In The Studio With

The production process behind Chris Clark’s entry into soundtrack has increasingly filtered into his solo work. Danny Turner discusses the making of his ambitious new album Playground in a Lake

© Eva Vermandel

For the first 15 years or so of his career, electronic purist Chris Clark enveloped himself in tech, driving the experimental needle on IDM releases like Clarence Park (2001), Body Riddle (2006) and the pounding techno album Turning Dragon (2008). Yet Clark has become increasingly drawn to the world of scoring, most recently the TV mini-series The Last Panthers and psychological horror flick Daniel Isn’t Real. Having widened his parameters, new working processes have bled into solo albums such as Kiri Variations (2019) and his latest long player Playground in a Lake. Perhaps Clark’s most ambitious record to date, esoteric concepts on the topic of climate change perforate its narrative. Recorded with string ensembles in Budapest and Berlin, ideas initiated acoustically were manipulated electronically, tearing up the framework of what he did with past compositions.

You’ve been increasingly getting into the world of soundtracking over the past few years. Was that something you’d been actively pursuing?

“I pursued 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. The frustrations of each respective craft inform the other, so I tend to find that after I’ve scored something I want to write a solo record because I can do what I like.”

Do you find scoring restrictive in that sense?

“It’s not that you can’t do what you want with soundtracks, but just that you get good at picking battles and there’s lot of tricks to smuggle your vision in without them quite realising it. Some would call it compromise, but the stakes are higher when you’re serving a project that’s way bigger than a solo album. It’s like learning a new language and it’s been a bit like that with me because I’ve been forced to sight read.”

How are you tested by soundtrack work?

“There’s no test like having to come up with stuff really quickly. You have to be able to summon up emotions to convey a certain scene and deliver it in days, but I also love the slow, percolating process of making a studio album where you get to deliberate and be methodical. That’s something I didn’t appreciate until I started scoring. If you just do solo albums, after a certain age you get in a bit of a rut. I remember thinking around the time of Iradelphic, is this it now? It’s such a privilege to write a solo record, yet you start repeating yourself and you need something to shake yourself out of that.”

What differences were there between working on the TV show The Last Panthers and horror flick Daniel Isn’t Real?

“It depends on the script and the direction. The Last Panthers had a music editor that really went to town on what I did so I wasn’t scoring that much. With Daniel Isn’t Real I scored the whole thing and it was the first time I’d worked with an orchestra in Budapest. It was a bit rushed and a lot of the music I made for that didn’t get used, so a lot of what you hear on the soundtrack isn’t even in the film. That’s put me in a weird position where my soundtracks are like studio albums because I put everything on there that I wanted to use for the film but wasn’t able to get in.”