Clark [UK]
Holy Other [UK]
Ghosts of acid future Clark and Holy Other will take over Fuchs2
For the leap day on 29 February 2024, Spectaculare festival has prepared an exceptional feast for fans of intelligent electronic music. You can celebrate the leap year at Fuchs2 with UK classic of intelligent beat - Clark, who's been releasing on the cult label Warp. Clark will present his fresh new album Cave Dog (released 1st December) in addition to this year's eclectic Sus Dog album (produced by Thom Yorke). Another guest at Fuchs2 will be one of the forefathers of the witch house genre, the enigmatic British producer Holy Other. Like the other events of the festival, their performance will be accompanied by light design prepared just for this show.
Support: Mike H. | Visuals: Brian Kelly (light design)
Few names out there are as closely associated with the history of the iconic Warp label as Clark. Christopher Stephen Clark made his debut here at the turn of the millennium, releasing classics like Body Riddle, Totems Flare and Empty the Bones of You under their logo, which bubbled acid synths and crunched weird beats. But he got his start in music deep into the '90s as a child prodigy building his own electronic instruments. It's hard to imagine the boom of innovative, sophisticated electronica of the noughties without it, but in the later stages of his career Clark also recorded music for contemporary dance performances, gallery installations, television series and computer games.
In recent years, he's also enjoyed escaping into other genres - on Playground In A Lake, Clark mixed electronics with strings, and the album was produced by the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label, which focuses mainly on classical music. Clark even sings alone for the first time on Sus Dog. "I wondered what the Beach Boys would sound like if they took MDMA and wanted to make a rave record," says Chris Clark of the record, which was overseen by longtime fan Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The result is Clark's most personal record yet, on which the veteran of brooding electronica sounds as if he's been poured over with living water. The current release, Cave Dog, brings Clark back to the waters of hard acid beats, his vocals already in the mix.
When the trend of a ghostly mix of slowed-down hip-hop beats and minimalist synths emerged from the underground at the end of the noughties, journalists gave it the name witch house. One of the earliest examples of the new gloomy aesthetic were the recordings of a Manchester producer who calls himself Holy Other. Released on Tri Angle Records, they derived their hallucinatory atmosphere from delving into intimate moods. His 2012 debut full-length album Held appeared in a number of annual polls and, along with the With U EP, is one of the best electronic releases of the new millennium.
Holy Other maintains the spectral spirit of his music in their presentation, refusing to be photographed or reveal any minor information about himself. What we do know for sure is that Lieve recorded the introverted sonic structures of last year's album during his stay at Liverpool's Bidston Observatory, a tower with unique acoustics on Bidston Hill overlooking the sea. The record was a return after four years of silence and also featured collaborations with singer Sian O'Gorman, violinist Simmy Singh and saxophonist Daniel Thorne. Holy Other remains enigmatic and elusive, but its music welcomes listeners to adventurous explorations. He will certainly convince us of this on April 29 at Prague's Fuchs2 club, where he will perform at the Spectaculare festival party together with electronic classic Clark.