Back with their first new album in seven years, Lark, the music project of artist Karl Bielik and his ever-evolving band of collaborators, unveiled Be Still on 31st January. It’s been worth the wait.
From the minimalist throb and nerve-jangling piano of the opening title track, through to the Blade Runner synth washes and warped vocals of closer ‘Powders’, this is a record that casts pictures across your brain and raises the hairs on the back of your arms. Dark, desolate and dissonant, it makes for gloriously uneasy listening – its instruments distorted and thrumming at funereal pace towards the low end of the scale, its cut-up lyrics drawled in a haunting slur by Bielik.
‘Goodbye Man’ slithers along on an undulating synth wave, ‘Decorate’ clangs menacingly and ‘The Underpass’ looms as gloomy and anxiety-raising as a late night scuttle across its subterranean namesake. Then there’s lead single ‘Blind’, a track that manages at once to be grimy, with a thread of guitar static running through its core and Bielik’s gruff vocal, and almost… jaunty? with its rubbery bassline, clackety glam rock drumbeat and missing word chorus line. It shouldn’t work, but my goodness it does.
We asked Karl Bielik to guide us through the album track by track.
Written, performed and mixed in my home studio in East London with many others contributing but not in the same room, Paul M Burke from Sheffield played guitar, Warsaw based Oscar winning sound engineer Tarn Willers played Bass, as did painter and now Pixies bassist Emma Richardson, Rayna Ferner played violin and Joe Ryan drummed. Paul Galpin mastered all tracks. Artists Ben Walker, Donna Mclean and James F Johnston(Gallon Drunk, PJ Harvey) all contributed paintings for the sleeve and Ciaran O’Shea did the art and design work. Films have been made by Angela Johnston, Charlie Bonallack with Kaz Raad, Stephane Kowalczyk and Inga Tillere with more in the pipeline. Some of the above are long term collaborators, some new… I’m deeply grateful for all their work on this album.
It’s been 7 years since the last Lark album and this one has dragged its heels to the finishing post… all my old notebooks were scoured for words then once done glued together and used as supports for making paintings. No unfinished songs were left at my studio, they were used or deleted – felt like a good cleaning of the slate…and a ground zero starting point for the next album.
This record goes from the deeply personal to the absurd…. Fatherhood – being and having one, love, loss, abstinence, acceptance, addiction, childhood, greed, meditation, sex and the plain old beautiful hard thing of being alive.
A bag of hope, a box of tears.
Released 31.01.25 – My 58th birthday.
A Side
Be Still
Be Bastard, Be Still were either lingering in the tail end of a dream or the first thing I thought when I woke up. That day I wrote the rest of the lyrics, played and mixed the song – the lyrics and the melody came before anything was played. It’s an odd mysterious powerful couplet and I knew that was going to be the first track and title of the record straight off.
Blind
The album is pretty slow paced and dark in tone… this was kind of an attempt to throw some light on the matter. I asked the brilliant drummer and friend Joe Ryan (we have worked together for years) to give me 5 minutes of Fall-Blindness (hence the title) meets the Glitter Band drums and then I wrote the song to that. The lyrics were Burroughs/Gysin/Bowie style cut up technique – In no particular order I placed the cut up lines on my studio table, turned the mic on and sang, some planned, some improvised lyrics…leaving the word Love out between I and You when singing was unplanned but it worked so stayed in, the song is loose, messy and essentially played live.
Decorate
The only song written on a guitar – two chords – near my limit – I’m not really a musician and only play anything during the writing process. A Cezanne, Velvets, violence, sex, domesticity, dirty, healing soup. My painter/musician friend Emma Richardson played Bass on the track – she’s now joined The Pixies – that’s what happens if you play on a Lark album.
Goodbye Man
A moody synthy ode to accepting and welcoming the love and beauty you have in your life in whatever form or shape that takes.
She Breaks
She lies, she sings, she breaks my heart strings… the words were written sitting outside my 9 year old daughters room while she sang in bed in the morning. She also sings backing vocals on this song and the underlying track is a recording of her heartbeat in the womb. For years this song was two different songs that weren’t cutting the mustard so as a final attempt at salvation they were hastily welded together. Jazz drums by Joe again and wonderful guitar by long time and long distance collaborator Paul. M. Burke – they both appear throughout the record. Paul put Lark on a few times in the very early days of the band.
Shimmy
A fragile gentle song of closing, of aching, of watching love slide away knowing you can’t keep hold of it, a song of letting go. The last song on side A of the vinyl… leave them wanting more is my showbiz maxim.
B Side
The Underpass
Mexicana Abstracto… cut ups again, some facts, some fictions, some play. A groovy seedy dark twisted dusty desert western of a song. Once the money rolls in I see a video involving cuban heels, Mexico, a dirt track, Mezcal, a highway, Bobby Peru, a gun and a girl. Will it ever stop.
Answer
Built around a wonky drum/keys loop off my very cheap casio… the wailing keys always seem on the point of failing but held together with the heavy bass glue… a break up track, that took a long time to make, that I wrote during a long break up.
Sixpence
Initially written as an instrumental for a film soundtrack Lark are making for a film about the Artist Simon Carter made by his son Noah which is out later this year. The music inspired me to write the words… straight off the melody brought sing a song of sixpence to mind which I changed to sing a song of sickness…the rest followed pretty quickly for me. The seagull ish sound at the beginning and end is me thinking i could whistle, it was so bad that I put it through a guitar effects pedal and it then fitted fantastically with the songs mournful tone. A wet seaside walk in the grey beauty of life. It was the last song written for the record. My favourite.
The Ink House
Started out as a song for one of the greats – Mark Linkous – hence Ink House – but soon drifted from its subject matter in to what is an ode to leaving the North…Great Violin by Rayna and backing vox by Lorna and Rob…. Billy Liar finally gets on the last bus to ever leave this town. It’s oldest track on here.
Powders
Was a bloated 10 minute piece which I kept adding more and more to and I couldn’t get it to go anywhere, the original words and vocal line were dreadful so as one final act to get something out of this I cut it down to 4 minutes I just turned the mic on and improvised some made up sounds over it… was throwing a spanner in the works to see what I could get out of the song – which I ended up liking and keeping. Feels like a good closer.
Be Still is out now on vinyl, cd and digital download via Bandcamp
Lark: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Introduction by Paul Maps
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