Currently on a whirlwind club tour of Australia under the Red Bull Music Academy banner, Clark is a producer who knows how to melt dancefloors. While his sound ties in various elements from instrumental hip-hop, techno and ambient, it all oozes with an ominous energy that’s indicative of his base in Berlin. Having already left his mark at Goodgod Small Club, Clark hits Melbourne tomorrow before Adelaide and Perth over the weekend. Here’s five things from the producer himself that you might not know about him:

FRI JAN 23 – Melbourne – Boney
SAT JAN 24 – Adelaide – Rocket Bar
SUN JAN 25 – Perth – Mojo’s Bar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPlN6mUemow

1. I’m an ice snob. I actually love everything about ice. Sometimes I’ll think of all the different kinds of ice cubes as a way of calming my brain down before I sleep. I’ve even found the best freezer for storing it, huge. Worth it though. Like, Volvic makes a very fine ice cube. Normal tap water doesn’t. Filtered is ok. Perrier is good but it’s slightly cloudier than Volvic when it freezes, it makes a great crushed ice for cocktails though, I store it in special containers in the ice freezer at home, I hate buying it, people just don’t know what they are doing.

It’s all about the transparency, and shape. I would say the supreme cube is asymmetrical, about 20mm/15mm/18mm, and transparent enough to be hard, not crumble in your mouth but not feel like granite either. It’s just a perfect thing.

2. My mum is German. She’s from a town called Rosenheim; it’s in the really beautiful mountainous landscape of Bavaria, in the south of Germany. So my parents should have been enemies but they got married instead. I feel more English but sometimes like, my dry English side gets beaten by the German side, I just don’t get sarcasm, the information doesn’t hit my brain, it’s weird, I start finding slapstick humour funnier than it is, like “Oh look the man slipped on a banana skin”, perhaps that’s quite a Bavarian type of humour. Germans don’t understand why English people apologise all the time, I totally understand this. It’s an affliction.

I think I play the piano with my English side and program synths with Germanic side, like, a bit more clinical and removed from the messier, “actual real music” side of human reality. Or maybe this is just total bullshit. I think it’s probably bullshit, actually. Origins. Pff.

3. I’ve met Bruce Springsteen. My mum’s younger sister owned a hard rock clothing store, that basically sold everything to do with rock music. It’s called Hard N Heavy. It was actually quite a big deal in the 80’s, a lot of rock bands would visit. Bruce Springsteen was playing a gig and my aunt blagged it to do the hospitality dinner with him at the local bier fest. It was alright, I had no idea who he was, I was just munching on the weisswurst und senf. I didn’t sit on his knee or anything.

4. I totally suck at painting. Like, I really wanted to do still life paintings as a kid, drawing windows or a bit of cabbage or whatever. Massively precocious little dick basically, I sucked at it though. I got quite into drawing abstract shapes which I still do now, like these:

I love trying to imagine the look of new musical notes, or drawing a track, in an abstract way, it’s a very useful way to conceive of your work. Traditional music notation is good in some ways, awful in others. The way it looks is a disaster, the way it doesn’t deal with micro timing or feel or texture is very limiting. People have to cling to it out of tradition, which I can understand. I taught myself it for a while and then got frustrated and learnt midi instead.

5. I’m a divorced guitarist. I married a guitar once, but we’ve split up now. I love the sound of finger picking, and I played it for about 1 year everyday for 8 hours, I was obsessed, I just used to dig it, trying to play as fast as I could, really trippy suspended melodies. I was alright at fingerpicking. But I would always retune the guitar, which is kind of like demanding your eggs be cooked a certain way everyday and never doing the washing up. At some point you need to do the washing up/learn the theory and I could never be arsed on guitar. I much prefer the piano, the way it’s laid out, all of the beautiful harmonic structure behind it, I could explore it forever. I would never study it formally though.