Clark's Favourite Albums

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"It's funny because I did this album list and I am into the whole album At Action Park, but there's only about three tracks that I go back to again and again and that's 'Crow', 'Boche's Dick' and the first one, 'My Black Ass'. Sometimes I will listen to it all, but they're just creamy riff heaven. And there's almost a techno element to it, it feels blocky, like it's made out of angles rather than anything circular, but still the production's quite warm, it just draws you in. 'Crow' is just amazing: Todd Trainer is an incredible drummer. It's really hard to drum without hi-hats as well; a lot of the drum patterns, the timing of them is incredible because they're so stripped back. There's so much room to fail when you drum like that and he doesn't, it's just amazing.

I find that really weird about Steve Albini's stuff. He's got this total aggression, but because he's just a master of texture and he just uses all of this amazing equipment to give this angular but slightly fuzzy production, that just draws you in. At Action Park is clinical but it's certainly not inhuman - it's weirdly seductive music. It is very male though. I don't think my girlfriend is into Shellac. Albini is kind of quite comical when he sings because he just sounds like a bullied school kid getting back at the world a bit. He possibly was, and he just thought, 'Right, I'm gonna make war on humanity by becoming the best record producer known to man' or something.

I haven't heard Dude Incredible. It's a good title. I bought the most recent one before that, Excellent Italian Greyhound, but I didn't really get on with it. I think there was one on it I liked, [but] I think I'd just had my fill of them. I tend to binge on music - like I'll just hammer it for ages and then go off it. "

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"Life…The Best Game In Town is just a monster, I'm really awful at track titles but it's all about the first track. The lyrics are amazing, it sets the tone of this cosy Christmas Eve song and then it goes completely brutal and it's got this amazing noise section at the end. The production on it's really creamy as well.

It doesn't surprise me that the bass player from Shellac, Bob Weston is involved with Harvey Milk because they've got a very similar way they present themselves. The album cover is just a picture of an Iron Maiden poster on the wall or something, or a denim jacket. It's sort of deliberately schmucky artwork. I read they said Life…The Best Game In Town was their least favourite album and I was really annoyed. I'm all for people being self-effacing or whatever but they just came across as utterly hating their own work and you wonder if that's inverse narcissism. It's like "look how much I can criticize myself"; like machismo, but the inversion of it - "we really fucking hate ourselves, grrrr". I found it a bit disappointing so I just listen to their music and forget about that, because I just think the actual riffs on that, some of that album is so good, so uncompromising and so singular. It's quite annoying that apparently they don't play it live. If I knew they were going to play that album back I would travel the world to see them, but I don't think they play any of their album stuff live.

That Harvey Milk documentary, not the shitty film with Sean Penn being a dickhead, the actual documentary is amazing. It's properly moving. It's got an amazing synth soundtrack as well. It's just called The Times of Harvey Milk, it's great. It's a complete insight into that era of politics in America. Even though, obviously, he was assassinated and the guy who did it is obviously a sociopathic, homophobic freak, it doesn't totally vilify him, it shows the whole context it happened in, it's quite non-judgmental. It's amazing, because I only found out about him through the band Harvey Milk."

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"When I was a teenager I worked in a stationery shop. It was when I first started writing music, and I got into sampling loads of Sellotape being scrunched, because I just had this PZM microphone - really cheap but amazing, and the filters I used on this sampler were pretty amazing. I just had a MiniDisc player and I built these collages. I was young, arrogant - I just thought yeah, shit I'm the first person to have ever done this. And then it's just one of those where someone goes, 'No, you're not actually, someone did this 30 years ago much better' and you're like, 'oh, right' and he was that person, Bernard Parmegiani.

I don't think he specifically worked in a stationery shop, he probably worked in, I dunno, a brothel or something, but he was an amazing sound recordist. But it's weird because his stuff, he's French, it's got this weird, I wouldn't say sexual exactly, that's a bit too much, but it's got this colourful lightness of touch and this humour that the more academic musicians didn't have. It's great and a lot of the English electro-acoustic music doesn't really have that, it's a bit sterile.

Parmegiani's stuff was just incredible sonic worlds, he'd just explore certain textures within a track and it would just be like a journey to the centre of a rubber band or something. I still don't know exactly how he did it, because they wouldn't have had any digital effects when he did this album. They would have had very primitive delays I guess, but it was amazing.

To be honest I haven't listened to The Nature Of Sound for ages, but it was a mainstay when I was doing my second album for Warp, Empty The Bones Of You, that was always on the CD just constantly. I only really listened to it on headphones because I like it really loud and my girlfriend of the time didn't. I just preferred it on headphones as it's not exactly dinner party music. Or maybe it is, maybe he's the dinner party version of electro-acoustic music. "

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"The Cure was one of the first bands I liked. My stepbrother lived in Cornwall and I remember family holidays and stuff like 'Catch' and 'Boys Don't Cry' and thinking, fuck, those melodies are amazing! My sister was really into them and she got Disintegration, and the songs had got massively long guitar intros, which was quite a bold move at the time. You've got two minutes of guitar before the vocals come in. It's an amazing album and it does sound like it's disintegrating - I think I had it on tape and it just got heavily mashed by the tape heads so the sound quality degraded the more I listened to it.

