The movements, motifs, and themes that make up Cashmere Spheres were prepared outside the niche of ecological collectivism. Continuous re-formation served as a center for the music to move and fluctuate. Multiple generations of artificial selection were spawned ex situ with no single series of notes, timbres, or dynamics bred within the interdependent radius of an in-group unit.
A long strange echo, this year.
- Chad M. Clark, December 2020
All songs performed and edited by Chad M. Clark
Recorded, mixed, and mastered Studio Sea, Evanston, IL.
Distant Taxa, 2021
DT002
credits
released March 1, 2021
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It’s unclear what instruments appear on Cashmere Spheres, but Chad M. Clark plays all of them, and that’s impressive enough. It sounds like he’s got guitars, horns, percussion, and a wealth of unidentifiable noise-makers cascading through the album’s nine songs, each one a precise mix of energetic improvisation. Clark’s approach is often pointillist, which builds momentum through small jolts and shocks. The sum is music that sprints forward even when its individual parts are patient and sparse. On the most memorable tracks, such as the rollicking “Tauca” and “Cordillera,” the rushing sounds mimic Clark’s fast-firing neurons, as if Cashmere Spheres is some kind of mental seismograph.
Marc Masters - The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: March 2021
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This is the follow-up to 'Time Tidal Disruption' (see Vital Weekly 1249), the debut release of Chad M. Clark. I listed back then with whom he worked, so I won't repeat that. I will repeat his instruments, "guitar, a pre-WWII archtop Epiphone guitar, he uses wool, balloon, hairpin, glass slide, microtonal harmonica, rods, mixing bowl, and split shot fishing sinkers", assuming he still stuck with that. All of this he recorded solo, due to the times we live in, but from his words, I understand there is some kind of layering process going on here. "Continuous re-formation served as a centre for the music to move and fluctuate. Multiple generations of artificial selection were spawned ex-situ with no single series of notes, timbres, or dynamics bred within the interdependent radius of an in-group unit." Unless, of course, he means to tell us that each track is the logical extension of the previous pieces. I very much enjoyed the first release for its direct approach to sound, being right in your face as such. He cuddles, hits, plucks, bows the strings with his hands and his objects and that results in some vibrant and energetic music. Lots of object abuse and Clark doesn't hide anything; there is no tarting up the sound here, everything that produced a sound during the recording, became part of the music. There is a complexity in the music that I enjoy and which made me think that this is all the result of mixing a few takes or tracks together and occasionally Clark manages to sound like a band in full action, with what seems drums, saxophone and, of course, the guitar raking about. This is a one-man free music army! I understand he wants to play music with others again, but on his own, he needs no others!
Vital Weekly - Frans de Waard
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CHAD M. CLARK Cashmere Spheres (Distant Taxa, DT002): What a pastel-colored, wild thing. It was done by a guy who worked with Chicago Phonography Acoustic Ecology and crossed the path with a soundwalk on Gruenrekorder. He then plucked, twinkled, crawled and plucked "Time Tidal Disruption" (2020) with Guitar, Wool, Balloon, Hairpin, Glass Slide, Microtonal Harmonica, Rods, Mixing Bowl etc., so that Evanston, IL, seems like one Wormhole to Merkworthistan. And now he teleports you in a surreal snail flight to Bolivia, into the Cordilleras, on the Altiplano, to Lake Poopo, the 'Salar de Copipasa', the 'Tauca', the 'Tunupa', silted up salt lakes and an inactive volcano, the 'Kusku' a faithless petrified giant. Tunupa wept at his feet to such an extent that tears and breast milk formed the largest salt flat in the world. The salt is laboriously mined as the 'white gold' of the poor. Bitter bread that they have been chewing since the conquistadors exploited the silver mines of Potosí (Georg Ruby wrote a little threnody about it). Beginning of a spiral of greed and horror: slave labor with tens of thousands of dead, the dam break disaster of 1626 and one of the first major environmental disasters due to the mercury contamination, the landscape and people exhausted to the bone. With Evo Morales and the lithium treasure, that finally seemed to be turning to the annoyance of the neoliberal rest of the world. He survived the 2019 right-wing coup with difficulty. But vultures like the Tesla Group are lurking, because lithium is the gold of the electromobile future, although the exploitation is again only leaving deserts. Clark writes only vaguely: The movements, motifs, and themes that make up Cashmere Spheres were prepared outside the niche of ecological collectivism. But his itchy, cacophonic sound images speak their own language with a strangled barbed wire guitar, percussive fever and poisonous saxophone. Pointed feathers are followed by a growling bass clarinet, the wind gnaws at the wires, there is a manic beating, tugging, rustling, splintering, rattling, whetting and hailing, which condenses a prey scheme so that the deformation becomes general.
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