Chris Stewart returns with his synth-wave project Black Marble, announcing that he will release his second full-length, Its Immaterial on September 30th via Ghostly International. Stewart has relocated from the East Coast to Los Angeles, as well as finding a new home on Ghostly, and the upcoming record reflects these transitions–and their difficulties. Discussing the album, he explains:
“It’s a lot of psychic turmoil about time, place, and the dissatisfaction that comes with being young and not having control over place, or being old and not having control over time. The record is filled with characters trying to convince themselves, and others, to change, or to see things differently, or to come along with them somewhere. Its that moment of wanting, between knowing and doing, but frozen in time”.
“Iron Lung” is the first single off Its Material, and right from the beginning bass line there’s something immediately familiar in the best ways about this track. While there was often a delicate fragility and cool mist that distinguished the tracks on Black Marble’s 2012 LP A Different Arrangement, as well as that year’s EP offering Weight Against the Door–both out on Hardly Art–there’s a quiet confidence and immediacy to this new cut.
This is still Black Marble, though, and even though the West Coast provides sunnier climes, a tenebrous mood still prevails. Stewart’s vocals do seem closer in the mix now. So, rather than sounding like they come from some subterranean level, on this track it seems they come from inside “Iron Lung”‘s negatively pressurized chamber.
