Clark - Death Peak

[QQQ 9]

definitely takes more than one listen to sink in properly, but when it does... oh boy. this might be my favourite electronic release of the year so far.

[Joyrex 462]

definitely takes more than one listen to sink in properly, but when it does... oh boy. this might be my favourite electronic release of the year so far.

Agreed - just the tonic I needed after Depeche Mode's disappointing "Spirit".

[Perezvon 0]

this is seriously fantastic. i want to see how these translate live!

there you go http://concert.arte.tv/fr/clark-arte-concert-festival

[fairuzosman 3]

 

this is seriously fantastic. i want to see how these translate live!

there you go http://concert.arte.tv/fr/clark-arte-concert-festival

 

 

UGH I want to see but I don't want to spoil my experience in Brixton soon

[Guest Chesney]

I didn't even realise it was out. Just started listening.

[BoomTssPhace 18]

 

 

this is seriously fantastic. i want to see how these translate live!

there you go http://concert.arte.tv/fr/clark-arte-concert-festival

 

 

UGH I want to see but I don't want to spoil my experience in Brixton soon

 

Same, there's a chance i'll see him in nashville but i just had to skip through real quick. Looks like those, ehm, dancers only come out for tracks from death peak. Otherwise looks like a maniacal show

[apriorion 9]

Barf. It's so annoying to see an electronic musician who is basically pressing 'play' with a bunch of lights on a stage and a few other gimmicks while everyone in the audience is looking forward in a crowded situation with no room to dance to fucking killer tunes. 

 

Let me be clear: I fucking love Clark's compositions. They're fucking banging. Every time I spin his records, the room gets down and people ask me "dude, who did that track?!" There's an art to that, producing music that good. But this thing where the dude's on a stage and everyone must be looking up at them has got to stop now. Electronic music is interesting in that it doesn't need to conform to silly rock-and-roll traditions. We should all be gathering together to get down to the artist's great music. If it's the composer himself up there playing his compositions 'live', that's cool. But why face the stage that way? Why are there lights up on the stage? Why do I need to pay tons of money and travel to a place just to be in a tight space with no room to dance while listening to (intelligent) dance tunes? 

 

These thoughts have been bouncing around in my head ever since I flew to Houston in December to see Aphex. I'm not meaning to say that I think anyone is stupid for enjoying that show (it seemed everyone did), but I've just been realizing that I enjoy the smaller venues with the more intimate crowds as compared to those large, arena-style situations, I guess. I prefer the stronger sense of community I get at the smaller things (and the room to dance), rather than a tightly-packed deal. 

 

I think of it like this: if I go to an art gallery opening, I want to experience the artist's works. There's nothing wrong with the fact that there's no performance element there. But it would be silly to want to watch the painter up on a stage painting something in front of a crowd. Still, there is something really valuable about being in the room with the artist and a crowd of like-minded folk, on a special day that the artist designated. What's wrong with an analogous thing for an electronic music show? Pressing 'play' is akin to unveiling the work of art. There's no harm in it. But it's different in kind from the noodling that guitar-dudes are doing for their rock shows. So why does an electronic show almost inevitably follow that format? It's stale. 

[Rpeg 0]

^ dis

 

 

guys this is good music.

[Threads 2]

Catastrophe Anthem is next level

[Rpeg 0]

Listening now, and Catastrophe Anthem moving into Living Fantasy has done things to me.

 

There are Edgar Froese vibes on Living Fantasy.  I'm vibing on those vibes, this is vibey.  With his s/t I was bored after one listen but I've cranked the volume three times and it's not over yet.

[Extralife 132]

http://thequietus.com/articles/22187-clark-death-peak-album-review-chris-clark-warp

 

Pretty sterling review from The Quietus.

[apriorion 9]

"Catastrophe Anthem" is definitely my favorite, followed by "Living Fantasy"--great transition. Everything that's great about Clark's development as an artist lately with the "Last Panthers" OST, s/t and everything leading up to this. Everything on this album is knockout, really. My word. 

 

Clark is getting better and better with each album. 

[danshoebridge 6]

"Catastrophe Anthem" is definitely my favorite, followed by "Living Fantasy"--great transition. Everything that's great about Clark's development as an artist lately with the "Last Panthers" OST, s/t and everything leading up to this. Everything on this album is knockout, really. My word.

 

Clark is getting better and better with each album.

Yeah that run of 2 songs is the absolute highlight of an already very good album. Was listening to this on headphones while walking through the woods yesterday and those 2 gave me 'the feels' in a way I haven't had from anything else for a while.

[jules 83]

Barf. It's so annoying to see an electronic musician who is basically pressing 'play' with a bunch of lights on a stage and a few other gimmicks while everyone in the audience is looking forward in a crowded situation with no room to dance to fucking killer tunes. 

