Christopher Stephen Clark (born 29 August 1979) is a British electronic musician, performing under the mononym Clark. He has produced music for his own albums, as well as music for television, films and video games, having composed scores for award-winning contemporary dance and BAFTA nominated TV series. His records have been released by Warp Records, Deutsche Grammophon and his own label Throttle Records.
History
Clark was born Christopher Stephen Clark in 1979 in St Albans, Hertfordshire, England, where he grew up and attended St Albans School. He started making music as a teenager, and also began experimenting with building his own primitive equipment, including a "home-built stylus made out of a hook and some masking tape". He went on to attend Bristol University. As a student, his music teacher told him that if Clark were to buy a drum machine, he would give up all hope in Clark's musical ability. Whilst still a student, Clark first impressed staff at Warp Records playing under the moniker Chris From St Albans at their Nesh party in December 2000. He was subsequently signed to Warp, and released his debut album Clarence Park in April 2001 as Chris Clark. Clark then moved to Brighton, followed by Birmingham where he stayed for some time, during which he collaborated with Broadcast on a reinterpretation of his track "Herr Barr" and other unreleased material. He currently splits his time between Brighton and Melbourne. With the 2006 release of Throttle Furniture, he shortened his artist name to Clark. His music has been played on BBC Radio 6 Music by Shaun Keaveny, Lauren Laverne and Tom Ravenscroft. He also recorded a mix for Ravenscroft, described by the presenter as "just about the best ever done for the show".
More recently, Clark has focused on score work for film and TV, pursuing it alongside studio albums "because you get options to record with more musicians when you score and I found that was a nice thing to have running alongside the solo work".
Clark has a longstanding creative collaboration with award-winning dance choreographer Melanie Lane, beginning in 2010 with the dance performance/installation Tilted Fawn which later won the 'Dance & Physical Theatre Award' at the Fringe World Awards 2012.
Style
Clark's music is generally considered to fall under the genre of electronic music, although Clark himself finds this label ambiguous and describes Turning Dragon as a "techno album". He often experiments with forms of degradation, distortion and decay associated with different mediums, employing techniques such as re-recording samples and field-recordings in different environments. Describing such processing, he has said "What I tend to do is just jam stuff through as many boxes as I can, until everything sort of bleeds into itself and all its surrounding parts". Clark plays the drums, and some of his material, especially Body Riddle features recordings of his drumming, often heavily re-sampled.
Live
On describing his live set Clark states "If you see me play, my hands are all over the place – literally I’m doing every single thing. Everything that happens on stage is being played and created live. It’s very interactive. So in that respect, it is very much based on live instrumentation." His set has in the past included a live drummer.
Clark has played a Boiler Room session, played the Berlin club Berghain and the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago. Festival appearances have included Bang Face, Sónar Tokyo, Sacrum Profanum and Taico Club.
In December 2013 he premiered his live show Phosphor in London.
Videos
Notable music videos for Clark's work include Lynn Fox's video for "Gob Coitus", 1stavemachine's video for "Ted" (selected by Pitchfork as one of the top 50 music videos of 2007), James Healy's video for "Herr Barr", The Vikings' video for "Black Stone", Christopher Hewitt's videos for "Winter Linn" and "To Live And Die in Grantham", and "Peak Magnetic" directed and produced by Sander Houtkruijer.
The video for "Lambent Rag" (2021) was directed and choreographed by frequent collaborator Melanie Lane.
Australian artist Jonathan Zawada expanded the cover art for Playground in a Lake into a music video for "Citrus".
Commissions
Art
Clark contributed music, along with fellow Warp artist Jamie Lidell to a giant interactive projection show at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Director Showcase in 2011.