Essential Listen: ‘The Deep Ark,’ a Mysterious 8-Hour 1990s Electronic Mix from The Arkiteket

A few days ago on his Blissblog, the LA-based writer and scholar Simon Reynolds highlighted a recently released 8-hour, brilliantly crafted ambient and post-rave experimental electronic mix and accompanying book called The Deep Ark. Created by an artist Reynolds describes as “an enigmatic figure, known to some on this circuit, but for this project self-shrouded in mystery,” the seamless, expertly crafted set was built by someone called the Arkiteket. The selector, per a website devoted to the project, “always felt that this music was under represented by DJs,” adding that he’d “spent about 10 years playing electronica out on pirate radio, and in the club and was always puzzled over the lack of DJ exploiting this genre.” The Arkiteket added, “I threw everything I had at it, every trick or technique I’d picked up through the years.”

You should go ahead and start listening to the mix now and then read the rest of this. As you proceed through the eight hours — and you should at least try and do the eight hours as a single uninterrupted listen — note the The Deep Ark’s dramatic arc. By the 90-minute mark, it’s hardly an ambient mix at all, let alone “relaxing.” The snares start to get fuzzy and distorted, and the quarter- and eighth-notes start getting more complicated. As the time passes, The Ark eases back into a certain calmness. By the end of the seventh hour, the snares have been banished and only washes of melodic chords and tones remain. That final hour is a wonder.

Here’s how and why The Deep Ark was built, per the website Q&A:

This was originally intended as a soundtrack to a very particular kind of experience that I won’t elaborate on, but generally lasts at least several hours of wandering of one sort or another – and the mix is structured to loosely line up with various aspects of that experience, so there’s an arc to it that required a long duration to engineer. Musically, it tries to trace a very specific strain of electronic music, the hyper-emotional, melancholic variant of electronica typified by the mid 90’s WARP sound and its various descendents, and I wanted to let the tunes breathe as much as possible in the process – so there was a lot of ground to cover, if only in terms of moving between different tempos and vibes.

The entire interview is worth a read, but the part below really resonated with us, and precisely aligns with the overall In Sheep’s Clothing mission and ethos:

Many years ago I came across a short essay written by hardcore techno turntablist the DJ Producer, entitled The DJ as cultural historian. It seems to have been lost to the vagaries of the internet, but it outlined the importance of the role of the DJ in the preservation of music and its surrounding culture through both the contemporaneous recording of sets, and the curation of mixes after the fact – this is an idea that’s been common in hip hop for decades – a naturalistic use of the medium itself as a tool to create and enhance a historical and cultural narrative.

The DJ continues:

This was about 2005 or so, and it really struck a chord with me as it dovetailed with the approach I was taking to mixing at the time, and also with the presentation of mixes online, adding sleeve art, liner notes, personal reflections, histories and connections, fleshing out the context around the music and using the mix as a springboard for some kind of inquiry. I think If anything this role has become even more important over the last decade as we have been subjected to an increasingly relentless torrent of music and other media, and having someone (or something) make sense of it all and present it in a coherent framework becomes a necessity. This all seems a bit grandiose I guess, but at some point you have to ask yourself what exactly it is that you’re trying to achieve with your work, what you can add to the culture. My hope is that this will be some kind of worthwhile contribution.

Rather than list the ridiculously deep set list, here’s a screenshot of one section of it.

Learn more about The Deep Ark here.