Totems Flare by Clark is the Sh!@t
Chris Clark’s new album, Totems Flare, was released today and the sound is huge! My first listen was on my iMac speakers. My second, on my car stereo and my third on my crystal clear Mackie HR-624’s. I do this so that I don’t pay too much attention to the production right off the bat. Now that I’ve heard it all the way through about four times, I can honestly say that this album rocks. The synths on the opening track, “Outside Plume,” are so freakin’ thick. It’s a great introduction to the album single, “Growls Garden.” The break in the middle of “GG” is one of baddest things I’ve heard all year. Big up, Clark!
Although the album seems predominantly digital, it feels human. It sounds like the future of the past. Beats are missed, pitches slip and notes get dropped. The best example of this is in the seventh track, “Future Daniel.” If you’ve ever tried playing chords with a monophonic synth patch, you’d understand. There’s something special in every track—the beginning of “Luxman Furs”—the end of “Totem Crackerjack”—there’s a lot of cool shit going on here.
Clark apparently had an extremely hard time narrowing down 30 tracks that he had originally recorded for the album. I’d love to hear the tunes that didn’t make the cut. My only complaint with Totems Flare is that I can’t play it really loud because of the overwhelming distortion. Those of us with tinnitus have to be careful.
If you dig it, check out Boxcutter, Autechre, Venetian Snares, AFX and Telefon Tel Aviv. If I’ve left some key artists out, leave a comment. Totems Flare is available now from bleep.com and iTunes.
MP3: Clark – Growls Garden
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Good to see people liking the album, I love it. I just wanted to mention that the statement about it being “almost entirely digital” isn’t completely accurate, in interviews Clark says he plays a lot of instruments himself, and a lot of the synths he uses are analog synths. One of his more recent interviews has him saying he primarily uses a computer “like a tape recorder” for mastering… obviously he does some serious manipulation, and most of the musical process is composition rather than live performance, but I get the impression that he does a lot of it with hardware and heavy sampling of real life objects, lots of layering, etc. Still, thanks for the positive review, I’ve been listening to Clark since his very first release and it’s exciting to me to see his “rise to fame” so to speak.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:25 pm