Both consumers and producers of electronic music swear by the principle of perpetual change, as if the words were tattooed on their foreheads. Even for someone who's situated within a culture that's constantly looking around the bend, though, Chris Clark is a particularly restless artist. Over the last decade as a Warp recording artist, the English producer's carved an idiosyncratic path for himself, many of his full-lengths containing an elegant, impeccably refined version of a particular style that's more or less discarded by the time the next release rolls around.
Clark's never really been a trailblazer. His music has often paid heavy tribute to his labelmate contemporaries-- Aphex Twin's hyperspeed whir, the psychedelic menace of Boards of Canada, Autechre's high-falutin glitch chemistry, and so on. 2006's Body Riddle still stands as his prettiest, most impressionistic work, but 2008's Turning Dragon was undoubtedly Clark's lightning-in-a-bottle moment of brazen originality. An ultra-aggressive, adrenaline-addled slab of twisted metal and chugging, chopped-up beats, Turning Dragon's aged impressively over time-- possibly because it was so prescient as a musical document, predating the 16-ice-cream-sundaes-at-once maximalism of current Warp artists like Rustie and Hudson Mohawke by almost a half-decade. Even now, its black-on-black swarm of drone and sugary noise sounds utterly singular.
If Turning Dragon represented dark magic captured on wax, then Clark's last full-length, 2009's diffuse Totems Flare, was a malfunctioning firework of a record. On the surface, everything seemed orderly, but the anticipated "wow" factor never really arrived. Totems Flare was the first record in Clark's career that truly lacked direction; listening to it was akin to zeroing in on a studio spitballing session, which was unexpected given his track record of statement-length uniformity.
In a sense, then, Iradelphic, Chris Clark's latest full-length, is a return to form. The album's not just another sonic change-up for Clark-- it's possibly the most drastic shift he's made thus far, a shift that's announced from the spinning acoustic guitar figures that open "Henderson Wrech". In a bio, Clark states that he taught himself guitar over two months after discovering that "I was bored of computers." Indeed, while there are plenty of "electronic" moments on Iradelphic (the hypnagogic analog ooze of album highlight "Com Touch" especially), the album's jittery organic instrumentation and suite-like structure resembles post-rock's progginess more than anything having to do with ones and zeroes.
I've heard a colleague or two refer derisively to Iradelphic as "nostalgic." It's been a hot-button descriptor for electronic pop of various persuasions, and one that Chris Clark himself isn't unfamiliar with when it comes to his own work (his debut album, 2001's micro-IDM document Clarence Park, was named after a park in his hometown of St. Albans). You only need to look at the exposed-negative photograph art that adorns Iradelphic, though, to get the uneasy feeling that Clark-- who's spent most of his career existing outside of conversation-dictating musical trends-- might be somewhat cynically tapping into youth culture's still-current fixation with all things fuzzy, distant, and glowing.
As they are with many acts as of late, Boards of Canada are an influence here-- as is, somewhat surprisingly, fellow Warp signee Bibio, whose collaborative sessions with Clark were partially used on Iradelphic (Clark largely wrote and performed the album by his lonesome). To me, Bibio's music has always possessed a soft-around-the-edges feel, where even his most hard-knocking material hits with the impact of a pillow stuffed with cotton balls. That style actually looks good on him, but it's ill-fitting on Clark, who usually makes music that does more than slowly fade in the background.
There are moments of gnarled danger on Iradelphic-- the broken tones of "Skyward Bruise/Descent", the passing-train ambience of album closer "Broken Kite Footage"-- but the abundance of tepid, six-string-shuffled numbers give Iradelphic the relative potency of a warm glass of milk. Even guest vocalist Martina Topley-Bird, whose 1990s collaborations with Massive Attack and Tricky made for some of the most chilling, gorgeously druggy music from that scene, sounds limp and perfunctory here, almost despite herself.
Even though it's an improvement on its predecessor in sheer memorability, and its compositional detail and preciseness is impressively par for the course given Clark's history, Iradelphic's fatal flaw is the same that felled Totems Flare: Despite its overall hazy, sun-lit-kaleidoscope feel, it's just too sonically scattershot to truly take in and enjoy as a body of work. An album's worth of paisley, synth-y psychedelia à la the gorgeous one-two punch of "Com Touch" and "Tooth Moves" would be ideal, or even a record that embraced one of the album's recurring bucolic motifs; instead, we get a somber piano instrumental here, a static guitar lullaby thrown over there, and how about a strummy three-part stomper right before that unsettling ambient piece at the end? The exact opposite's more or less worked for him for over a decade now, but it might finally be time for Chris Clark to find something-- just one thing-- and stick to it.
