Black Marble
Meet Black Marble
Buckle up we’ve got a lovely synth pop project to sink your teeth into. Black Marble delivers a sound evocative of the good old days (shout out New Order), utilizing a lo-fi production.
Helmed by Chris Stewart, this project mixes in hazy, introverted lyrics to create some bouncy yet broody tunes.
Below, we discuss his painterly approach to music, his formative advertising years, and shine some light on the LA / NY debate.
Check out his wise words and give his tunes a listen. Go buy a cheap drum kit and start making sounds. Any sounds. You’ll thank us later.
How has life in LA shaped your artistic process? Can you run me through an example of the creation of a song?
The main difference is that I don’t work out of my house out here and because it’s cheaper to live out here I don’t share a studio with a million other bands, meaning I can almost turn this into a 9-5, which was my goal in moving out here. Ultimately being raised a conservative Southern Catholic boy, I kind of feel a natural sense of guilt for not having a 9-5 job, like I’m somehow shirking my life responsibility even though I didn’t really like my job all that much. I think in some way I was excited to be able to turn this into a 9-5 because it made me feel like I was taking this more seriously. Now I’m doing something better for me, and ultimately for other people – not that I feel like my music is changing people’s lives but I do think that me doing this instead of working some kind of cubicle advertising job in Manhattan, spitballing slogans for toothpaste is more useful to others. For whatever reason, I had this nagging feeling that I’m doing something wrong by quitting doing that. I have to check in with myself and recognize that it’s not just better for me but for others, too.
Also, having a studio of my own makes me feel like I’m being more serious about it and I can quiet that side of my conscience – to give up having a good job to sort of sleep in and watch Judge Judy or something. You having a good job isn’t helping anybody out. I guess in terms of gross national product it’s good if you want to think of it like that but like… nobody gives a fuck. So the fact that it’s easier to live out here and it’s a little cheaper, I can kind of treat it like a job which makes me feel like I’m being serious about it which makes me feel better.
I also can’t help but feel like it’s making my work better. Turn it into a vocation - it’s important to try to do that if you’re lucky enough to be able to. My artistic approach is less like a band and more like an artist, like a painter, since I’m the only one who does it. If you go to a gallery everything you see is made by an individual person, so my music is like that, one person’s ideas. It takes so long for me to write albums since I’m doing it alone so I find that having all that time is really helpful. I can sit there for five hours and not really do anything but the thirty minutes where I had a good idea and got something down was worth the five hours where I was just sitting there. When people ask me how the move has changed my music, I feel like they want me to be like, “I went to the beach and I looked at a bird and I listened to a cockatoo and I went home and wrote something that sounded like…” I don’t know. I don’t feel like the physical space of has impacted my process. I don’t think there’s any sort of residue of place on my music, it’s very much my head. It’s all cooked in there from shit that I was thinking from when I was 12.
People continually draw connections between your work and that of the smiths, new order, joy division, etc... Which band or artist inspires you that might surprise people? Which contemporary artists do you find the most exciting?
I got the idea for my bass sound from Television Personalities, I loved how it sounded. Once I learned more about production I realized no engineer would even intentionally try to get an instrument to sound that way. From a technical perspective, it’s pretty terrible, but the more I learned about these more underground artists from that time, I came to understand that you could go down to a corner shop and pay a small fee to “record your band,” which probably consisted of some low-quality mics and recording equipment. Left in the hands of an inexperienced band, it would likely come out even worse than usual. But kids would use these facilities in those days to record demos to try and get a deal – some of these old tapes floating around of these now considered “seminal” acts were recorded like this.
Really it’s nothing magical, it’s some really terrible equipment being used by people that had no idea what they were doing, but I still loved the distorted and tin-can sounding quality of some of that stuff. To me, it sounded like the sound of some young people excited to make music and not afraid to do it themselves. Now, everyone does it themselves, but in those days I think it was more daunting and interesting to have that kind of an ethos when there wasn't really anyone around to tell you what to do or how to do it.
How does your background in advertising impact your current work?
The answer is probably not as fun as people think but it is sort of unusual. I had a few stressful advertising jobs in Manhattan and when I was younger and I often thought of myself, as young people do, that I was sort of better than everybody. That I was living in this cool place and knew about all this cool stuff and those office-y job people were really square, and I would go in there and blow everybody away and it wouldn’t even be that big of a deal. I’d go be a designer in order to make money and do all these other things in my life and that was going to take 10% of my effort. When I got into that world, however, I realized that maybe not everyone in there is the most cultured person but they’re fairly intelligent, they’re pretty talented, and they’re very serious about what they’re doing and they’re doing it to the best of their ability. It was a bit of an eye-opener.
