Chasm by Chad M. Clark (DT 010)
One track, one guitar, one plunge. Chad M Clark’s Chasm announces itself less as composition than as topography: a descent into an acoustic void, mapped in real time, improvised but never casual. The guitar here is not merely strummed or plucked, but excavated—strings groan, scrape, sigh; harmonics flare and vanish like phosphorescence on cavern walls.
The sound-world is dark, heavy, almost monolithic in affect, but achieved with remarkable economy. Clark layers resonance upon resonance, allowing space and decay to do as much work as attack. What might initially register as austerity slowly reveals itself as density: subtle overlaps, ghost-tones, sympathetic vibrations accumulating into an atmosphere both immense and intimate.
There are no climaxes in Chasm, no obvious resolutions. Instead, Clark operates in gradients of tension, coaxing the guitar to sustain itself on the edge of collapse. The music resists narrative, but it doesn’t drift; its forward motion is geological, sedimentary, a slow accretion of sonic weight.
In stripping back to a single instrument, Clark has paradoxically expanded his palette. Where earlier works flirted with multitracked collage, Chasm insists on exposure: the immediacy of fingers on steel, the body of the guitar resonating like a chamber too vast to measure. It is at once spare and engulfing, a document of solitude that feels strangely communal, as if the listener is pulled into the same abyss the player inhabits.
Chasm isn’t about virtuosity or display—it’s about listening, to instrument, to room, to silence. A heavy, layered spareness that opens not outward but downward, into the cracks and rifts that structure both sound and self.
