Clark – Body Riddle (Warp/Inertia)

The first thing you notice about Chris Clark’s third album, Body Riddle, is that it is loud. On the very edge of distortion, Clark manages to craft some amazingly spacious tracks around sampled live drums and overwhleming rushes of bass. At its best in a good set of headphones, Chris Clark has moved in a new direction, filling the collection of eleven tracks (and three bonus free downloads from his Throttleclark site) with lush string arrangements, 70s jazz breaks, and intricately programmed electronics that lurk in the background. Whilst Herzog is vintage electronic Warp, it is tracks like the opener Herr Bar, Matthew Unburdened and Vengeance Drools that offer the more exciting vision of Clark’s highly electrified beat science lurking beneath sweeping strings and dusty drums. Elsewhere Night Knuckles is a frenetic music box which dissolves into the distorted fuzz ambience of The Autumnal Crash. Everything that has been initially recorded live and resampled is so produced it risks falling in a heap but with every sound so carefully, obsessively, worked on (and no doubt reworked to the nth degree), it is a amazing that it manages to come together with so much life left intact. Superb.