Track By Track: Clark on Death Peak

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Death Peak is out now via Warp.