Sagas
Each album is part of an anthology that fancifully illustrates the stage if life he was in when he wrote and recorded them. Effectively, each album could be seen as elaborate journal entries written in a fantasy setting. There are three core factors: faith, philosophy, and emotion. The sound of each realease and hyperbole in the lyrics serve to express and illustrate Eerie’s journey as he navigates these factors.
The Nightmare Saga: 2013-2015
During this time, the project was called “Dead Choir Anthology.” This name was later dropped due there already being a band called “Dead Choir.” Reissues of these albums have “Eerie Clark Chronicles” denoted on the artwork to represent the retroactive change. The music during this period was very developmental and focused heavily, if not exclusively, on sequencing. There wasn’t an established narrative just yet, rather individual concepts expressed in ways that could be, and later would become, tied togther in a greater story. This was also an era characterized by extreme metal influences and harsh vocals, something that would shift as Eerie developed his voice and branched out stylistically.
Sick Blood Work Pathogen, 2013
Chiptune music heard in 8-bit video games has held a special and nostalgic charm for many people in the Gen X and Millenial generations. Having grown up watching his father play Final Fantasy as a kid, Eerie fell on love with the sound of video game music right away. He dreamed of making an album like this, a soundtrack that may or may not be used in an actual game some day. The challenge of using only 4 audio channels to create compelling and motivating music as heard in games on early consoles and home computers in the 80s held quite the appeal. The better part of 2012 was spent composing this collection of tunes and it’s regarded as one of the best projects Eerie has ever worked on to this day. As for lore and narrative, the album has a story that pertains to the kind of survival horror game Eerie envisioned this album would be a sound track to. As it relates to the greater lore of the bigger project however, it serves as a mystery. Telling a story only through the peaks and valleys of the music itself as though it were a 45 minute prelude to set the catchy but unnerving tone of the Eerie Clark story.
Electro Hip Hop Gore Grind For Kids, 2015
Building off of what was accomplished with Sick Blood Work Pathogen, Eerie had two goals: 1) continue with the chiptune, but this time without the self imposed limits designed to emulate sound chips in early computers, and 2) make the best electronic grindcore album possible. To say he had fun with this one would be an understatement. Lyrically, he continued a formula he established with his previous project The Uke of Doom with many of the songs being silly and others being more serious in nature. He considers that this album occupies a space in the time line where the chaotic nature of its sound and content illustrates the restlessness of a nightmare.
Goats and Goats 2, 2015
Goats was a strange experiment. Black metal, industrial, and folk music couldn’t possibly have less in common but that didn’t stop Eerie from trying to combine them to see what would happen. Results were, no pun intended, mixed to say the least. Despite the bizarre combination, disjointed sound, and audio quality that left much to be desired, the track managed to get the attention of a few people. Lyrically, this was truly where the lore of the Eerie Clark Chronicles story begins. It explores the thought process of faith deconstruction in light of hypocrisy observed in the church.
Goats 2 was equally experimental but more cohesive. Eerie decided to see how well he could blend industrial with doom/drone metal. While it’s validity as either of those genres is rightly questioned, its atmosphere is undeniable. It’s a dark, foreboding soundscape with enough musicality to hold one’s attention. For the first time in the series, a story is told deliberately through voice acting and without any lyrics. It’s an audio skit performed by Eerie and his then roomate where Eerie played a fantasy version of himself and his roomate played the role of a therapist. They discuss religious doubt, philosophy, and deconstruction while Eerie makes some very deep, vulnerable admissions and the track ends on a major cliff hanger.
There was going to be a part 3, Season of the Goats, but while lyrics for this were written, it simply never came to be. Nonetheless the story still continued.
The Descent Saga 2015-2020
This was when Eerie began to take a step away from heavier influences and try his hand at other styles. This was the time he developed his sound which can loosely be categorized as alternative. There was much improvement during this era despite setbacks holding up his intended release schedule. Clean vocals, use of physical keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, bass, and ukulele were all brought in for an unabashed expression of eclectic influences. The lyrics in this span of time grew more and more personal and embarrassingly vulnerable. Eerie Clark Chronicles was going to be what it was going to be, for better or worse. In short, it simply is. This is fitting as this was also the era of the permanent name change from Dead Chior Anthology to Eerie Clark Chronicles.
