This is Chris Clark’s fourth full album release for Warp, and the second bearing his stripped down ‘Clark’ moniker. Following on from 2006’s Body Riddle, Turning Dragon sees the ever inventive Clark abandon the emotional, subdued nature of his previous record, and replace it with a far dirtier, headache inducing techno record. Turning Dragon locates itself firmly on the dance-floor of a grimy dark club in the inner cities, all angular, metallic sounds and abrasive pounding rhythms. Melody is replaced by the thump-thump-thump of the kick drum.Album opener 'New Year Storm' begins with the sound of a radio flicking between stations, before fixing on the motorik beat of one channel and building upon that beat with various levels of distortion and atonal keyboard squelches. What follows for the rest of the album rarely lets go of this manifesto of relentless harsh beats and electro squelches. 'Volcan Veins' finds Clark moving away from the IDM tag that plagues many artists making dance music that you can’t always dance to, with its cut up hip hop samples (sounding much like the reverse-verse of Missy Elliot) and uncomplicated rhythms decaying into white noise by the end. This cut-and-paste sampling technique continues, all be it less successfully, on 'Truncation Horn' which once again sounds like a radio mangling a processed guitar funk record that sounds like it could be Prince or Michael Jackson, throwing in scattershot beats and atonal distorted keyboard stabs along the way. At times during the track it feels like Clark is playing around with new toys, looping, reversing and cutting up for the sake of it rather than with a goal in mind. Any newcomers to Clark’s work could see this as sounding amateurish; perhaps it is only his reputation for experimentation that keeps us from questioning the validity of the work.While Turning Dragon creates a sense of brooding insistence with its hard, heavy techno beats, it suffers from a lack of direction. Too many of the tracks here seem to loose there way half way through, fading down and turning into something slightly different before fading out again. 'For Wolves Crew' is a case in point; a pounding beat stops two minutes in and becomes virtually a different track, built around a simple keyboard loop to which glitches and electro wooshes are added and then cut out randomly building to white noise before fading out again to a completely different melody. It is almost as if Clark himself grows tired of the repetitive nature of the tracks mid way through. While there are certain phases of the record that are enjoyable, it lacks the consistency of Clark’s earlier work. 'Hot May Slides' and album closer 'Penultimate Persian' serve as a nod to the more melodic work in Clark’s back catalogue, but ultimately these caustic keyboards, throbbing electronics and reverb drenched tracks come across as pale imitations of other Warp artists, lacking the sense of underpinning melody and construction of an Aphex Twin or Autechre, or indeed Clark’s earlier work. 55%Links Clark [official site] [myspace]