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Witness the Analog Future of Clark's Oscilloscope-Driven 'Phosphor' Show

The Warp Records artist has even been taking laser training courses in preparation for his amazing live set-up.

When Warp Records artist Clark first imagined his Phosphor show, which is still undergoing new iterations after a debut late last year, he wanted to essentially produce a live audio-visual album. As Clark told me, it has to do with him wanting people to see and hear something unique and slightly unhinged. To bring that vision to his fans, Clark enlisted experimental video artist and musician Vincent Oliver.

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“There's a lot of adrenaline in the sound because a lot of it is live analog and improvised, so it's a bit unhinged,” said Clark about Phosphor, where he presents a more forceful and dynamic sound than can be found on recent efforts Iradelphic and Fantasm Planes—releases that feature more languid melodies and percussive asymmetry than his earlier, darker, and more techno-driven output. “I think electronic music in that form is possibly the most live music you can get, and more live than an indie band playing their released records, even though they're playing instruments.”

Clark digs it when things goes a bit haywire while tuning his synths live on stage. For him, it's a means of disrupting or subverting technological homogenization and blandness.

“We live in such a streamlined world of patterns,” he mused. “Everything is tamed and homogenized, and anything that suggests anything outside of that is something I welcome. That's the paradox: when you finish an album, you have to capture the wild energy but frame it or keep it at a distance. It's a different experience on headphones than in a live space.”

Ironically, as Clark noted, when Oliver's visuals are synced to his music, blandness proves useful. “The more bland the signal, the crazier the oscilloscope looks,” he said of his Phosphor's heavily analog audio-visual experience. “The signal has to be very clean to get clear imagery.”

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But, don't mistake the analog emphasis for nostalgia. Clark isn't interested in a retro-fetishism. “I want Phosphor to seem futuristic and raw,” he said, noting that Oliver's live oscilloscope tweaking is essential to creating something raw and minimally filtered. “From a technical point of view, the oscilloscope visuals just look better on screen than if they were pre-recorded. We tried that and it didn't work.”

In laying the conceptual foundation for Phosphor's look, Clark told Oliver he wanted to avoid geometrically-shaped “rave land” visuals. But, once he saw the oscilloscope imagery, which was also deployed on the “Riff Through the Fog” and “Superscope” videos, Clark quickly realized that Oliver had taken it further than he could have ever imagined. “Vincent came back with this crazy, detailed and meticulous imagery, and it's crazy but annoying because I can never really see it live,” he added.

Like Clark, Oliver's background is in music. It was only after Nathan Fake (a mate from university) asked him to make live visuals for a tour that Oliver took up the cause. The pair played 50 dates over two years together, at which point Oliver went back to music, recording on his own material and running a record label, and only occasionally dabbling in visuals and design work.

The collaborative relationship with Clark began when Warp Records asked him for some live visuals for pre-Phosphor dates. This resulted in, as Oliver noted, the “usual VJ thing—nothing special really.” But, when the two played Japan, Clark told Oliver that he was going to be doing more of a hardware set with a modular synthesizer. So, Oliver thought it would be appropriate to use an oscilloscope he'd recently found in his attic.

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“I knew oscilloscopes had an X-Y input, but I'd never actually turned on the one I found,” he said. “When I started experimenting with it, tons of things came out. I used sine tone generators, test tones, and then mixed squares and sines together at different frequencies, and all of this stuff started popping out of it. I was really amazed.”

Oliver said that there is no hacking of the oscilloscope. He only uses software to fashion the Clark logo, and for a small section where a bunch of symbols are blasted up onto the screen. “I just drew some stuff and then created audio loops from them, which I then bring into the set and mix up with the other stuff,” he noted. “I use Ableton's live audio software, but there's actually no hacking during the performance.”

Live set up, photo by J. Zeairs

Apart from Ableton, Oliver uses a couple of MIDI controllers, including a Kaoss Pad for the X-Y input. This is essentially a little synth that Oliver plays into the Phosphor set. Then he runs audio out of a sound card into the oscilloscope, and points a camera at the screen, which feeds the oscilloscope visuals to the projector.

“The projection doesn't look as good as the visuals on the oscilloscope's screen,” said Oliver. “On screen, it sort of feels like there is some depth. You see these tiny trails which the camera doesn't really pick up. So, it's not totally ideal, but it's quite faithful.”

Oliver said that he “plays” the oscilloscope the whole time, and tries to respond to Clark's sounds as much as possible. A BPM calculator helps Oliver sync the visuals to audio, though he has to be able to respond to Clark's improvisation.

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Elsewhere, Oliver condensed the Phosphor show to craft the “Superscope” video. He performed and recorded the whole live show with his oscilloscope and laptop setup (both audio and video), and then edited it down as audio using Logic and other software.

The “Riff Through the Fog” process was different. Oliver wanted to work around the rolling shutter effect produced by the camera in recording the oscilloscope visuals. To more faithfully replicate them, he decided to rent a global shutter camera, which takes full pictures of every single frame. In experimenting with global shutter, Oliver noticed that the camera produced a 3D effect out of what looked like a “non-sensical mess” on the oscilloscope screen.

In the future, Oliver hopes to bring more of this 3D effect to the Phosphor show with laser accompaniment. To do so, he's been taking a laser training course so that, as Clark joked, he doesn't burn the audience's eyeballs out of their sockets. Other layers will eventually be added, at which point Oliver said that he and Clark might gently let go of the oscilloscope's phosphorescent material. Until the, the mind-bending show goes on.

For more on Clark, including his upcoming tour dates, visit Warp Records' site: http://warp.net/records/clark

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