Clark

Following innovators can be a tough task, especially when you share a label with the prior boundary pushers of your given noise-craft.

Chris Clark, who initially, on Warp debut album ‘Clarence Park’, went the cheeky semi-Aphex Twin-aping route, now has two alternative means of attack. Where better to try them out live, sans safety net, than in the city where he went to university?

Trick number one: Get absolutely shit-wasted with the tried-and-tested confidence improver, an entire bottle of vodka. Then, second, erase most the structural twattin’ around you temporarily lost direction with (sophomore LP ‘Empty The Bones Of You’) and revisit the promising beat mashing of your best work (his ‘Ceramics Is The Bomb’ EP) with added amen breaks. It’s a guaranteed winner.

Clark, whose eyes rise from his hardware fiddling and software triggering occasionally with a splendidly hammered focus-lacking glare, shouts nonsense and drunkenly sabotages his own momentum on several occasions with cut outs and malfunctions.

But the resulting glorious mess is a massive outpouring of IDM-goes-full-on-jungle terrorism, with which highlights from all three aforementioned Warp releases – plus enough new material to found another clutch – are filtered remorselessly. And though half the success comes from a devil-may-care intoxication not to be tried at home, he’ll be knocking over sound-systems regularly with this ammunition.