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Phantom West

Let's start by talking about the name of your project. Phantom West and Phantom East are roads out in the desert, by an abandoned military base. How do these ideas tie in with the music you're creating?

Clark: For several years I was driving out there on a regular basis to see the person who's now my wife. There was this housing there for small families and enlisted people, this huge neighborhood of abandoned houses, and the houses were crumbling, and in all the cracks of the sidewalk weeds were starting to grow in. They were homes. They were the places where these families got along or had fights and where their kids grew up, but now it's just this thing that's no longer useful. There's something about that idea of these places being abandoned and no longer deemed necessary that always appealed to me. It informs my writing, both my music and a lot of the other stuff I've written, stories and stuff like that. The idea of a wasteland and that kind of transformation, of things that were abandoned and repurposed for other uses, is really interesting to me.

Was it called Phantom West when people were still living in the houses?

Clark: Yeah. I think it's because of the Air Force base. It was probably named after the F-4 Phantom fighter jet and then eventually became something else, but the name was just as appropriate. It was this completely different abandoned and empty thing, and the name still worked.

Since your first release, Chimaera, was released under your own name, what led you to picking Phantom West as the new name of your project?

Clark: I regretted releasing Chimaera under my own name, mainly because who knows me, anyway? It's not like Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode releasing a solo album when everybody knows who he is. Something about releasing it under my own name didn't totally sit well with me, so I wanted to find an actual name for my project, one that wasn't necessarily just me, but that would also open things up for collaborations with other people. For quite a while I was was working on a track that was going to be called 'Phantom West and Phantom East,' and I had mentioned that to my wife. When German, who runs Sistinas, mentioned that he wanted to release some stuff that I was making, I wanted to come up with a name, and my wife said, 'Well, what about Phantom West?'

Do you find that working under a project title allows you a certain amount of anonymity that allows you a little more creative freedom?

Clark: There is something appealing about the anonymity. Another reason it didn't sit perfectly with me is because it felt somewhat egotistical to release something under my own name. Authors do that all the time, but as a music project it just felt different.

There's a definite soundtrack feel to a lot of the stuff you've done. What instruments do you use in your music, and how do you put it all together?

Clark: The first instruments I learned were guitar and bass, and I started that 15 or 16 years ago. A few years ago I worked with a band in Orange County that was more electronic and industrial, and that influenced me a lot, seeing how they put things together and how the sounds worked. Now I mainly use Reason for sequencing, synthesizers and drum machines. Reason is very versatile; you can have everything from very acoustic-sounding drums to crazy trance loops to hardcore industrial noise stuff. I think it's that versatility in Reason that I like, because it allows me to create all sorts of different styles. On Aleph Null there's everything from stuff that almost sounds like A Perfect Circle to stuff that wouldn't sound out of place on a Cure album or something, like one of their '80s instrumental B-sides.

Speaking of '80s music, your vocal style has a sort of wistfulness to it that recalls classic synthpop and stuff like The Cure. Who are your favorite artists and your favorite singers?

Clark: I'm a big fan of Joy Division. I really like New Order and The Cure. The very first album I ever bought was a Peter Gabriel album, and he's always been a very big influence on me, everything from the really edgy stuff of his 1980s albums to the stuff now. As far as singers go, my favorite singer is probably David Gahan of Depeche Mode. I think he's always had a very strong voice. Joy Division and The Cure are very influential on my music, but not as much vocally. In terms of more modern stuff, I listen to Radiohead a lot, which you can probably tell when I sing in the higher registers. I think I've been influenced a bit by Thom Yorke's style. But as far as singers where I really enjoy the tone of their voice and the way they emotively sell their music, I don't think there's anybody that can top Peter Gabriel.

You mentioned New Order, and you were on a New Order tribute CD not that long ago. How did that come about?

Clark: A friend of mine who assisted me in the production of Aleph Null is a big fan of New Order, and he's a regular visitor to New Order Online. He gave me a heads up one day that they were working on the second community tribute album. The way it was set up is that different bands submitted cover versions, and the members of New Order Online voted for the songs. I came in 16th, which didn't get me on to the album officially, but each of the three producers who run New Order Online got to pick one song, and I was one of the producer's picks. It was really nice to be picked for that.

A lot of the artists that do remixes on The Rain Expedition are really heavy industrial noise projects, which is a little surprising considering how mellow a lot of your original tracks. How did these collaborations come about, and were you surprised by some of the results?

