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Clark, “Pleen 1930s.” Clark (Chris Clark) is a prolific and inventive producer-composer who makes shape-shifting music in which no two moments—not to mention no two pieces—ever sound similar. He’s sort of a chameleon whose signature sound is that his tracks never sound like anyone else and they do unconventional things that are beautifully surprising. “Pleen 1930s” (2001) popped up on my Harold Budd Spotify playlist, probably because it’s piano music. (Solo piano music is one of Spotify’s most valuable currencies.) The piece is built around a 2-bar repeating phrase of interlocking chords. After a few repetitions a higher register melody joins in. The piano sounds lo-fi and distant, evoking gamelan music transcribed for an old player piano. Harmonically the music hovers in a liminal space of betweenness—between resolving itself, between upbeat and melancholy, between live and looped. Once both parts are in, the piano pattern’s notes start to disappear, replaced by rests for the second bar of the 2-bar phrase. And then, after just a minute and a half, the music is gone. In an interview on Jamie Lidell’s podcast, Clark calls his short compositions “haiku tracks” and explains how he decides on a music’s length:

“Sometimes it’s just really obvious when something shouldn’t be continued and should just stop…Generally there’s this ratio of 80/20–I’ve got an intuition that something shouldn’t be more than what it is.”

Radiohead, “Knives Out.” This is an elegant 2001 song with a crystal clear orchestration to match. There are so many presences at play: vocalist Thom Yorke’s choirboy long tones disappearing into long mono reverb tails, Motorik-esque minimal drumming (no crash cymbal, just ride), bass jumping octaves, the sound of a ticking clock, and filigree guitars moving downwards chromatically, evoking Baroque suspensions. The guitars are the star, suspending “Knives Out” in a web of inner melodies: the lead part over in the left, acoustic strumming on the right, and then a solo section (2:25) where two more electrics join down the middle and on the right. The three layered guitars are counterpointedly majestic—like Malian kora music stolen into another world. If I played guitar I would want to play like this.