Clark
For the first 15 years or so of his career, electronic purist Chris Clark enveloped himself in tech, driving the experimental needle on IDM releases like Clarence Park (2001), Body Riddle (2006) and the pounding techno album Turning Dragon (2008). Yet Clark has become increasingly drawn to the world of scoring, most recently the TV mini-series The Last Panthers and psychological horror flick Daniel Isn’t Real. Having widened his parameters, new working processes have bled into solo albums such as Kiri Variations (2019) and his latest long player Playground in a Lake. Perhaps Clark’s most ambitious record to date, esoteric concepts on the topic of climate change perforate its narrative. Recorded with string ensembles in Budapest and Berlin, ideas initiated acoustically were manipulated electronically, tearing up the framework of what he did with past compositions.
You’ve been increasingly getting into the world of soundtracking over the past few years. Was that something you’d been actively pursuing?
“I pursued it alongside studio albums because you get options to record with more musicians when you score and I found that was a nice thing to have running alongside the solo work. The frustrations of each respective craft inform the other, so I tend to find that after I’ve scored something I want to write a solo record because I can do what I like.”
Do you find scoring restrictive in that sense?
“It’s not that you can’t do what you want with soundtracks, but just that you get good at picking battles and there’s lot of tricks to smuggle your vision in without them quite realising it. Some would call it compromise, but the stakes are higher when you’re serving a project that’s way bigger than a solo album. It’s like learning a new language and it’s been a bit like that with me because I’ve been forced to sight read.”
How are you tested by soundtrack work?
“There’s no test like having to come up with stuff really quickly. You have to be able to summon up emotions to, is this it now? It’s such a privilege to write a solo record, yet you start repeating yourself and you need something to shake yourself out of that.”