There are such strong melodies. You know when you hear melodies that couldn't really be anything else at all? It's like they've just unearthed it. They've dug it up and it's always been there or something. The Cure reminds me of Thatcher's shitty England, Our Price and closed Ryman shops. So British."

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"That's full of amazing songs. '30 Century Man', that's a great song in itself. It's just a complete world unto itself. I got into that around the time I was getting into the Ligeti-style, Debussy-style dissonance of orchestras just playing these long static drones and that's why that album's so weird.

The songs are really sentimental songs for housewives, but the lyrics are really weird and they've got these really uncomfortable drones underneath them. What a phenomenal, weird album to make. Especially as he started poppy and then went weird. To me, that's my favourite era of his, where he wasn't fully nuts at that point, there was still some pop sensibility. I love the new stuff, but it's definitely less ubiquitous.

The stuff with Sunn O))) is amazing. The sound on that is heavy as fuck, that Scott O))) record. If I could get a guitar sound like that I'd probably never use a synth ever again.

I don't like to put myself in one category really. When I've used guitars before people are so incredulous, as if I'm a rapper who's suddenly made an opera, but guitars and electronics have gone together over sixty years, so I'm surprised people think it's that radical to be honest. Personally I'm not so into the guitar playing, I'm more into piano and drums. I'm into it as a sound source, just completely pulling it apart still interests me, but it's mainly about drums and piano for me. "

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"That is an amazing dinner party record I suppose, because I got into him through a track he did - 'Mood Indigo' which is in The Untouchables film, it's like the first song in the film. There's just a beautiful version of it, he does the most sublime bass solo, so I checked him out after that and got intrigued.

I was just looking for material to sample. I didn't sample any of that album. It's too good to sample really. I like sampling shit music because it's harder to make something good out of it, it's more of a challenge.

I like this album because the piano is not his first instrument. It's incredibly clunky, the playing, but it's also really clever. It's so unpretentious and unaffected the way he plays, there's no sort of notional trying to sound technically clever. It's just purely instinctual and that combination of feeling like you're in the hands of someone who's playing quite naively but is also a total expert and you're not quite sure where the line goes. There's something very childlike about it but there's also a subtle intelligence to his playing and the way his mind kind of picks out certain harmonies; it's a really great record.

The recording of it is amazing too. It sounds really warm and lush. I think it's his only solo piano record. It's a shame it's the only one, but it's great when people do those one off records where they're out of their comfort zone a bit. But he clearly had the chops to deliver a whole record of piano, which is quite amazing, given that it's not his first instrument."

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"There's a lot of the Shepard tone going on in this album. I can't give you a technical breakdown of what it means, [but] the way I see it is the sonic equivalent of those red and white barber shop poles that are continually ascending. It's something where you can't really hear where it begins or ends, it's just continually spiraling upwards. I think it's just like a certain algorithm for sine waves that give that affect. That album does a lot of that.

That's not why I got into it though, I just put it underneath a kick drum for a radio mix and it sounded good and that's my Luddite way of appreciating it. The intensity of it; I actually tried to go to sleep to it. Because I get up quite early and work on music during the day, if I get up at four in the morning I get really tired around two in the afternoon and I test myself by listening to really intense music as I fall asleep. Music to see how tired I am, and I couldn't actually sleep to that record. I just had my laptop on my bed and I was like, fuck, this is too intense and I got up, had a coffee and just carried on working. It's definitely not a Grouper-style ambient album. I thought, I'm really gonna have weird dreams if I fall asleep listening to this, but I didn't get into that sleepy stage, it was too intense. I was listening to it on laptop speakers and it's just all midrange. Maybe with the Shephard tone you're just continually peaking and that wakes you up. It's sort of enjoyable.

There's something really funny - to me it's quite a comical album. I don't know if it's intentional. I don't mean that in a derogative way - I think you can have humour in music and it can still be moving. I don't buy this thing that music's got to be serious. You can have tracks that are humorous and are tragic as well. You can have multiple layers of emotions in music, and that's what I get off some of the Mingus as well, it's clunky, it feels like a broken toyshop in some ways. There's a childish naivety to Palace Of Marvels that does make it a bit comical, but doesn't detract from its integrity or its melancholy. It adds to it in my mind, it makes it more of an engulfing human statement - I wouldn't say it's melancholy, but it puts strong visuals in my head. It's quite trippy. Visuals of squids! "

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"Lamb's Anger got a bit dissed. I actually prefer Moustache (Half A Scissor), but it's got some classics on it. When Lambs Anger came out me and my friends in Berlin just listened to it loads and loved it, and everyone else seemed to think it was a joke. It was just one of those things where you're feeling like you've got to stick up for it.

He just does this thing of using a cheap form but managing to make something really expressive and weirdly catchy out of it. I think he just made it all in about two weeks on a laptop and just used presets, but there's not many people that can do that. Most people go the opposite way, they have high concepts and use very expensive material and think of themselves as grandiose artists and they still manage to make stuff that doesn't really translate, whereas Oizo's got this slightly flippant anarchic streak that always really appeals to me.