From that whole world, I learned how to use a calendar, respond to emails within five minutes, be thoughtful in emails and not be rude to people. The whole way you have to act to be a good little capitalist is a useful skill that you kind of can’t learn unless you’re thrown into the deep end of that world. I think that what I got out of it was how to be a professional artist who could do all this without a manager or a label looking over my shoulder. Nobody really tells me what to do or how to do it because I assume they get a sense that I can handle this end of things on my own.
I forget where I read this somewhere but someone was talking about successful people draw on experiences they’ve had from different backgrounds, creating a synergy that allows them to succeed. For me, having a background in these stressful jobs where you need to have your shit together has allowed me to kind of be this one-man-band who can make the music, do all this design, work on the videos (because I went to school for visual arts), so I have the whole visual and musical world down. I can also not miss interviews and get back to people and handle booking agents and book venues, I can excel at all that. Everything I’ve done has led me to this point where I can stay afloat as this one-man-band kind of thing. You will so get ripped off if you don’t have these skills as a creative, especially in the booking world if you don’t understand numbers you will completely get fucked over. The whole thing is set up to fuck you over so if you know how to defend yourself and you’re detail-oriented enough to understand numbers, you can kind of break-even in this way where you win some/lose some versus getting ripped off and paying a manager 20% of gross no matter how much they’re doing.
What's one thing you miss about life in NYC and one thing you're glad you don't have to deal with anymore?
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with constantly being at the mercy of a huge throng of people. Out here everybody’s late all the time, nobody seems to care and nobody apologizes for it, almost like time doesn’t exist out here. Whereas in New York, everything’s by the book and if you’re ten minutes late it seems like the whole worlds started without you. But there are all of these factors working against you, like the train could be broken or they’ll be shooting a film or a million different things could be keeping you from where you need to go. I was very frustrated in New York at the end because of the logistics of having to get around and feeling like people are always in the way.
It’s interesting because out here it took me a while to get used to the notion that people don’t really seem to care about the time that much. At first, I kind of had that annoying New Yorker attitude where I was waiting in line and tapping my foot and being really annoying, thinking how the fuck could it possibly take someone this long to order. Over time that all sort of melted away, now I’m at peace with it. At first, I took zero responsibility for my actions, I thought “these people are fucking idiots and it’s all their fault” and then over time you start to feel like “it doesn’t make sense for me to be the only person that’s mad all the time.” You then sort of learn to chill out or it happens naturally.
What's the last song you had stuck in your head?
Strange Powers by Magnetic Fields. I was going through their whole discography yesterday they’re really good.
What kind of sandwich would your music be?
Ham and swiss on rye.
Interviewer: Any dressing or…
Chris: No, no dressing, so you’re wanting a little more. It’s pretty good but I wish it had something and you look at the deli guy and he’s like “nope we don’t have anything else.” I think it’s cool to not be upfront with everything. I try to keep it a little undercover with my music I think that draws people in a little bit more. It’s just the old art school cliché of denying a certain amount of access to people will make them a little more interested. The first record I made, the lyrics were pretty much unintelligible, but I spend a lot of time working on them. I thought it would be cool if you really had to strain yourself to hear it, because I knew people would kind of mishear things and your own brain would fill in the blanks, which is probably more interesting. Have you ever heard a song and you thought the lyrics were one thing and you really liked it but then you learned that they were something else that’s a little stupid and you didn’t like the song anymore? I don’t know if that makes it a ham and swiss on rye but I feel like it.
What colors would you use to describe your music?
Definitely red, blue, and yellow, sort of like childlike, like Bauhaus-y, simplistic. I feel like there’s also something intentionally simplistic about my music and those are the most “what they are” colors. Maybe not necessarily childlike but I think in the way that there’s something very to the point and open. I know I just got done talking about intentionally obscuring things, but underneath all that I am trying to be fairly universal. A lot of the lyrics I talk about, I’m trying to talk about things in a very basic way.
Final comments?
I’m really excited because I just learned how to trigger light via midi, which is a very fun thing. Midi is a protocol/programming language for synthesizers that was invented in the ‘70s by, I believe, the bass player from the band Boston, which is a really weird factoid. It’s a very simple language that allows you to talk to your synthesizer and tell it what to play. It’s really withstood the test of time, so a synthesizer you would buy from Guitar Center today has the midi in it the same way a Juno 106 from 1984 has, so it’s really cool that it has withstood the test of time.
Anyway, you can also use it to trigger things besides synths, but you have to buy a certain kind of box that can receive midi messages that then turns a light on and off. You can also write midi notes but instead of telling the synth, it’s telling your lights when to turn on and off. You can set up a whole light show for your set from your sequences that will trigger all these lights – it’s almost limitless what you can do with it. Hopefully, that will be coming to a city near you. I don’t know if I have enough time do to it by the time I go to Europe, but hopefully in the spring, maybe April, which will be the span of the whole tour. I can definitely see other applications for it.