Mark Stewart's New Album 'The Fateful Symmetry' Is Out Today On Mute
NEW ALBUM THE FATEFUL SYMMETRY
OUT NOW ON MUTE
Photo credit: Chiara Meatelli & Dominic Lee
“As the songs swoop from industrial disco to piano balladry, Stewart is a steadfast, dramatic and charming grand dame – as commanding as he ever was as frontman of The Pop Group, and as sentimentally wounded as a torch singer.” - The Wire
“The Fateful Symmetry finds this political/music-making radical at his most approachable and reflective.” - 4/5* MOJO
“Mark Stewart is my hero” - Daddy G (Massive Attack)
“A fearsome vocalist & unbelievably exciting frontman to whom I am deeply indebted” -Nick Cave
“Bristol would be a very different place artistically & politically if it had not been for Mark’s influence on all of us” - Geoff Barrow (Portishead)
Mark Stewart’s eighth solo album, completed shortly before his untimely passing, The Fateful Symmetry, is out now on limited edition red vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute.
Listen to “This Is The Rain” HERE. A lustrous, tender ballad co-produced with Pop Group comrade Gareth Sager, the track also features Bristol cohort Janine Rainforth (Maximum Joy) on backing vocals. Here Stewart composes a poetic, Blakean hymn to renewal; an unabashed song of hope amid contemporary turbulence: “a world upside down and backwards / this is the rain that washes and heals in glory”
Listen to the album HERE.
Last week, a striking new stencil appeared in Bristol - a life-sized image of Mark Stewart at the docks, by Banksy’s Girl with a Pierced Eardrum. The graffitied stencil is the work of local artist Stewy, whose work appears in “psycho-geographic” locations, somewhere intrinsically linked to the subject.
In conjunction with the release of the album, two events take place in July in London and in Bristol. Both events will exhibit Mark Stewart and Peter Harris’ collaborative BombArt series, described by Stewart as "an embassy for the imagination". The events will also feature unseen art pieces and archival material by Mark Stewart, as well as previously unseen photos by legendary Bristol photographer Beezer and more.
London’s Farsight Gallery will be hosting the exhibition at their central London space on 4 Flitcroft Street WC2H 8DJ from July 16-18 (July 16 from 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. and July 17-18 from 12:00 p.m. - 6:00p.m. – free entry). Sign up for tickets for the Private View on July 16 HERE.
Bristol will then host the exhibition at the “Mad Max meets The Good Life” setting of Rockaway Park as part of a weekend of musical and artistic homages to Stewart from July 25-27. Musicians from Bristol taking part are DJ Milo [aka DJ Nature], Smith & Mighty, Pinch, Tessa Pollitt of The Slits and Janine Rainforth of Maximum Joy, with more to be confirmed. The event will be on a donation basis, with proceeds going to Help Bristol’s Homeless charity, whose flagship project converts shipping containers to a secure accommodation for the unhoused. More information on the event HERE.
The album features the tracks “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime (Bébe Durmiendo Cumbia Bootleg),” “Neon Girl” and “Memory Of You”. The melodica-driven, Cumbia-influenced rhythm provided by producer Elijah Minnelli on Stewart’s heavyweight rework of The Korgis 1980 hit “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” transforms the original into a masterstroke of soundsystem militancy. Mixed by studio acolyte and On-U Sound originator Adrian Sherwood, it’s a remake steeped in Stewart’s transformative methods. “Neon Girl” was co-produced with Youth (Killing Joke) and features backing vocals by longtime affiliate Gina Birch (The Raincoats). On it, Stewart’s eloquent, singular lyricism is as prescient as always and evermore poignant now: “His arms were too short to box with God (sorry the irony’s lost on me)”. On the album opener “Memory of You,” also co-produced with Youth and featuring backing vocals by Hollie Cook, Stewart unfurls a propulsive, post-disco torch song, a surging neo-noir of yearning vocals (“I could’ve wrote a love song”) and sleek, imposing synthesis, representing one of Stewart’s most dramatic and affecting performances.
Across an illustrious career of pioneering music with The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & Maffia and as a solo artist, Stewart has produced a seminal body of work, galvanized by the DIY ideals of punk, radical politics, protest movements, theory, philosophy, technology, art and poetry. With The Fateful Symmetry, Stewart’s abiding legacy as a “revered countercultural musician” (The Guardian) is sustained, with an album as fearless and visionary as his best work.
Testifying to Stewart’s prolific, unrelenting ingenuity and signifying one of his most intimate, empowering statements, The Fateful Symmetry is an astonishingly expressive and innovative record, a fierce and beautiful manifesto for a better world. The inimitable, titanic Mark Stewart, never normalized, always extraordinary.
Purchase or stream The Fateful Symmetry HERE.
The Fateful Symmetry track listing:
1. Memory Of You2. Neon Girl
3. This Is The Rain
4. Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime (Bébe Durmiendo Cumbia Bootleg)
5. Stable Song
6. Twilight’s Child
7. Crypto Religion
8. Blank Town
9. A Long Road
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