Magical Produce Powers, 2015
The concept was originally a self aware joke. Eerie had worked in the produce department of a grocery store for several years by this point. Customers would constantly ask him if he had certain out-of-stock items in the back. This was so frequent he thought to himself “What are they expecting? Do they want me to go to the back and conjure up some fruit with my magical produce powers?” He found this so amusing he decided he should write an EP titled after this. That is precisely what he did. He recorded some bass lines and keyboard tracks to a metronome and sang over it. Sequenced percussion and layering were then added in post. The lyrics take an unusual turn for Eerie, focusing largely on vague social issues, a valed scathing criticism of the effects of the economy on the working class. In the overall narrative this EP serves to begin the new era. The nightmare has ended, we’re waking up to the real world now. The EP ends on a dark note as a sarcastic rant descends into an ominous keyboard outro that dares the audience to delve deeper in to what’s to come.
Maker of Miracles, 2018
It was time to write a new full length album. From the start, it was decided that the followup to Magical Produce Powers would be the definitive beginning of a more obvious and ongoing narrative from then on. Said narrative would be inspired by Eerie’s own lived experience, largely based on his spiritual and mental journey rather than his admittedly mundane day-to-day life. Working paycheck-to-paycheck at a grocery store doesn’t make for terribly gripping storytelling, as the previous EP proved, but it does allow the opportunity to peel back the surface layers and see what this life does to a person and how he navigates it in light of serious philosophical questions. If God is real, if sin exists, if man is culpable, there must be a response to these things. How does one react to them when facing the incessant frustrations of a day job where he’s underpaid and under appreciated?
Originally, this album was going to be called “Alms for the Sober.” 2016 was a rough time for a lot of people, including Eerie Clark. Health issues, financial struggles, crisis of faith, and alcohol consumption quickly became characteristic of his life at the time. He had actually written a full album’s worth of material in 2016 for this and created and album cover for it. He still uses pictures from that “photoshoot” to this day. In terms of style, Alms for the Sober went back to Eerie’s acoustic roots. None of these songs were properly recorded but some were demoed. The title track summed up the unreleased body of work well, being a very honest and vulnerable snapshot of Eerie’s thought process at the time: struggling to keep his faith in God, struggles with mental health, and self medicating with alcohol.
The narrative associated with Alms for the Sober was a bit more fantastical than previous works and it was written with two purposes: 1) an allegory of his own personal growth and 2) serve as the basic lore of the Eerie Clark character and premise of what would become his web series “When Games Happen” a year later. In short, Eerie was split between two people: who he used to be and who he was becoming. The dichotomy was first introduced in the opening track of The Embryo EP, the only work he released under the name Apostolis. Alms for the Sober explored this dichotomy as the central conflict and concluded with a song describing the decisive moments where Eriee splits from Eric, the man Eerie used to be, somehow creating two distinct beings. Eric in his frustration tried to kill Eerie, the man he was becoming, and the song ends with what seems like a success for him. While this was the closing song, it was actually a flashback, and chronologically sat at the beginning of the album. Eerie was a left a mess after the attempt on his life, hence the songs about confusion and drinking. Eerie Clark was killed, but existed as a ghost, of sorts. A grim reaper, who was actually Eerie’s childhood self, happened to find Eerie and knew immediately what had happened. He offered to keep Eerie alive long enough to either reconcile with Eric or kill him. This was never stated in the lyrics of the album, but it served as the backstory and subtext of the whole thing. The basic philosophical conflict of putting away the past to become who who you will be was always a core theme in Eerie Clark’s music, but this was where it was made more obvious. This album never came to be because, out of character, Eerie was largely unhappy with most of the songs and he failed to make time to record it. The backstory and lore did recieve publication, however, in his web series When Games Happen on YouTube. The music and the series are linked as it is the same protagonist in both the series and Chronicles.
Maker of Miracles was recorded mostly in 2017, partly during the production of The Way Down EP by A Haunting on Mars. His bedroom served as the makeshift studio for both of these releases. Story wise, Maker of Miracles actually takes place after the story Alms for the Sober presented. Since Alms for the Sober never came out, one would need to watch When Games Happen to fully learn the context of the work, but the songs themselves told the listener enough to follow the story on its own. It was more poetry and metaphor than anything, so the meaning won’t be lost on anyone who didn’t know that Eerie was a ghost and was killed by his past self. This is actually why I included this page on the website, so I could fill people in who were curious about it.
