Clark – “Green Breaking”
Last year, Christopher Clark, the producer known to most of us as just-plain Clark, released his album Sus Dog and its companion piece Cave Dog. Thom Yorke was the executive producer of Sus Dog, and now Clark has scored Yorke into the world of film scoring. Clark did the music for In Camera, a British indie film that had its debut at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year. Now, he’s getting ready to release that score as an album.
Writer/director Naqqash Khalid’s feature debut In Camera stars Station Eleven standout Nabhaan Rizwan as a British actor who faces constant, nightmarish rejection. Clark’s score features 20 tracks, including a version of the Carpenters’ “Superstar.” Lead single “Green Breaking” is an eerie pulse with alien-sounding pitch-shifted vocals. Here’s what Clark says about the soundtrack.
I loved how precise Naqqash wanted everything to be. Precise but also extremely keen to hear suggestions and not flinch at curveballs. The palette needs to become laser focused through a period of free play and experimentation. Using my vocals but abstracted in a way that tonally matched the film was the most unique challenge. I was going to just include the cues, which are all on there, but got far too into recording new stuff that fitted the tone and emotion of the film. The record has a very distinct colour/feel. It’s drenched in muted joy/dark euphoria.
And here’s what Khalid says:
I knew from the outset I wanted to work with an artist and have the soundtrack not be something that acts in support of the film, not as an aid or crutch, but be this whole new layer of writing — a layer of storytelling that is in a dialogue and dance with the images and characters on-screen, and going further. So much of making a film is about articulating something inarticulate in collaboration with other people; you’re building something with someone where there are no words — and in doing so, in going on a shared journey together, you invent your own language. This soundtrack feels like another character — like an extension of the film’s atmosphere and interiority. Chris has drawn out something that felt like it’d always been lurking, waiting, under the surface of the film.
Listen to “Green Breaking” below.
Clark’s In Camera soundtrack is out 9/13.