Lee Clarke - Genes (2022)

Producer Lee Clarke draws on themes of memory, degradation and the evolution of sound and bloodlines with his beat tape Genes.

The initial ambition was deceptively simple: compile and release a set of beats from the last few years. But the project morphed into a transtemporal collage layered with samples from unfinished work with collaborators like Ivy Sole and Kingsley Ibeneche and decades old cassette recordings of Clarke’s family members.

In the early stages of compilation, Clarke encountered the Morphagene—a sampler described by the manufacturer as “a next generation tape and micro sound module that uses reels, splices and genes to create new sounds from those that already exist.”

Reflecting on repetition, degradation and the process that is sampling and resampling, which in some ways parallels the way genetic information is passed down, Clarke used samples from old family recordings of his grandmother Ahvagene—a NYU-trained pianist with perfect pitch and his biggest musical influence—and her sisters playing, singing, and talking about their childhood.

Over the course of twenty-two tracks Clarke explores not only how sound degrades with time and processing but also how memory is itself ever evolving as the one who remembers recalls it.

In a nod to the nonlinear nature of grieving and even of time, Clarke discovered that his interest in iterative music processes and reimagining sounds from the past created openings for previously un-accessed dimensions of grief surrounding the death of his grandmother whose end-of-life Alzheimer’s disease took much of her memory but spared the muscular memory of being able to play jazz standards.