Following his album Iradelphic from earlier this year, Clark has already moved on, his natural inclination for restlessness leading him to rework three tracks from that LP and adding them to another three new recordings for this EP. Read up on Clark's recent studio output and live performances, and the word "psychedelic" will crop up, although it's difficult to match up this music with the true definition of the word. These tracks don't represent some kind of mind-altering tussle with the doors of perception. But, to be fair to Clark, nor does most music described that way. Instead, much of Fantasm Planes rests in quietly reflective passages of sound, edging close to the rustic-electronic idyll that a number of British musicians in this realm find consistently alluring.
This is a bump back down to earth instead of a total removal from it, a shying away from the cartoony blitz-out of prior Clark releases like the synapse-shattering originality of his 2008 album Turning Dragon. Many artists who appear to make it their mission to hurtle relentlessly into the future find that the past has a way of coming up in an outside lane to overtake them. If that was the case for Clark on Iradelphic, which was backed into a corner with no particularly interesting place to go, on Fantasm Planes it feels like he's lapping himself several times over. For someone once so resolute on finding new lines to trace out for himself, it's remarkably easy to figure out how Clark got to where he wanted to go here. Even the title of "Henderson Swooping", an almost unrecognizable retool of the folksy "Henderson Wrench" from Iradelphic, owes a considerable debt to the oft-whimsical ways of Boards of Canada.
Despite the creeping feeling of genre exercises playing out, there are moments to seek solace in on Fantasm Planes. The title track works in a jazzy lightness reminiscent of the type of electro-fusion crossovers former Warp signees Red Snapper were attempting in the 1990s, all set to beats so bouncy it feels like you can reach out and stretch them. On "Fantasm Planes" there's a sense of narrative, a feeling of a story being set in motion and playing out, full of bends in the road that take time and thought to navigate and digest. That's when Clark excels across all his work, making it even more disappointing when the Aphex-by-numbers ambience of "Dove in Flames" brings this EP to a limp close. "Brigitte" verges on that territory, too, but gathers some clout of its own as Clark does some Blanck Mass-style empire building, only to tear it all down in flames at the end.
"Brigitte" is a useful musical metaphor for Clark's endless urge to enter a cycle of construct, destroy, renew. Just when it feels like he's onto something, he discards it, perhaps with more haste than he should. Clark may complain, with some justification, that he'd be accused of repeating himself if he settled into a recognizable style and worked up multiple variants on it. But Fantasm Planes is a series of loose ends that lack the sense of purpose and playfulness that made his prior work such a persuasive listen. Even the one vocal contribution, from Martina Topley-Bird on the reworking of "Secret" (titled "Secret Slow Show"), is an uninspired choice. It's a needless hark back to an older era, clumsily falling into 90s trip-hop pastiche when the beat kicks in during its final third, with Topley-Bird wheeled in just as she was back then to provide suitably "spacey" vocals. Clark can, and hopefully will, do better. But for now he feels like a genuine talent unable to find a foothold.
