On the Rise
Xav Clarke

Fossil Forest – the fourth solo album from the British artist and composer – started life as a cartoon, the tale of a schoolgirl who falls through time and lands in a dying civilization begging to be saved.

The animated series never got made and instead shapeshifted into an album stitched together with bass recorders, toy synths, and lo-fi tape hiss. The result is a sonic terrarium: equal parts folklore, philosophy, and fuzz.

Clarke isn’t trying to make perfect songs. In fact, he hopes they wobble a bit. “Shows should feel like they could fall apart at any moment,” he says. “That’s how life is.” His anti-perfectionism is a kind of radical honesty. It’s a belief that soul trumps polish, and that tape hiss might carry more emotional truth than an expensive mic. On Fossil Forest, he leans all the way into that ethos: vocals are often guide takes, instruments are slightly out of tune, and meaning comes in strange shapes. As he puts it: “Nothing is real, and that’s okay.”

Clarke doesn’t make music the way most musicians do. There’s no spreadsheet, no sacred demo folder, no gearhead worship of plug-ins. If something sounds good on a toy microphone taped to a shoebox, that’s the take. If the vocal was recorded as a guide and it makes him feel something, it stays. “I’m the most anti-perfectionist person ever,” he says, not apologetically but with a kind of quiet glee. “I don’t rehearse. I don’t want anyone to know the parts too well. Life’s fragile. Why pretend it’s not?”

That fragility is more than a metaphor—it’s sonically alive. On Fossil Forest, some of the most emotionally charged moments are tangled in tape hiss, or teetering slightly off tempo. He recorded parts of it on a cassette machine with a microphone that only works with the device itself, causing pitch warbles and strange speed shifts. “Every time you re-record something, you lose the energy of the room,” he says. “That’s why I keep it messy sometimes.” To Clarke, the moment matters more than the take. Even when it’s imperfect, or especially when it is.

This instinct didn’t come from some music school ideology but from van tours and backstage green rooms, where he’d write tracks in snatches between soundcheck and stage time. In fact, it was this musical openness that brought him his first paid gig, making him a professional musician back in 2016.

Years ago, Clarke worked as a runner and production assistant for studios in London. One day, while toying around on his ukulele, one of the show’s producers thought his sound was perfect for the show and he asked him to write a song. That song ended up being “Weird Like You And Me”, a fan favourite for a now cult-classic show—The Amazing World of Gumball.

Since then Clarke has carved out a career composing for animation, with his work in shows such as Elliott from Earth, The Heroic Quest of the Valiant Prince Ivandoe, and Wolfboy and the Everything Factory.

“People liked my music for animation because it had a looser, rougher edge,” he tells me. “It came from a green room, not a conservatoire.” That energy has never left; you can hear it in the tape flutter of “None of It’s Yours Anyway,” in the looseness of his live band, and in the way he describes his creative life: not a career path, but a long, shambolic adventure.

“There’s no master plan,” he says. “Just a life of moving forward. Writing music in rooms. Meeting strange instruments. Laughing at tape hiss.” He talks about it like a scavenger hunt more than a process, like the reward is the weird moment something half-broken accidentally makes sense. Even his dream guitar he recently acquired—a battered old Silvertone—is an accomplice in this. “It’s out of tune in the same way I am,” he says.

But underneath all that whimsy is a deep belief: that a song doesn’t have to be perfect to be true. That first takes carry fingerprints. That wobbles can hold meaning. “It’s not laziness,” he says. “It’s soul.”

When Fossil Forest was still a cartoon, Clarke had the whole thing mapped out: a girl on a school trip to the Dorset coast finds a fossil, touches it, and gets pulled into the past, into a lost civilization on the brink of extinction. They’ve summoned her to help them survive – but she’s just a kid, and she’s got her own life to get back to. “I couldn’t stop thinking about that idea,” he says. “But I realised I might never make the cartoon. A loose concept album felt more realistic.” So he turned the world into sound.

That’s how Fossil Forest began: as a parallel reality, flickering between folk tale and ecological warning. Clarke loaded the album with strange textures to match—no electric guitars, just bass recorders, Japanese koto synths, and soft, woodsy acoustics. “We kind of made this soft rule,” he says. “Let’s just not use electric guitars. The whole thing needed a different sound world.”

Some tracks came directly from the imagined cartoon. Others morphed into personal myth. “Skyscraper,” the first song he wrote for the record, is about moving to Bristol after years in quiet, remote places. But he didn’t want it to be a song about anxiety. “I wanted to romanticise the city,” he says. “Cities can be natural forces too, not just concrete anxiety.” The track was also inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s Sunflower Sutra, “a poem about a dirty, black sunflower. Its themes are so human and full of grace.” That image, wedged against a skyline, gave him the spark.

Even “Fields of Sunflowers Black in the Sky” started as a real life experience driving through southern Spain during a drought. “There were these black sunflowers, just nodding together and dying,” he says. “It was beautiful and terrifying.” The apocalyptic image stuck, so he turned it into music. But in his world, even dying plants have a kind of magic.

Or take “None of It’s Yours Anyway,” a song full of spiralling, slightly stoned existentialism. “It’s one of those dumb epiphanies,” he says. “Like, whoa! Days of the week aren’t real, man.” He recorded the vocals on a tape recorder, just to match the feeling. “The speed was all wrong. We had to chop it into place like a little jigsaw of thought.”

This is how Clarke works: real moments—grief, confusion, moving cities, seeing whales from a window—get alchemised into surreal objects. A cartoon becomes an album. A sunflower becomes a soul. “Skyscraper, recorders, sunflowers, whales, it all blurs together,” he says. “That’s Fossil Forest.”

That’s why he doesn’t separate music for adults and kids. While he's scored award-winning animated series for children, the songs are never cloying or simplified. “I’ve always hated the idea that there’s music for kids and music for adults,” he says. “Kids have heavy feelings. Adults have silly feelings. Why separate them?”

On Fossil Forest, he applies the same logic: there’s grief in it, especially on “Bluebells,” a mind-bending song about scattering the ashes of his late dad, but it never collapses into sentimentality. “Losing someone is wild,” he says. “Sadness, joy, confusion, transformation, it all comes at once.” He didn’t want to make a dirge. He wanted to make something that felt like hanging out with his dad again. “Not sad, but joyful and weird.”

That emotional logic carries through every corner of the record. The vocals often weren’t re-recorded, “they felt too honest to replace.” The instruments weren’t corrected. The ideas weren’t overthought. He chased the feeling, not the frame. “Making music isn’t just about documenting a sound,” he says. “It’s about capturing a moment before it vanishes. It’s like catching smoke.”

Xav Clarke isn’t trying to convince you of anything. He’s just out here making things that might fall apart—dreamscapes that bend slightly in the sun, songs that start as brain spirals and end up as eulogies or cartoons or neither. He’s already halfway through his next project—a German-language album. No one asked for it – so of course he's making it.