Clark: "Com Touch"

There’s something about Clark’s ability to slip unnoticed into the long evening shadows of a bustling, hype-drenched musical landscape. On first thought, you might rightly think this a pretty debilitating trait for any reputable artist to nurture, but what it allows the UK native, now basing transmissions in Berlin, is the rare repeated opportunity to turn his releases—which by all experience should be some of the most reflexively anticipated hype magnets of their kind—into real haymakers. They always seem to burst into my periphery from out of nowhere, boasting nothing but leaving plenty of broken blood vessels to attest to the skill of the perpetrator. Such are his powers of subtle materialization; our Clark might teach that Kent fellow a thing or two about keeping Lois in the dark.

And the first track released from his upcoming LP on Warp, Iradelphic, makes it undeniable. I find myself asking, in concert with my similar exclamations in reaction to 2009’s intriguing Totems Flare, why I haven’t wisely been listening to Clark every day in the obvious anticipation of something grand.

As if I expected anything else, “Com Touch” rings confidently of the unique Clark-ness that make his sound a successful name brand with no need for a marketing department. There’s a fresh sense of wandering restraint, though, a lonely distance that readily calls to mind countrymen like the Ghost Box Records crew, Moon Wiring Club, and similar conjurations, as the burnt out Polaroid of the track’s (and presumably record’s) cover might suggest. The song winds along with the kind of intricate, woven melody that immediately imparts a kind of bouncing eastern flair, the dusty sounds whirling through a darkened hall of baroquely adorned mirrors, strung up with the strange jewelry of an eerily familiar culture-out-of-time. It’s got a real narrative feel about it, and the adventurous freedom of form Clark has long cultivated finds him again somewhat loosed from genre expectations. Some may be tempted to call it warm and summery, but fear no chillwave, because as with previous Clark work, the sun quickly turns into something ominous and merciless, a fierce desert deity that hypnotizes with heatstroke instead of offering any kind of warm welcome. It’s the darkness of those shadows that Clark knows so well, and is well known to make good on.

Like few others, he really embodies the reliability of the Warp name, the kind that will, even in today’s day and age, still find me buying a record before hearing it. To its continuing credit, I didn’t need to hear “Com Touch” to know I’d be buying Iradelphic. But it’s assuring just the same.