We’re finally going to talk about the actual album, Maker of Miracles now. I had to tell you that story to tell you this one. To cut to the chase, the album is about suicide. The opening song was actually the last one to be written for it, and he almost didn’t include it, but he felt that it gave so much context to the rest of the album that it would be incomplete without it. “I sit alone, next to everybody else” This opening line sets the premise of the album: different characters respresenting different and conflicting perspectives within Eerie’s mind. Exhausted by the inner conflict, Eerie decides to drive out to the middle of nowhere to end his life, or in the case if him being a ghost in the greater narrative, simply giving up. The songs were recorded in much the same way Magical Produce Powers was, hence the inspiration to make it a direct sequel to it. The title is also a reference to the closing song from Magical Produce Powers of the same name. Where calling himself a “maker of miracles” on that song was obvious sarcasm, this album would serve as the proper confrontation to the real maker of miracles, which is God. The sound kept the core of bass, keyboards, and atmosphere, but also added guitar and ukulele. Each song was intended to sound as different as possible from eachother but still keeping a common enough sound so that it felt cohesive. Once Eerie had run out of gas, he ended up in a forest. He started talking to himself until it spiraled into a full on breakdown. This breakdown is what the bulk of the album covers, but it kicks off with My Brain Made Me Do It, arguably his best song to this day. The story discusses different perspectives, taking personal and practical application to the themes discussed in Magical Produce Powers and following them to a logical conclusion, a conclusion that demands a response. The album closes with a very real glimpse to the man behind the music with The Richest Man Alive, a song that describes why he does what he does, and concludes the story on a note where Eerie decides not to give up. The album trails off into a pensive but hopeful instrumental outro that leads into what would come next.
Cold Shower, 2020
Cold Shower began shortly after Maker of Miracles was finished. One thing Eerie laments about Maker of Miracles was the rushed and sloppy vocal performances on most of those songs. One reason for that rush was an overwhelming interest in moving on from that project to start another. By this time, Eerie had been working with drummer Eric Johnson on a project called Hubert’s Quill. Said project consisted of Eerie playing guitar and singing while Johnson played drums. The focus on singing and playing guitar had a major influence on him at this time and he wanted to show more of what he had learned about skill and mixing at this point which were things that made Maker of Miracles seem obsolete already. Eerie really wanted to push himself with this one. Was he ready to produce something on his own that did justice to his childhood influences? Spoiler alert, no, but the attempt did accomplish the goal of showcasing how much his skills improved between Magical Produce Powers and the release of Cold Shower.
Cold Shower was meant to be a full length album. It was going to be a much darker look into Eerie’s mind, navigating family issues and satisfying anger that he held against various people. This project also highlighted a fork in the road for his life. He allowed himself to be challenged on matters of politics and religion quite a lot up until this point and he had begun to challenge his own views on these things as well. The fictional deconversion story depicted in Goats 2 was slowly becoming a very real possibility. Eerie had also become involved with an adult subculture community within an online platform as well. This consumed much of his time. Was what he was taught about sexuality wrong this whole time? He was happier and more confident than he had ever been, which seemed contradictory to what he was taught in church. This album explored this struggle to reconcile these things. Musically, the project proved to be more ambitious than his skill level would actually allow. While a whole album’s worth if lyrics had been written, only four of these songs would be recorded.
During the process of working on this album, setting up an account on DistroKid, moving to a new apartment, preparing a CD release and lyric videos for Maker of Miracles, Eerie had grown past a lot of the anger that fueled most of the lyrics of Cold Shower. In the interest of releasing what was finished and a new disinterest in most of the songs, he made the tough call to release Cold Shower as an EP with the four songs he had already finished. This would prove to be the best decision. The EP opens with “Tone of Voice,” a song that describes a vulnerable moment of reflection. The lyrics are barely metaphorical, “don’t you talk to me in that tone of voice, I’m still drunk.” This was a very real and unfortunately common happenstance for Eerie by this point in his life. Drink too much, get called out for his behavior while he was drunk, get in his feelings about it, wishing that people would at least show some compassion or charity in their rebukes toward him. Not everyone is ready to make difficult changes in his or her life in order to recover or heal. In the meantime, speak kindly if you want to help them. Such was Eerie’s plea in this song and frankly the whole EP. It closes with a track heavily inspired by early 90s industrial. The title track, Cold Shower, goes back to the formula of Goats and Goats 2, a fitting call back. Basic but intense riffs accompanied by readings of Scripture, voice acting, and a variety of liberal talking points. Each sample going back and forth from one another to depict the inner dialogue Eerie was struggling with. Effectively putting Eerie in the same position as the figurative character written for Goats 1 and 2. He wasn’t writing a fictional story this time, it was real. He knew he had to respond to these things and he could only keep running from this fact for so long.
Doom Fish Records 