 

Let me be clear: I fucking love Clark's compositions. They're fucking banging. Every time I spin his records, the room gets down and people ask me "dude, who did that track?!" There's an art to that, producing music that good. But this thing where the dude's on a stage and everyone must be looking up at them has got to stop now. Electronic music is interesting in that it doesn't need to conform to silly rock-and-roll traditions. We should all be gathering together to get down to the artist's great music. If it's the composer himself up there playing his compositions 'live', that's cool. But why face the stage that way? Why are there lights up on the stage? Why do I need to pay tons of money and travel to a place just to be in a tight space with no room to dance while listening to (intelligent) dance tunes? 

 

These thoughts have been bouncing around in my head ever since I flew to Houston in December to see Aphex. I'm not meaning to say that I think anyone is stupid for enjoying that show (it seemed everyone did), but I've just been realizing that I enjoy the smaller venues with the more intimate crowds as compared to those large, arena-style situations, I guess. I prefer the stronger sense of community I get at the smaller things (and the room to dance), rather than a tightly-packed deal. 

 

I think of it like this: if I go to an art gallery opening, I want to experience the artist's works. There's nothing wrong with the fact that there's no performance element there. But it would be silly to want to watch the painter up on a stage painting something in front of a crowd. Still, there is something really valuable about being in the room with the artist and a crowd of like-minded folk, on a special day that the artist designated. What's wrong with an analogous thing for an electronic music show? Pressing 'play' is akin to unveiling the work of art. There's no harm in it. But it's different in kind from the noodling that guitar-dudes are doing for their rock shows. So why does an electronic show almost inevitably follow that format? It's stale. 

 

 

awesome post. clark should have the light show on the floor of the venue and not on him. put the dancers on the floor. foster that environment. that would be super sick.

[Perezvon 0]

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/track-by-track/track-by-track-clark-on-death-peak

 

 

 

1. Spring But Dark

 

"I wanted this to sound like a ‘70 [Werner] Herzog film mutated by a gnarly slab of future-bound sound design creeping in at the end, really detailed and layered. It pulls the whole thing apart, corrodes it, I want it to feel like a shock, or a gasp when you inhale too much whatever it is you like inhaling. The children’s choir are just singing a simple interval. It sounds like an induction ritual, they are encircling you, they pull you in."

 

2. Butterfly Prowler

 

"The re-iteration of the riff in this feels like the constant hum of your perception as it moves through a changing landscape. The same but different, all the time. It took me about 3 minutes to make the initial improvisation of this, but I really climbed inside it for months after, and wanted to make it a fully immersive composition, with new nooks and crannies revealed on each listen. For a while it was quite hard to hear it as a whole. I micro-tuned each frame of the journey and wanted it to build in momentum continually. It’s a pretty friendly tame track though, for me. It’s like a Trojan horse, a romp through the meadow at the bottom of the Death Peak."

 

3. Peak Magnetic

 

"Almost the tougher sibling to butterfly. Starts off all unburdened happy to the point of being a bit pleased with itself, but then churns into this euphoric white out of peak drop. If I was going to sound crass I’d say it’s like something from Disintegration Loops with a kick over it. It actually originated from an improvisation with tape loops through a desk and about 5439 guitar pedals. I could build a castle out of the end melody drop, I didn’t want it to end. I want it to feel like time lapse footage of a tree pushing through the soil, the sound of growth, child-like optimism with a pinch of aggression too."

 

4. Hoova

 

"The album stops being all 'I'm a friendly happy guy' at this point. It’s a vital pivot, you feel the mood hinge into something else. Piano section is proper Basic Channel influenced, those 1 chord moody vamp things they do so well. I’ve totally contorted it to fit my ideal though. Some sounds have a snarling, lairy quality that I find quite addictive. It’s confusing because snarling, lairy people aren’t that much fun, generally. "

 

5. Slap Drones

 

"We all could use some slap drones in our lives. Like physical manifestations of conscience. They give us a slap when our behaviour is LESS THAN IDEAL. I stole the title from an Iain M. Banks novel that a friend recommended. It sounds proper psychedelic to me. I’d like to release a long version of this drone at some point, there’s a version of it that’s just the drone, and me improvising intoxicated sounding jazz scales over it for about 20 minutes. I wasn’t intoxicated when I played it. I never am when I make music. Music is like my very own slap drone. The improv was nice, abit like Alice Coltrane vs Sunn 0))). but alas not peaky enough for the album."

 

6. Aftermath

 

"Total texture switch up but in same key and same tempo as slap drones, it sounds like 'Slap Drones' grandfather on a rickety old horse in the desert, simultaneously annoyed yet relieved that 'Slap Drones' has finished. Everything interlocks. It reminds me of something from a Sergio Leone film. Harpsichords do it for me, when you take all the treble off and crank them onto tape they have a sadness and intimacy that pianos lack. Taking the treble off and drenching them in tape hiss makes them sound less cutesy, they sound heavy, mournful, big."

 

7. Catastrophe Anthem

 

"The children I recorded aren’t REALLY children they are ancestor simulations singing to their AI creator. Possibly. ⅓ chance. I reckon I beat Kevin Shields in an OCD competition with the mix on this. I got obsessed with hearing it in contrasting spaces, 1 in the quiet of my studio, and 2 in loud spaces, in the street where you hear all the other sounds bleed in, I wanted that messy chaotic aspect in there, I would listen as quietly as possible in the most noisy city spaces, imagining how to convey something overwhelming, earthy, asymmetrical.

