RA.823 Clark ⟋ RA Podcast

Connecting the dots from classical to Burial.

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Chris Clark's music is hard to describe, but if you wanted to explain it to an electronic music fan, you might use the dreaded term "IDM" to encompass the many strange and alluring records, some frantic, some chill, the UK producer has put out through Warp over the years. We can be a bit more specific: he uses field recordings, out-there drum patterns and all kinds of hardware (seriously, there's a lot) to make make meticulously processed music, some of which you can dance to. Lately, though, he's turned his attention to classical music, scoring films and televisions shows and culminating in last year's Playground In A Lake for vaunted label Deutsche Grammophon, which featured guests like AFRODEUTSCHE and Oliver Coates and a member of Grizzly bear on a moving, string and horns-led suite about climate change. You hear all these ideas at once on Clark's stirring RA Podcast, which features music, as he explains, from 1922 all the way to 2022. Classical rubs elbows with Burial and Ricardo Villalobos, as once familiar tracks melt into new (mis)shapes. It also features plenty of Clark originals—maybe some glimpses of the new album? The best part isn't even the formidable selections, but the way he puts it altogether. Far from a seamless DJ mix, this one is full of peaks and valleys and clever transitions that'll make you check the tracklist and wonder what you just heard. It's the kind of all-over-the-place mix that captures the brilliance of Clark's in a DJ format. Maybe he should do this more often. What are you grateful for these days? People in my life. Being able to carry on doing what I love, making music, progressing, inching along, stitch by stitch improving it all a bit everyday. How and where was the mix recorded, and can you tell us the idea behind it? Some in Australia, then some more on a flight on the way back and the rest in my studio back in Brighton which is where I am now, jetlagged but buzzing. It started off as a DMX drum machine rinse out, I've been enjoying that thing, I wanted to play some old electro stuff but felt I needed to justify it by making my own alongside it. That was fun, but felt a bit norms, so I started crafting this slab of material from older music, musique concrète classical, jazz and some of my own unreleased tunes as well. This was very engaging, but obviously a bit of a mess. So I decided to go right back to 1922 with Symphony Of Sirens. So it's now music that I like from 1922 to 2022, and you can't possibly call it a mess, because it's because it's music from 1922 to 2022, ok? There's a definite wink to John Peel in there in terms of ground covered. Actually the more I went on, the more I began to see abstract parallels between the pieces chosen. How is it recording with string ensembles, and how does the composition, writing or recording process and approach differ from your previous, more electronic albums? I played in orchestras as a kid so strings are a distant but native part of my language, it's just felt more normal to go between the two as worlds as time has gone. When I first worked with orchestra for the film Daniel Isn't Real I was kinda freaked out at how much I liked the sound, but also how different it was to techno, or say the more pure electronic of a record like Turning Dragon. I wasn’t like, "yeah this is EXACTLY the same as that album." But I gradually started integrating voices from my more electronic world. For instance, like the cat synth, I layered a line from that over the string session and this track became "I'm Pulling My Face Off." It shouldn't really work like this, but it does. My favourite kind of flavour combination discovery. Maybe it's something in the harmonics between sawtooth waves/noise and orchestra slamming it on the chromatic spider lines, it just clicks. Why did you choose to go so far back into electronic music history for this mix—and do you think older electronic music and musique concrete informs the way you make music now? It was actually just a very natural thing of thinking "what do I like?" And I like plenty of current music but I'm not actually a DJ, so I'll never have 400 tracks that were released in the last six months on my hard disk, it would be weird if I did, like procrastinating on all of my own music by losing myself in other peoples. Some people do that exceptionally well, with full commitment, and entertain thousands of people in the process. But I'm from much more of a producer/composer/musician mindset. I just know what I enjoy, some music has a potent quality that transcends our particular moment, it's always good to be aware of what's going on outside our particular moment, you realize it's all connected, it's a conversation. You can see the links between hip-hop, techno and musique concrete, Bach chorales inform gospels, jazz harmony. Blues to funk, funk to Kraftwerk back to Detroit techno again. It’s a massive ever growing feast, basically. I'm sure I've missed some links in that chain, there are always hidden links in the chain :) What's one social or political cause you want the world to pay more attention to? Tackling the ongoing ecological collapse of our planet seems like a good place to start in terms of causes. I'm reading a really good book at the moment by Jason Hickel about the idea of "degrowth," called Less Is More. I heartily recommend it, but I'm not going to badly paraphrase it here in an interview about some music I mixed. What are you looking forward to in the near future? Finishing my album so I can go on holiday. Been too long. My album is fun though. I don't wanna finish it! I wanna stay in this place forever.

Tracklist

Bartok - Dorian Mode From Mikrokosmos Sun Ra - Love In Outer Space Basil Kirchin - My Unintended Basic Channel - Mutism Albert Ayler - Spiritual Unity Bendik Giske - Adjust Todd Dockstader - Water Music Clark - Dark Acid Climbs C Yoshiu Wada - Reed modulations Eliane Radigue - Opus 17 Eliane Radigue - Vice Versa Bernard Parmegiani - Premiere Series Positive Centre - Mycelial Culture Gajek - Connected By Pipes (Live Version) Clark - Entropy Polychord Suicide - Ghost Rider Clark - Unreleased dmx jam Clark - Untitled PTP - Show Me Your Spine Blawan - Underbelly Thomas Bangalter - Spinal Scratch Clark - Unreleased Steve Poindexter - Computer Madness Clark - Unreleased Clark - Unreleased Clark - Unreleased Burial - New Love/Anti Dawn Clark - Abyss Thick And Wide Mary J Blige - Real love Ricardo Villalobos - Ichso Clark - Already Ghosts Black Dog - Olivine Clark - Springtime Epigram Balil - Choke And Fly Clark - Unreleased Nathan Fake - Unreleased Clark - Unreleased Archetype - Chant Laguna Seca - Twin Set Current Value - Atonement Nathan Fake - Untitled Clark - Slow Haunt Clark - Lambent Rag (Alt Version) Arseny Avraamov - Symphony Of Sirens