WITH his first album for his new home Deutsche Grammophon, Playground On A Lake, now out in the world – and a far-reaching, ambitious record it is, too, spread over four sides – and it seems it wasn’t just the IDM cognoscenti who’ve been wowed.
Also more than a little taken was Pablo Lerrain, the director of the Apple TV+ series Lisey’s Story, based on the Stephen King novel; she found she was listening to some circulating early demos of Playground On A Lake a lot, having first had Clark’s work brought to her attention by his score for the film Daniel Isn’t Real. He asked to include several finished tracks in the series, in which the widow of a successful novelist who acquires a dangerous and obsessive stalker, a fan of her dead husband’s writing.
And the pair then found their working relationship blossomed, with an entire new score commissioned weaving in with the originally requested tracks from Clark’s album. ‘
Clark describes his approach to the commission thus: “It was a pleasure writing music for this show. I had to inhabit quite extreme polarities of emotion. Lisey’s Story is just as much about fragile human relationships as it is traditional horror.
“I love this thing in film; you get to write so much material, and you have to keep the code totally efficient and versatile. The music needs to be an elastic shapeshifter. It makes you interrogate the material, you always have this burning question: ‘OK music (as if the music is a person) you can do this, but can you do this, this, this this and this’.
“It’s a bit of an obsessive quest; working in film suits my nature. You also have to kind of become a character in the film yourself. Interpreting what you see, projecting back into the picture, as music, being guided by imagining the interior life of the characters, and letting what you create seep into that.
“It’s rather addictive. The Long Boy [a character from the novelist’s otherworld who turns to be more than a figment of the creative mind] will haunt me forever.”
Lisey’s Story is screening on Apple TV+ now; Clark’s score for the series will be released on June 25th, via Loud Robot And Watertower Music.