I set myself these impossible targets, I want it to sound corrosive but gentle, generous but brutal, tragic but also almost drunk with joy. There’s this physical quality to the distortion, I want it to protrude from the speakers, like it almost doesn’t belong there, like it’s beyond what the medium can contain. Want want want. Music is quite selfish isn’t it. Just pure focused relentless desire fixed on what you want the music to sound like. Brutal, heheh! I’m a softy really."

 

8. Living Fantasy

 

"Probably my favourite track. The main riff is a Korg Kronos (the least me synth ever) cranked and repitched and spliced onto a Nagra mono tape machine (the most me machine ever). So you get this fresh blend of slick future bound, warm, crunchy, vintage. It’s hard for me to pin down what the origins of some of these sounds are. I like the cognitive dissonance involved. Brushed/plucked/played/sequenced/futuristic/as old as the hills/a church organ/a synth. Am I taking the piss? Am I weeping and laughing at the same time? I like work that asks questions!"

 

9. Un U.K.

 

"So much went into this! I wrote the whole thing in 4 days around Brexit. I was stuck in Melbourne, watching it from a far, stuck in this perpetual loop of shock/incomprehension/sadness/hope/anger. Another one of those where the general structure was nailed/improvised in a few hours, but the post compositional structural refining took weeks.

The drop in this is about 35 EDM tracks time stretched and put through guitar pedals and tape. Plus a multi layered field recording of wasps tuned into diatonic sync with the track. At some point I got bored of human voice and thought fuck it let’s get wasp-core. For me it’s all about inducing a vivid shock, extending the boundary of what can be structurally achieved in a piece of music. I loved making the end bit that’s in 3 different time signatures, with those proper splasks of spring reverb sawtooth waves. So tense. It bristles with aggression but then there is this quite pretty female vocal element on top. That’s a real vocal btw, no sample libraries involved on this record. I persuaded two of my Norwegian friends to sing on the record, gradually going out of phase with each other. An old Reich trick.

When it drops I wanted it to THROB with malignance, yet still somehow sound elegant. Like footage of horrendous, dangerous looking /beautiful natural landscapes. Uninhabitable but you still kind of can’t take your eyes off it. It’s quite an obnoxious/bombastic track, this one. So I knew it needed a contrast. I wanted the ending to dissolve down to this fine, muted point of humility and surrender. It feels like a return to some child-like place of innocence and hope. A folk melody for a broken country."

 

"The drop in this is about 35 EDM tracks time stretched and put through guitar pedals and tape. Plus a multi layered field recording of wasps tuned into diatonic sync with the track. At some point I got bored of human voice and thought fuck it let’s get wasp-core." flol

Edited April 13, 2017 by Perezvon

[BoomTssPhace 18]

Clark commenting on Clark? Haven't even opened the link and i'm erect

[QQQ 9]

this album is so fucking good !!

[beer badger 160]

Really enjoyed this on first play, so it's getting another blast

Edited April 14, 2017 by beerwolf

[BoomTssPhace 18]

Not directly related but i just got a lightly used Body Riddle lp at the shop for $25. Is it just me or should that have gone for more?

[fairuzosman 3]

Sell it to me for $35?

[StephenG 148]

$36

[hello spiral 538]

Not directly related but i just got a lightly used Body Riddle lp at the shop for $25. Is it just me or should that have gone for more?

 

errrrrrr

[beer badger 160]

watmm did a good job with this, as I don't think I would of bothered it 

 

super album, played it most days this week and into the future

 

good work Mr Clark

Edited April 16, 2017 by beerwolf

[ncrtx 2]

Went to my first Clark gig yesterday with Ash Koosha and Blanck Mass, who were both fantastic by the way, including the a-we-some visuals they provided on the huge fucking screen. The music was absolutely banging and was, as I expected, performed without flaw (inb4 'pressing play', as it clearly didn't seem like it). He brought (impressive) dancers and stage lighting and it had a pretty good 'show aspect' to it. I usually dislike any shows that are so well-orchestrated that they need a budget of this sort, but I make an exception for this one.

 

Furthermore, there were like only 120ish people there - which is an insanely small amount for that line-up imo. It did make the entire evening feel very intimate, though; no one was talking, everyone had more than enough space to stand/dance and one could even sit down to bask in the awesomeness that were the provided visuals (especially those of Ash Koosha).

Edited April 16, 2017 by ncrtx

[Stock 43]

It had been a while since an album didn't grew up on me like that. First time I heard it I thought it was pretty lame (mostly because of Catastrophe Anthem which I hated).
But then I stumbled upon his Paris performance on Arte, found it amazing, listened to the album more and more until I bought the vinyl yesterday.
Feels good to hear something not immediately rewarding, and I'm glad I can feel that kind of "grower-album effect" again. Feels like it'll be very rewarding in the end !