. Everything Changes, Nothing Ends is Mark’s 11th album under various monikers but in a way it’s his first, his last. A completely new experiment for him in its choral and orchestral grandeur but one that happened almost without thought. An album filled with such loss and such urgent beauty, such effortless wonder, that it could only be inspired by a person with an undimmable spark. Within it is grief, yes, untold grief; but it also contains life, two lives to be exact.

Speaking of the album Mark says:
“This is a story. A story of life and ultimately death. A story of two lives coming together through a chance meeting on an aeroplane and spending the next 20+ years together via the craziness of Berlin in the late 90’s to Northern Italy, South America and finally the tranquility of rural ibiza. The story of how life can change and be snatched away in the blink of an eye. But this is not a sad story, it’s a story of joy, love, grief and gratitude for what was.”

Mark and Sara’s story begins in Berlin, living in the the infamous 90s Kastanienallee squat K77 and experiencing a creative boom like no other. It ends in Ibiza “We were driving a hire car from the airport and within 10 minutes we just said, let’s move here”, Mark says of their instant connection with the island, “we just lived this beautiful, tranquil, gentle life surrounded by the locals, the countryside, and the animals”. It was here that Mark made perhaps his most successful records to date, his Sketches from an Island series (8.0 Pitchfork). Though widely credited as the peak of a Balearic revival (largely spearheaded by Mark and his International Feel label and regarded as “one of the finest and most consistent catalogues […] of the era” – Resident Advisor) he describes them more as “folk music, because in effect they were telling the stories of everyday Ibiza, the stories of normal people; nurses, doctors, firemen, greengrocers and farmers”. A million miles away from the perception many people have of Ibiza.

Mark 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 Reflections. Another stark about-turn, it began as his first time scoring a documentary, about the Japanese process of paying a company for a totally new identity. The documentary was eventually put on hold during COVID but what emerged was a remarkable 8-track journey through the sounds, sights, smells and sensations of traditional and contemporary Japanese culture.

No stranger to variety then, but Everything Changes, Nothing Ends is different. “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”. 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”.

Pre-order Everything Changes, Nothing Ends here:
https://reflections.ffm.to/mbecne.OPR

Photo credit: Jos Kottmann

High-res images are available here

Everything Changes, Nothing Ends artwork

Everything Changes, Nothing Ends tracklist:

1. Pandora
2. Butterfly in a Jar (i)
3. Butterfly in a Jar (ii-iv)
4. Looking Through the Mirror of the Soul
5. January 25th
6. Mono No Aware
7. It’s Just Like Falling Asleep