Sacred Bones Records (label)
26 October 2021 (released)
26 October 2021
Black Marble is one-man machine, Chris Stewart. ‘Fast Idol’ is his fourth-long player, his second for Sacred Bones.
The most consistent, insistent and persistent feature of this album is Stewart’s com/dis - passionate, robotic, monosyllabic, monotonous (with none of the negative connotations of this term) vocals. Droll, almost hushed, whispered intonations are threaded throughout and caught between wanting to tell you something as a matter of urgency and then stopping halfway leaving you hanging, waiting.
Additionally, the analogue synthesisers and protean drumbeats (re)construct an audible bridge between the past and the present, deftly borrowing from yesterday’s tomorrow and anticipating delving into the future’s remnants.
Like many other practitioners of this particular pop-epoch (also out this week is East Coast min/maximalists Xeno and Oaklander’s similarly space-age ‘Vi/deo’) these sleek sounds stir the memories of a fertile pop-cultural period once pregnant with promise and progress, the prospect of a techno-topia dream yet to curdle into a dystopic prism-prison.
These are electronic sounds that feel equally coolly warm and icily enticing. Taking schematic inspiration and thematic perspiration from science-fiction visions of mediated, fractured connections, atomised individuals striving for belonging and community through the tactile touch of an-other, yet merely existing in cyber-networked environments of fibre-optic panopticons offering illusions of freedom behind invisible bars, the physical and psychic ruins of the apocalypse the last vestiges of a world that once was.
However, it’s not ALL barren black and bleak. At times evocative of upbeat compatriots Generationals, French firstwave minimalist-pop pioneers like Martin Dupont and 20th century British Invaders Mk II such as Depeche Mode and A Flock of Seagulls, these songs signpost paths to better days, expertly mapping history to boldly chart new frontiers.
'Fast Idol's cover has (presumably) Stewart’s hand immersed barely into (quick)sand, depth-testing and demarcating, with a watch face pointing downwards which (may) signifie time (r)elapsing and or collapsing. A cryptic image for an elliptic album
