Clark: "Unfurla"

How well can you recognize the many faces of Chris Clark? A production talent teaming with skill and ambition, the UK-born artist has donned a number of varying identities since his debut on Warp in 2001. But regardless of which wildly different personality is represented at any given moment in Clark’s six-album discography, there is a characteristic throughline that has remained familiar since the beginning. It’s in the nimble way he juggles his acrobatic melodies, his insatiability for deeply textured atmospheres, and the solemn emotional heft he packs into his work. Clark’s face may often change, but the eyes are always the same.

And yet a track like “Unfurla” is almost unrecognizable. It has the most in common with the dystopian rave of 2008′s Turning Dragon, but Clark has cleared away the cobwebs and polished the fixtures here. This is proper dancefloor music—not an unwieldy IDM—with more similarities to the austere techno of Ben Klock than any contemporary Warp artist. “Unfurla” immediately takes command with a determined yet slippery stride, never deterring from its euphorically ascendant course into misty clouds and hypoxic peaks. Maybe we’ve never really met this iteration of Clark before, but his defining attributes are reliably intact.

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