Shares new single & video "Preoccupation"! Album 'Fast Idol' due Oct 22nd via Sacred Bones.
Black Marble aka Chris Stewart shares the heartwarming video for the brightly arpeggiated new single “Preoccupation” which appears on the upcoming album Fast Idol, due out October 22, 2021 on Sacred Bones Records. Black Marble is set to tour the UK October as well as next spring.
“Preoccupation” is the beating heart of Fast Idol, wherein Stewart captures the loneliness of Ray Bradbury’s atomic-era sci-fi and the apocalyptic but revolutionary spirit of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, conjuring ambivalent scenes of an empty world and the comfort to be found in a shared humanity in lyrics that state: “What is gone only people and time/ standing tall covered cities and signs. Well I’ve wandered the west side and I’ve laughed at your broken roads but this feeling of preoccupation makes life whole.”
Black Marble worked with mixed-media collective Crack Cloud on the video for “Preoccupation,” ultimately embracing the song’s themes by running with a tenderly meta approach which resulted in a video within a video, beautifully capturing various intersections of creative pursuit and camaraderie; joyfully embracing the process over the product. These notes provided by Chris Stewart (which it so happens, appear in the video at the start via projector) served as a starting point:
“A kind of revolutionary spirit but back to nature post apocalyptic motif is what ‘Preoccupation’ is about. Sort of a return to barbarism, reclamation by nature over the state and the protagonists are observers of this going on and narrating it from an anthropological point of view...So anything that hints at these motifs but in your own way. "What is on the way?" is just questioning what is coming specifically but knowing what's coming generally. I counted twice 1,2,3,4, but I reversed it, so it's counting down - or counting up rather, but in reverse.”
