8 Tracks: From The Mind Of Mark (aka Klon Dump) with Moopie

South-Londoner legend El-B’s words of wisdom were sampled on at least two of Mark’s tracks, the first on “Here Comes A Fucking Startup Campus” and the second under his Klon Dump alias on “Out of Touch” which we released a few months later. “Don’t be scared, just make it all loud and make it all crazy…”

The cry of “sex!” from this Neue Deutsche Welle song is deployed to great effect throughout “Integrier Dich Du Yuppie”, often appearing in tandem with the scream of Keiji Haino and creating a new hook of its own. “Integrier” is probably my favourite track of Mark’s to date – it sounded like the perfect consolidation of his ideas up until that point and also boasts a most boisterous bassline.

This is another NDW record whose B-side, “Das Tor Zur Welt” is also great. “Pingelig” (a colloquial German term meaning fussy or picky) was released as a 7” single on the mighty Zickzack label and was apparently written as a cover version of – or riposte to – a Schlager song by Nina Hagen whose title bears the same word. Its vocals are used on “Do The Dump”.

The cracks of these whips, which were apparently recorded during the Indie Gathering Film Festival, Cleveland, are heard most prominently in the introduction of “See In Symbols” (Unterton, 2018) amongst a swathe of ambience and foreign sound effects. The EP containing this track, “The Least Likely Event Will Occur In The Long Run” was a huge leap in Mark’s production prowess and confirmed that he should be writing Hollywood film scores, really.

This is another YouTube clip whose audio appears on the same EP, its zaps heard throughout the lead track “Know No Out Only In”. There is a distant “what is that?” heard in the background of the original audio source which has also been accentuated and manipulated. It’s possibly Mark’s most sample-heavy track: fragile timbres, alien sound effects, classic UK soundsystem samples and at least two other voices are all in there.

This is the first of a few sources used in “Incantation For The Protection Of JC” (A Colourful Storm, 2020), the central track on Mark’s side of Split with Christoph de Babalon. The “hey, is this it!?” posed by Flipper co-vocalist Bruce Loose appears twice – the second time before a section that even includes a vinyl scratching sample.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard surfaces twice in the intro of “Incantation”, which included many other atonal sounds of unknown origin. If I’m not mistaken, Mark’s curious pitch-bending sounds working in tandem with the voice of Baudrillard are also used only in the intro – at least in that recognisable form. I can’t help but be reminded of Drew Daniel’s reflections in Spectres (Shelter Press, 2019) while working through this playlist, thinking in circles about the presuppositions of sound sources, the practice of lifting them and revealing the implications of what he calls the ‘grit of the given’. Considering the huge mishmash of sound sources at our disposal today, I’m grateful to be working with someone who can connect the dots between El-B and Jean-B with such sensitivity.

A young Bastian appears throughout the climactic moments of “Incantation”, his voice manipulated and stretched before the arrival of a bleeps and bass outro unique to Mark’s work. I think this was an extremely clever sample that influenced the mood of the entire track – it instilled wonder and innocence into a palette which might otherwise be labelled as oppressive or dark, and I can’t imagine the voice of anyone or anything else working as effectively.