Mark Stewart And The Maffia's classic album from 1983, Learning To Cope With Cowardice, has been reissued by Mute along with the Lost Tapes. In my humble (!) opinion this is one of the best albums ever made (so it stands in my personal desert island box alongside the likes of Ornette Coleman's The Shape Of Jazz To Come and Lee Perry's Blackboard Jungle, company which I'm sure Mark would be proud to share space with).
Avant Jazz and Dub informed first The Pop Group and thereafter Mark Stewart And The Maffia in spirit and sound. On Learning To Cope With Cowardice engineer Adrian Sherwood was at the top of his mixing game and Stewart in his prime as apocalyptic MC. Despair and defiance stalk these streets where 'control units are laid out geometrically'. The busier your are the less you see, indeed. But for all that can be read as an anarchist call-to-arms here, the flip side is a fierce call to arm yourself against timidity, doubt and the kind of despair which results in living a life of going to do and dying with nothing done. The Lost Tapes are a treat, fierce twists on established themes giving more space in which sounds clash and reverberate. Essential release. Available here.
I've been blending texts today, accompanied by Mark Stewart and Sherwood's sonic mixing, possibly even influenced by them to some extent. The words are from The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. This is a print, not a digital creation. Thanks for dropping by.
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| Condemned Man, RTomens, 2019 |
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