Black Marble hummed to life in the fall of 2012, switched on by the early aughts New York City synthwave revival. Today, fourteen years on and seven releases later, Chris Stewart continues to make records hunched over machines that warm to the touch when turned on and need to be coaxed to stay in tune. His albums, written, recorded, and delivered solely by Stewart, remain singular visions, with songs that seek to convey a diffuse pastiche, now shaped by a desire to wrap the whole thing in a message that speaks to where he’s been and where he wants to go.His latest vision, Life in Small Spaces, sees Stewart comment on the music industry and his role within it, reflecting on how underground music has changed over time, and how a blueprint for keeping things simple and being true to oneself is the only ideal for living in this complicated landscape.Stewart's desire to span time with his ideals intact shows up in the songwriting, which retains the project’s pop-sensibilities while adding new tricks to the bag. Life in Small Spaces trades walls of synths for more guitar, drawing on early American left of the dial college radio staccato guitar lines recalling Pylon, The Necessaries, and R Stevie Moore, and live drum samples, a nod to Wire’s simple metronomic style. Stewart explains the reason for the change as a way to “create this chime-y hypnotic quality. Like a radio dial that is between two stations.”Visually, Life in Small Spaces features Stewart alone on the cover in a sparse room, surrounded with an eruption of confetti — an image that reflects a self-contained world that may appear small, bleak and cluttered, but is fully his own. A fitting frame for a record that embraces limitation as a form of clarity, and one that tells the story of choosing a simple life, giving up stability and comfort for an existence of bold and engaging connections. This further reflects Black Marble’s confidence in not only his artistry, but the community that has grown and evolved around the project over the years. “[Life in Small Spaces] is what I want to talk about as an artist. It's where I am at this exact moment and I know I'm not alone in how I feel.”This sentiment isn’t a disclaimer. It’s the point. Life in Small Spaces, with its introspective lyricism disguised neatly within Black Marble’s radiant musicality, is an earnest analysis of the pressures that shape artists. It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.
