Dave Clarke

Dave Clarke ranked among the decade’s most admired and distinctive figures in techno as both a DJ and producer. He launched his musical journey spinning hip-hop records in the middle of the 1980s before gravitating toward acid house and, by the close of that decade, the emerging rave sound. Early in the 1990s he issued his first tracks on Stress under the alias Pig City and placed additional material on R&S, XL, and the imprint he founded himself, Magnetic North Records. Toward the middle of the 1990s he moved steadily away from rave into a direct strain of techno that combined hardcore’s intensity with the atmospheric depth of classic Detroit productions. Three consecutive singles titled “Red,” the final one of which reached the British Top 40, drew widespread attention between 1995 and 1996, as did the unrelenting power of his club performances. In 1995 he assembled Demagnetized, a collection drawn largely from his Magnetic North catalogue and augmented with contributions from Cristian Vogel, DJ Hell, and additional artists. His first full-length statement, the widely praised Archive One, followed a year later on Deconstruction. He also supplied two volumes to the influential Studio !K7 series Electro Boogie. Subsequent mix projects appeared, among them the pair of World Service collections that bookended his 2003 studio album Devil’s Advocate. Early in 2007 the double-disc set Remixes and Rarities: 1992-2005 collected further material. In the period afterward Clarke maintained a noticeably reduced release schedule yet sustained an active presence on radio. Occasional visits to his Amsterdam-based studio yielded a succession of striking remixes, many of which were gathered on the 2016 compilation Charcoal Eyes. Later that year he survived a road accident in Serbia that left him physically unharmed yet shaped the atmosphere of his 2017 album Desecration of Desire, a reflective, post-punk-inflected work that included vocal contributions from Mark Lanegan and Anika.