A Year of Music

Clark’s Turning Dragon is a vast, immediate, atonal monster of a techno record. The first half, in particular, is probably the finest half-hour of hard techno released since Surgeon’s Klonk. The album starts out with a short field-recorded ambient intro, and then warps (ha!) itself through a series of thudding hard techno rhythm loops, oversaturated noise-ambient interludes, diced R&B and disco samples splattered all over the mix, and Clark’s instantly recognizable downcast melodies, all fused into a seamless whole. Things calm down in the second half, but it’s still heavily beat-driven. The net effect is like moving between rooms at a very large, very loud and very postmodern warehouse rave, and it seems to me that this was the effect that Clark was looking for.

Chris Clark spent a bunch of time on tour after he put out his last full-length album, Body Riddle – his first under the shortened name of Clark – and it shows. Turning Dragon, for all its excess and outsized energy, is a concise and taut record that has obviously been refined by exposure to the dancefloor. There are parts of Central and Eastern Europe where the kids still want dance music to make the obvious dancefloor gestures – prominent kick drums, reverb, stabbing synths, meandering acid lines, everything compressed to hell and gone – so it’s not so surprising that Clark came back from a European tour sounding more like Chris Liebing or Umek than his beardy labelmates at Warp.

Something similar happened to fellow Warp alumnus Speedy J a few years ago (to which I alluded in my previous hyping of “Volcan Veins”, which is still my favorite track on the album), but Speedy J got so wrapped up in making an album that perfectly mimicked the “schranz” style Liebing made popular that he ditched most of the elements that made Speedy J sound like Speedy J. Clark doesn’t repeat that mistake – there is no point on this album that is not obviously Clark music. The combination of his sharp ear for atmosphere and the telling detail with straight-up techno and electro rhythms makes for a stunning, deep album. And techno albums that work as coherent wholes, rather than collections of tracks, are precious because they are rare. Only time will tell if this stands up to my personal choice of high-water marks, Surgeon’s Force+Form, but it’s off to a good start.

It’s nearly impossible to describe the state of mind engendered by listening to Frenchbloke’s recentish DJ set (I don’t know its provenance, but it came to me entitled And a Big Fuck You Too, which is par for the course with Frenchbloke). Frenchbloke, in case you don’t know, is one of the most prolific and talented of the original wave of mashup / bastard pop internerds who came to prominence in the early ’00s. My favorite of his mashups is “Bad Spicy Horny”, which combines bits of songs by the Bloodhound Gang, Bolz Bolz, some random R&B singer, and the Spice Girls. It shouldn’t work at all but something about the way he flows it all together produces something far more interesting than the individual pieces.

He seems to have developed into a DJ that aims for “diverse” and ends up somewhere west of “completely bonkers”, but he’s maintained that ability to sew together pieces that shouldn’t fit: Spahn Ranch (no, not that one, the one that came before it with the dude from Numb) into The Passions’ “I Fell in Love With a German Film Star” (both incredibly obscure bands remembered only by die-hard goth and New Wave fans), languid vocodered disco into Test Department at their most confrontational into Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon into a cheesy grebo cover of The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”, Brian Eno’s “The Quiet Men” into Heaven 17’s “Fascist Groove Thang”, spoken-word rants against jukeboxes mixing into “No Can Do” – somehow he welds all this cultural flotsam into a mix that exudes jaded sophistication and wit. I think this kind of cleverness is what a lot of college radio DJs aim for, but almost none of them make it, because they concentrate too hard on the eclecticism and not enough on the flow. If anyone’s interested, I can make it available, because I doubt Frenchbloke cares if I mirror it.