Clonk’s Coming

The duo of DJ Parrot, resident at Sheffield’s Jive Turkey, and Richard H Kirk, already a veteran of the city’s left field scene with Cabaret Voltaire, had already revolutionised techno once with “Testone.” The track was as powerful statement of “Yorkshire bleep” as LFO‘s self-titled single, and as important in putting the fledgling WARP label on the map. Then they decided to kill “bleep” with “clonk,” hence Clonk’s Coming (aka CCEP on vinyl and the self explanatory CCCD), which still to this day sounds like an alien transmission. It consists of six variations on the “Jack” theme, each taking the same elements (indecipherable chants, 808 drums, clattering percussion) and rewiring them radically, plus the title track, with its distinctive chime-warble that you can still hear sampled and resampled in experimental electronics and drum’n’bass to this day. The arrangements are so stark, so minimal, they’re like an exploded diagram of dance music — yet they retain absolute humanity, absolute funk, and brain scrambling joy of sound in the moment for every second of every track. Both Kirk and Parrot would continue to have extraordinary catalogues over decades (the latter in All Seeing I and as Crooked Man among other guises) but this stands up with the very best of either of their work.