Flood

Mark Ellis (born 16 August 1960), known by his professional pseudonym Flood, is a British record producer and audio engineer who worked with The Smashing Pumpkins from 1995 through the 2000 breakup. Other major acts Flood has worked with include New Order, U2, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

In 1995, Flood co-produced the diamond-selling Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness with longtime collaborator Alan Moulder. In 1997, he assisted Billy Corgan and Brad Wood on 1998's Adore., and then co-produced Machina/The Machines of God with Billy Corgan in 2000.

Production style
Billy Corgan, who worked with Flood on three albums, said, "Flood's incredible. Flood is a tremendous producer. Flood is very masterful with the sonics, but where he really shines is he's a great idea person. And I don't mean like he tells you, "Oh, put this chorus here." It's more like he can see an ambiance of the song that you don't necessarily see and he would really fight with us – not negative a fight, just he would really kind of push us to say there's another vibe here that you can get to."

Pseudonym
According to producer Mark Freegard, Ellis' pseudonym, "Flood," was given to him by producer Chris Tsangarides during Ellis' early days at Morgan Studios and while The Cure was there recording. As a young studio runner, Ellis was responsible for responding to numerous requests from the recording artists and staff for tea and bacon sandwiches. Ellis kept up with the numerous requests for tea while the other runner remained largely unavailable, leading to Tsangarides nicknaming them "Flood" and "Drought," respectively.