Chris Clark - Empty The Bones of You
There is brusque surprise to be found in Chris Clark's work. It starts with the sleeve: a white pencil drawing of a thousand jet fighters streaming towards a skull-embossed mushroom cloud. A pink figure, dropped from Heaven, falls towards the earth and, for an instant, I'm not sure if it is a falling Icarus-like figure or the distorted and outstretched hand of the skull-headed mushroom cloud giant rising up from the plain far below. The liner notes are all cribbed in a frantic hand, as if they were dashed off on the back of a cocktail napkin and then photocopied for the sleeve. The result is a calculated roughness, a back alley "psst! you wanna buy my CD?" sort of subterfuge and illicitness.
These same moments are on the record as well. The title track, "Empty The Bones of You," is a wash of static and jumbled noise as if someone were fumbling with a sink full of tupperware while the nearby radio hissed and sputtered lines of static from that empty space between stations. This stands in contrast with "Early Moss" which rises out of this confusion as a vibrant entity built from the previous cacophony. Very much a devotee of the Aphex Twin style of making enjoyable music from the snap, click, pop, and chime of machinery, Chris Clark brings with him an exuberance for melody, a penchant for winsome tunes and wistful arrangements. "Tyre" is a simple piano melody, an ode which tinkles across a soft buzz and a microphone stuck out a bedroom window which is picking up the droning sound of tires on wet pavement.
"Holiday as Brutality" is a fat polyrhythmic rondo, a "Squarepusher slowed to quarter speed" ditty which manages to be both tuneful and terrifying. There is a dark undercurrent to Clark's delightful songs, a black beast which prowls beneath the rich chimes and cascading melodies. "Wolf" begins with two loops -- a tin melody and a fuzzbox chatter of beat static -- and, after some stuttering and collisions, the two merge and give birth to a rich, dynamic wunderkind of a child. A child-like theremin-esque howl does a "la la la" counterpoint to the electronic crackle in "Slow Spines," and -- like a member of the wolf pack -- I want to howl along.
"Toucan" has about sixteen ideas running through it; there are two minutes of introspective noodling before the low end erupts. A enormous wash of sound splits the track right through the middle and the subsequent recover of the scattered elements is catastrophic and chaotic and catchy as hell. I'm not quite sure how he manages to make it all work, but he does. He utilizes some the minimal techno methodology -- the staggered layering of tracks atop one another -- yet Clark's approach is mash it all together, jumbling the elements together in a rich pastiche that finds its own center. He holds them together as long as he can and, when they break free, he lets them go, replacing them with a different idea.
This is the strange allure of Chris Clark's Empty The Bones of You: it seems as if it has been built in a back room of a ruined warehouse on machines which are going to fall apart again at any minute. And yet, you hold your breath as you listen. You are captivated, quietly hoping that he'll be able to eke out one more song from the ancient circuits before it all falls apart. Empty The Bones of You is a hypnotic sort of electronic chaos, a Zen-like compression of a thousand points of light. Very satisfying.
Chris Clark
Warp Records [2003]
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