Read an interview with Warp Records’ Clarke, taken from the latest issue of the magazine as part of our celebration of 20 years of Warp.
You can read the full Warp20 piece in our digital flipbook edition of the magazine, available HERE.
With a faintly innocuous ring to it, Clark isn’t the sort of name that exactly instils fear in the listener.
Except, of course, for those who have heard the succession of four uncompromising, abstract electroid long-players that have burst forth from the mercurial mind of Chris Clark on Warp Records, that is – who just might have a trickle of sweat winding down their necks right now. The enfant terrible producer is back with a new album ‘Totem’s Flare’, but this time out the template has considerably changed. No longer will his music cause quite the strong love/hate reactions of the past: Clark’s switched the programme, tempered his abstraction and outsider electronics with something a little more meaty and beaty. Whisper it – he’s gone pop, adding a decidedly melodic sensibility to the fractious, jagged burgundy edges of his hermetic sonic territories.
“It feels really snappy and concise compared to other work, but I think it’s still really challenging, it’s just got this sharp production,” Clark concedes. Indeed, ‘Growl’s Garden’, one of the album’s highlights and the title of his last EP, is the producer’s most accessible moment so far, with its dark, oscillating Berlin-indebted electro riffage and alien, desolate melody. Amidst it all Clark’s own processed vocal floats in blipping, constantly shifting drum wreckage. But this is still a long way from the commercial; indeed, by seemingly allying himself with a more pop framework, Clark’s seen a way to be more subversive, to fuck up the industry from within.
Born from a desire to consolidate his many musical influences, ‘Totem’s Flare’ sees him flinging elements of post-rock, acid house and, of course, freaky ambience into the pot for the most adventurous Clark excursion yet, channelled, naturally, through his wilfully perverse, trickster perspective.
“There was a bit of poking fun at linear music, I guess,” Clark smiles. “I like doing stuff that projects a broad range. I think it’s amazing that there are nights that play linear, homogenous music all night, I can see the value in that. But it’s not for me, I tend to get bored really quickly and end up trying to make things too short or too long.”
‘Totem’s Flare’ nonetheless contains his most club-ready track in ‘Look Into The Heart Now’, a sulphuric, bubbling acid percolator, composed of 4/4 drum kicks and Roland Groovebox squelch, all perceived through his wonked-out, non-typical vision. According to Clark though, he wasn’t out to craft a club banger at all.
“To be honest club music was the last thing I was listening to really, it was probably more rock ‘n’ roll influenced. I think it stands out from other electronic records by being super loud but my references at the time were proper thrash rock things. If you listen to it in that context it’s sounds pretty normal, sonically the aggression is similar. The club thing probably comes instinctively from my gig set-up though, for three years I’ve been playing clubs so it all seems quite intuitive.”
Clark speaks of all kinds of different music feeding into his own sonics, from the mutating dubstep-not-dubstep of Hyperdub Records to fellow Warp cat Bibio, via Robert Hood and Harvey Milk.
“I’m really into Harvey Milk, they’re this kind of stoner rock band. They always deliver two or three punchy, poppy tracks on each album and the rest of it is always the most uncompromising, organised mess. They’re quite hard going but they’re really decent.”
The guitar influence is indeed more pronounced than ever on the album’s final track ‘Absence’, sounding closer to post-rock pioneers like Slint and Mogwai, a serpentine coil of sleepy, vaguely sinister guitar, the soundtrack to unravelling sanity and quite brilliant in its execution. “I like to make tracks that are really dense in atmosphere but with really simple melodies. It’s actually really hard to play, that track, even though the notes are really simple, cos of the timing. I like tracks that are deceptively simple, that seem simple but there’s actually a lot of technique behind it. The technique seems invisible, it’s not showy, not like Steve Vai or something. It’s all in the simplicity and the delivery. It may seem the black sheep of the album but it follows really well.”
The producer first signed with Warp at the age of nineteen (“I sent them demo tapes, I was probably one of the last artists to get signed from good old TDK!”). His precocious vision and fuck off attitude seemed to herald a fiery, fiercely individual talent in the mould of fellow Warp man Aphex Twin (Richard James), and soon Clark was cutting 2001’s ‘Clarence Park’, and rapidly sloughing off the Aphex Twin comparisons with its follow up longplayer, 2003’s ‘Empty The Bones Of You’. Numerous EPs and several albums later, and ‘Totem’s Flare’ is his best record in a career that has allowed him to take numerous risks without once compromising a unique vision. Clark believes that Warp Records have been instrumental in this regard.
“They don’t expect you to compromise anything,” he reflects. “I really like the fact that they leave you to do stuff. That’s a typical Warp thing, to leave it to the artists to perfect it themselves. They’ll try to suggest a few things but they generally don’t expect you to compromise on things and I think that’s quite rare.”
With the new album in the bag, Clark is already conjuring new EPs with remixes and extra tracks, and then taking a holiday before embarking on a swathe of new material. Our advice is to embrace the fear and follow the flare.
Words by Ben Murphy
