Clark announces new record with vocal-led single "Cannibal Homecoming"

"Cannibal Homecoming" still features distorted vocals, but also arrives with Clark's first real vocal performance.

Alongside the new single, Clark, aka Chris Clark, shared a statement: "The track is like Japanese cuisine- it explores lots of textures but coheres as a song er..."meal". A song is finished when you get the sense it's being pulled along to an inevitable conclusion. It’s not literally about cannibals. It’s about paradox, despair, broken families, the fictional boundaries we cling to and the self destructive cognitive dissonance we suffer because of this.

Ooh listen to how naked and vulnerable I sound at the end! I like the synth arp that counters that. It’s like a shield. I’ve been gently poking fun at terrible preset Hollywood risers but doing them with my own customised sounds-the idea of a riser is amazing, it’s kind of timeless. The mounting of tension and release. It's been around since the Greeks.

But the palette needs to be unique, personal. I’m coming at it from quite a militantly purist angle. Some of the field recordings in those risers are over 20 years old, from dictaphone tapes I didn’t even know I had. All this texture needs to be married to a good' ol visceral composition though. This fusion of those two aspects of music is the ideal. Each one helping the other one out in mutual song craft welfare. You can't be a libertarian about this stuff."

Kiri Variations will be Clark's first full-length since 2017's Death Peak. Expanding on his new record, Clark said, "It’s a skeleton of an album, reduced to bare essentials, although it started out rather dense. The thing that takes time is making it succinct. Certain parts are also what you could call anti muso – for example the recorder on "Kiri’s Glee" is totally out of tune – but it sounds so colourful. I can’t resist the primary paint of acoustic instruments; it’s an antidote to frictionless digital music. I want people to listen to this in the same way they would read a set of Roald Dahl short stories; bitter-sweet tales with hooks and teeth and unexpected macabre twists. Proper Witch vibes."

Tracklist:

1. Forebode Pluck
2. Simple Homecoming Loop
3. Bench
4. Kiri's Glee
5. Coffin Knocker
6. Forebode Knocker
7. Yarraville Bird Phone
8. Primary Pluck
9. Flask/Abyss
10. Tobi Thwarted
11. Cannibal Homecoming
12. Banished Hymnal
13. Banished Cannibal
14. Goodnight Kiri