Clark newly drops Steep Stims II, a second wave of electronic mastery and tuffist expressionism in mature machine funk. The deftness of touch is immediately apparent, but the album’s real achievement lies in the precision with which Clark marshals his unruly musical imagination.
Allowing disparate ideas to coexist within a singular and continually evolving vision
Clark newly drops Steep Stims II, a second wave of electronic mastery and tuffist expressionism in mature machine funk. The deftness of touch is immediately apparent, but the album’s real achievement lies in the precision with which Clark marshals his unruly musical imagination. Loop fury, soulful synthesis, industrial abrasion and moments of startling tenderness converge in an ever-expanding language of sound. Beneath the restless surfaces sits a formidable comprehension of form: Clark knows when to let a loop mutate, when to fracture a rhythm and when to withdraw entirely. His everything-but-the-kitchen-sink instinct becomes a compositional strength, allowing disparate ideas to coexist within a singular and continually evolving vision.
“Houdini Modal” demonstrates this intelligence in miniature, evolving through breathtaking symmetry as it unpacks a cavalcade of motifs, machinery and mass production. Clark’s tectonic rough-housing is offset by a visceral understanding of synthesis, its abrasive surfaces revealing unexpected melodic intricacies. Ambient, EBM, synthpop, acid house and industrial circulate through the album, sometimes within a single track, their collisions generating a restless, multifaceted musical language that remains unmistakably his own.
Clark’s structural control is exceptional ::
The album’s strongest progression runs from atmospheric suspension into cinematic expansion. “My Crow Life,” a little over a minute of swaying, sweltering pad-depth, is a study in restraint, like drawing rainbows with a single tip on a blank canvas. Its brevity is crucial: Clark establishes a complete emotional environment, allowing negative space to become as expressive as sound itself. It serves as an exquisite prelude to the album’s opus and, for me, centerpiece, the remarkable future electronic classic “Moons of Temper.”
Here, that initial stillness unfolds into an extraordinary piece of electronic storytelling. Blade Runner street-scene imagery, tender industriana, stuttering beats and layers of falling helter-skelter synthesis accumulate into a composition that continually reveals new rooms within itself. Clark’s structural control is exceptional, his motifs returning transformed rather than merely repeated. The result is cinematic without sacrificing the intricate detail of its electronic construction, each shift in rhythm and texture contributing to an unfolding sense of movement. Quite simply, a movie unmade out of music. Exquisite, serious and adult in its intentions, “Moons of Temper” earns its grandeur through the remarkable coherence of its vision.
“Who Booed the Geese” offers a different kind of exhilaration. This braindance-adjacent workout sounds remarkably like its title suggests, its absurdity concealing a more ambitious collision of rapid-fire breaks and Clark’s rough-edged saw synthesis. Mid-90s German euro-acid, drum and bass, undanceable braindance and a pinch of Jean-Michel Jarre are thrown into the same volatile machinery. The result is playful, ferocious and unmistakably Clark, a track whose unruly rhythmic energy turns its eccentric premise into muscular modernist expression. A highly skilled assassination attempt with modernist music as the weapon.
Boundaries between electronic production, classical structure and emotional storytelling ::
The final four tracks shift the album towards contemporary classicism, with Clark’s deft piano work, soft somnambulant treatments and classical strings bringing acoustic intimacy into dialogue with digital precision. The piano-led passages invite comparison with the compositional sensibilities of Max Cooper, Nils Frahm, Jon Hopkins and Ólafur Arnalds, not because these artists feature on the record, but because Clark shares their interest in blurring the boundaries between electronic production, classical structure and emotional storytelling. His piano work possesses a delicacy that distinguishes him from his more overtly kinetic material, allowing individual notes to breathe and resonate against the moonlit sweep of treated strings. Here, digital finery becomes a vehicle for genuine tenderness rather than an end in itself.
This closing movement through the simplicity of “Skein” to endgame “Cult Leavers” completes the album’s progression, transforming the mechanical aggression of its earlier passages into something reflective without relinquishing their underlying restlessness. Clark’s all-in ethos encompasses both compositional architecture and minutiae, the grand structural gesture and the fleeting detail. Steep Stims II brings these impulses into a compelling balance, tracing a passage from exploratory machinery through cinematic expansion and kinetic excess towards acoustic intimacy. It is a descent into the artist’s imaginarium, returning with a fulfilling prophecy of digital and acoustic love. And seagulls. A satiated and fecund wholeness. I adore.
Steep Stims II is available on Throttle.
