10. Clark—Turning Dragon (2008)
A lone astronaut pilots a tiny ship up through the atmosphere in one final massive technological leap forward for humankind. Her goal is simple research, one last vague hope that maybe, somehow, a cure for Earth's terminal prognosis might be discovered. She rises out of the violet haze of the outer atmosphere and into the brilliant glare of pure, unfiltered sunlight. On this side of the planet things seems peaceful, almost. With precise manipulations of the ship's controls she banks to one side and begins to make her way toward the dark side of the Earth. The trip takes a few hours but eventually the sun begins to retreat behind her home planet in the ship's rear cameras. Then abruptly, like the shoulder of some pale monster, the curvature of the moon becomes visible, blurred slightly by a haze of debris. As the moon grows larger, she begins to notice flashes above the Earth, chunks of lunar detritus burning up as they skip across the atmosphere.
If there is one album that can capture the beauty and grandeur of such a scenario—as well as the icy brutality—surely it's Clark's
Turning Dragon. His other albums, at least the few I've heard, are good—a sort of mellow, trip-hop inflected take on IDM—but this one is truly something special, with an unusual, brittle production style that I find particularly appealing. He comes out of the gate at full throttle with "New Year Storm", quite possibly the best track on the album, a hard-edged driving song of cosmic proportions—the kind of sound you could imagine reverberating throughout the cosmos, emanating back through time to no less than the birth cries of the universe itself. For several more tracks the album continues in this vein, with each one functioning almost like a movement in a symphony—severe, crushing and gorgeous. Things calm down a bit with "Ache of the North", a track which does in fact have a potent aching quality to it, the sound of massive ice crystals drifting slowly, lifelessly through a once thriving solar system. Appropriately, the penultimate track, "BEG", is probably the most challenging—or certainly the most noisy and dissonant. This song pulls off the amazing trick of sounding raw and destructive while also sounding vast and austere, though it does transition from the former to the later over the course of it's running time, which gives in a nice narrative feel.
So our pilot continues on, placing herself between the Earth and Moon, transmitting data back home, frost shimmering on her windows. Below her, the occasional satellite is obliterated by a stray moon rock. Below her the flashes continue. She is entranced by them momentarily, finding them not so much frightening as oddly sublime. For the moment her mind goes blank, transfixed by what is happening below. When she does finally glance upward again, a plummeting gray boulder occupies her entire field of vision. For one seemingly infinite moment she observes every contour of its surface—every crack, every welt. Abruptly her ship explodes in a shower of ice and steel and blood. It shimmers in the sky for a millisecond then just as quickly it's gone.