Clark — Civilians

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Clark — Civilians (2025) Director: Melanie Lane x Corps Conspirators Era: Post-IDM Experimental Dance-Electronic Era (2025) - UK avant-garde electronic music intersecting with contemporary dance and body-based performance art in a period of renewed hardware-driven club aesthetics High curatorial value as a rare example of a music video in which choreography and direction are fully integrated rather than supplementary, produced outside mainstream label infrastructure via Throttle Records / Decca. The video's near-total visual austerity (brightness 16/255, 5 cuts in 210 seconds) and biomaterial staging constitute a deliberate refusal of conventional pop video legibility, documenting an important intersection of UK experimental electronic music and Australian contemporary dance-film at a specific moment of cross-artform institutional and independent production. Context: Released in September 2025 as the lead single from Clark's tenth studio album Steep Stims, 'Civilians' represents a creative return to hardware-driven, rave-inflected electronic music following Clark's extensive work in film and TV scoring, orchestral collaboration, and vocal exploration. The video places Clark's music firmly within the lineage of contemporary dance-film, extending his decade-long collaboration with Australian choreographer Melanie Lane and her Corps Conspirators collective. The grotesque-somatic visual language — centred on bodies moving in relation to gelatin biomaterial in near-total darkness — reflects a 2020s tendency among experimental artists to merge club music aesthetics with durational performance art and body-horror imagery, resisting the fast-cut, high-saturation visual grammar of mainstream 2025 pop video production. Director notes: Choreography and direction are jointly credited to Melanie Lane x Corps Conspirators, as confirmed by Clark's official Bandcamp page and multiple press sources. The video serves as the inaugural music video release from Clark's album Steep Stims (Throttle Records / Decca, November 7, 2025), with the video premiering on or around October 1, 2025. Per press coverage, the video features seven dancers and opens with gyrating gelatin used as inspiration for the dancers' movement vocabulary. The collaboration extends Clark and Lane's longstanding creative partnership, which began in 2010 with the dance performance Tilted Fawn at the Sydney Opera House and continued through Clark's 2015 and 2017 live tours.