Clark: A lot of the collaborations came through Sistinas. W.A.S.T.E. is on Sistinas, and the guys in W.A.S.T.E. know The Operative and Caustic. In the whole noise scene, a lot of people know each other. German sent the original versions around and asked about their interest in this, and I guess they heard it and said they could do something with it. Every single one of them blew me away. The Hazing Ritual mix was great, and Vaclav and Cacophony. I'm afraid of missing somebody who submitted something, because everybody put their own spin on things. It's an interesting juxtaposition between some of the original stuff, which is very mellow and melodic, and what people like Manufactura did to completely turn it on its side and look at it from a different perspective that's much more aggressive and dark. It's really fascinating to listen to the creativity of the people who responded, especially as fast as they worked; some of them only had a few days, and the product was amazing.

Do you have any plans to do remixes for any of the artists that contributed to The Rain Expedition?

Clark: I have a couple of remix kits for W.A.S.T.E. that I unfortunately haven't been able to get to, but I do intend to get to that before their next EP. I did submit a mix for Modulate's Skullfuck EP, which I think is going to be out in March. I did a version that's a little more of a breakbeat instead of a house beat. I have started to kind of get my toes wet in the remix arena, which I had never done before, and it's really fascinating to me to try and take somebody else's work and re-envision it in a slightly different way.

You have a new album coming out. What can you tell us about it?

Clark: It covers a lot of ground. The original version of Chimaera was very electronic, with just a little bit of guitar stuff in there, and it kind of covered some different genres. That was part of the reason I thought of the word Chimaera, because there were some very abstract tracks and a couple that were very cinematic and large in scope, like 'The Soul Trade.' Aleph Null is almost a magnification of that, because it covers an even wider range of genres. There's probably something for everybody to like, but to like every song on the album you'd probably have to like a lot of different genres, from the harder alternative to stuff like darkwave. It covers a lot of ground. There's one very long track, 'Construct of Elysium,' which is 14 minutes and is almost Cure-like, at least in the instrumental portions, and then there are some parts that are almost like A Perfect Circle.

What is the meaning behind the title Aleph Null, considering the fact that you've used the word 'Aleph' to subtitle your other releases?

Clark: The aleph number is a mathematical thing from set theory; the smallest set that is countably infinite is said to have a cardinality of zero, of null. Any set that you can count one, two, three, four, all the way to infinity, has a cardinality of aleph null. Aleph one is the next level of cardinality, where there's a set that's also infinite, but you cannot match that set one-to-one with another set. All the rational numbers have a cardinality aleph null, and all real numbers, which include irrational numbers like pi, have a higher cardinality of aleph one. There's this whole set theory that goes into different scales of infinity; it's not like one infinity is greater than the other, but if you take a chunk of that set, there are more things in between each member of that set than in another set. 'Aleph null,' you could say, is the smallest infinity. Like Depeche Mode, New Order, Joy Division and Nine Inch Nails—Nine Inch Nails has Halo One, Two, Three—and I wanted to serialize my releases in that way, and 'Aleph' just came to me.

Have you played live as Phantom West yet? Do you have plans to do a live show?

Clark: I do have plans to play live. I've gotten several people to come up and be a band with me, and we're working on how to put that together. If everybody is able to make it, we'll probably be a five-piece at our first show, which is going to sound pretty different from the original album, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Is it going to be a traditional rock band set-up?

Clark: Currently we have a drummer, a guitarist, myself on guitar and vocals, a bass player, and a keyboard player. Some of the songs that we're going to do are probably going to be without any backing tracks, so it's just going to be the five of us playing the actual song itself. There may be a couple other songs where we play with existing backing tracks from Aleph Null. It'll be an interesting experience.

Do you have any other upcoming plans you can tell us about?

Clark: I hope that once we get this first show under our belt, we'll decide how well that went and how soon we can do it again. If it goes really well, maybe we'll do it again in a few weeks or so. If it doesn't go so well, it'll be a couple of months before we play again. I do intend to at least play periodically, to do live shows a few times a year, even though I am mainly a studio dweller. As far as future plans in general, I'm already a quarter of the way through the next album after Aleph Null as well as another EP, so there's a bit of a traffic back-up. I have plenty more things to come out, so if you liked Chimaera and The Rain Expedition and if you like Aleph Null, there's a lot more in the pipe on its way later in 2007 and early 2008.