For me, it's not an album I listen to a lot, but if I want a burst of adrenaline then I'll definitely pick that record up. Maybe he's capable of more. I thought on Moustache (Half A Scissor) the production was pretty amazing - it sounds analogue and creamy and tasteful and some of the programming's just wacky, in the best sense of the word. Just bold and inventive, nothing else like it, I don't think. Really great riffs, great sequences, like 'Gay Dentists' - all of the tracks have got this identity, I just remember them in terms of development and arc and they're so distinctive. He does have a really good command of note-writing and essentially that's a skill that can be overlooked.

I live in the city of minimal techno and there's not much in the way of sequencing going on to a lot of that music. I know it's a different thing but don't sneer at the power of the sequence!"

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"I go through periods of bingeing on genres. I don't only listen to hip-hop at some point but, yeah, that Clipse one in particular, it's been out for about eight years now and every year I'll go for about a month where I listen to it constantly and then I get really sick of it. Then I think I don't ever want to hear it again, maybe it's actually a bad album. But then, like clockwork, the year will go by and I'll find myself getting back into it, every track. It's a very powerful record.

The production [by The Neptunes] is so weird, it's so deliberately thin and hollowed-out, and I don't know if that was intentional but it adds to this kind of atmosphere where they're almost like the Patrick Batemans of hip-hop, it's so openly materialistic. The lyrics just conjure up this cold world of materialism and hollow ambition. What makes it amazing is every now and then there's a snatch of regret and pain and you realise they're just cataloguing a very fucked-up world. Whether it's true or not, I think they're amazing storytellers. I'm not one of these people that need to have good lyrics to like a beat, but the beats in themselves tell a story. I'd love to hear an instrumental of Hell Hath No Fury. Yeah, just go back to it again and again.

If you listen to 'Ride Around Shining' it's just an amazing idea, it's just a harp being strummed really out of tune and a beat with hardly any bass in it, but loads of knock and it's a very disorientating sound. They've kind of been beset by problems as a band but they still made completely compelling music all the way. "

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"I remember Funcrusher Plus coming out around the time I signed to Warp I think and I was sort of writing some of the tracks on Empty The Bones Of You and around the time I did Clarence Park as well - they were going on in tandem in some ways - and I still find it an amazing album, just on a programming, engineering point of view.

I never smoke weed. I can't do it, but that album just makes me wanna smoke a massive bifta and sit in bed all day. It's weird the way El-P processes the vocal takes by Bigg Jus. I don't know how he does it, he doesn't double it, but he kind of re-samples it and puts little snatches of it between the verses a bar too late. In making it sound mechanical, he's making it sound not live, so he's almost distilling it and saying, 'Look, we're not being all one take about this, this is actually worked on'. It's contrived but it's just so subtle, it's got this subliminal effect of just layers and layers of skill and finesse that have gone into the way he creates the space between the words and stuff. It's like they've really thought how to make it into a record rather than just someone knocking a beat out and rapping over it live, they've upped it a notch so it's just a singular work of art at the best of times.

I'm talking in particular about one track called 'Bad Touch Example' but there are about four on that album that really stand out. And they also did this thing of not overwhelming you with bass. A bit like Clipse: it's really pokey production, it's just midrange and treble, which is a bit rock I guess. Which is maybe why I like them. There's a bit of grunge aesthetic there. Bit Albini! They should team up. Can't imagine they'd get on though. Albini, El-P and Mark E Smith: I think that would be a good album.

Company Flow were a little bit indie weren't they? If you liked Company Flow you might like Pixies, and you probably thought Nirvana were cool around the time they did Bleach. That new Run The Jewels thing El-P has done sounds incredible. It's a tiered system of buying their album and there's an option for 400 grand where they come to your town and they'll bully one person of your choosing for four months or something!"

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"Liquid Swords is just an incredible record, totally mad. Not many people can get away with beats that sound amazingly fluid but where the actual programming is like Krautrock, or like rock beats slowed down and everything is pretty detuned. It sounds intentionally flawed and rough and that always appeals to me.

I think there's so much anger on that record. In a great way. And then it ends with 'B.I.B.L.E.', which is one of the best tracks in the world. I've just listened to it about 200 times probably. There was an interview with him recently and he seemed the nicest guy, so different to that whole materialistic vibe. And he was really into chess and I just thought, 'What a don'. I don't think you could have had Funcrusher Plus without that GZA album. "

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"There's one song on that, 'The Fairest Of The Seasons', which to me is the saddest song in the world in a way that is maudlin, but also transcends that by being so well put together but that was more... I did mushrooms with Bibio and a load of mates in Wales on his 30th birthday and that was the only music we could listen to at four in the morning after tripping out. It sounded so soft and reassuring.

Nico's voice is just astonishing, so we were just worshipping that record for two hours and then we made loads of spaghetti bolognaise, weirdly, so I've got a weird association of that album. It's weird 'cause you don't really get hungry when you take acid, but mushrooms, I always get weird, psychedelic munchies and just wanna eat loads of pasta."