The Fateful Symmetry, Mark Stewart (Mute)
Mark Stewart was a William Blake for the 21st century. Discuss.* Well, he certainly left his mark on dub-inflected post-punk-culture and embraced a certain edgy paranoia and grand sweeping suspicion of organised politics whilst offering grand denouncements and critiques and embracing studio trickery and d.i.y. studio trickery.
I remember the late great musician and owner of Sentrax Records John Everall coming back from making a musical pilgrimage to see Stewart shocked by his scissors and sellotape approach to tapes along with the the obscure pamphlets and samizdat publications piled high and gathering dust in Stewart’s bedsit. These were, of course, what fuelled The Pop Group’s ragged and excoriating music which took on everything from apartheid to religion via complicity and oppression.
Since then, Stewart (and later on a reformed Pop Group) have embraced remix culture and the digital studio to make a solid body of album releases that draw upon electro, dub, funk and rock to continue his questioning, commenting and mystical pronouncements. From his deconstructive dub mix of ‘Jerusalem, back in 1982 – with choirs, freeform ranting and last night of the Proms chanting all in the mix, possibly with a brief ELP sample – to this posthumous album release and its declaration that WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE VOID, Stewart’s music has been full of cathartic sloganeering and anger.
And yet, The Fateful Symmetry is also an album of emotional love songs and forgiveness. He’s (thankfully) no Kylie, and songs such as ‘This Is The Rain’ have saw-edge guitars in the mix underneath the mellow tune, whilst the opposite occurs in ‘The Twilight Child’. Here it is an orchestra that holds the main theme and tune whilst voices swirl and echo above it, Stewart’s lyrics twisted into white noise here, sandpapering syllables to the edge of comprehension.
But the album’s opener and closer are both more straightforward exercises in melancholia. ‘Memory of You’, which starts the album, maybe feature a breakneck electric pulse pulling it along, but it is a journey into being consumed with a past love affair, whilst the final track, ‘A Long Road’, would not feel out of place on a Nick Cave album with its echoing piano and languid strings.
Like all the best Mark Stewart albums (and this is one of them), the listener – or this listener anyway – is pulled this way and that, energized, confused, bewildered, absorbed and disturbed by the details, the rawness, Stewart’s capacity to surprise and challenge listeners, to reinvent and combine contemporary music for himself and for us. Stewart is and was no William Blake, but he will continue to be as contemporary, relevant and – I suspect – as neglected as Blake was and still is by the general public. The Fateful Symmetry is a fitting last gift to anyone who has ears to hear.
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Rupert Loydell
*In case you’re wondering, the phrase ‘a fateful symmetry’ is a quote from William Blakes ‘poem ‘Tyger’.
Mark Stewart – Memory of You
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