Some songs drift ephemeral like fireflies in dark-summer-skies before street lamps buzz and blend bioluminescence into brightness; others never fade, and when the stars are perfectly aligned and sound waves vibrate the eardrums just right: they last forever, crystallizing within the subconscious subjectives of day-to-day-life; these songs take on the properties of all five senses: the dim orange lighting accompanying the musky smell of a garage-turned-office; weak plush of a thin-hospital-blanket; or the taste of cheap Maruchan you had for dinner the last three nights. Without realizing it, these songs have crept their way into the deepest recesses of your psyche, composing the soundtrack of your life.

Mom always said it was Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back,’ playing in the living room in black and white on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when she was sixteen, waiting for her high school sweetheart to buzz the bell before their first date. The same song started serendipitously after sucking-down milkshakes at the diner, minutes before the first kiss near the Pontiac that facilitated the drive home; the die cast, the psychic etching ensured. Fifty-three years later and that diner’s derelict but the music is still as clear as 1969.

Musical Imprintation can’t be forced – it just happens – and the less you think about it, the more likely it is to happen; the music is part of you now, whether you like it or not.

Most recently, for me: it was Black Marble’s ‘Self Guided Tours’ off their 2016 album “It’s Immaterial”; a song twinkling with starry guitar bits over delicately oscillating synthesizers; all innocuous until sub-machine-gun-snares of the drum-machine-persuasion burst into the mix accompanied by a second stuttering guitar line resembling neuroscientists’ attempt at capturing the very same snapping-synapse-sensation of ‘creating psychic-song-etchings’ in a test tube; this is all complimented by a simple bass line with just enough bounce and groove to be catchy; the vocals, low disembodied incantations attempting to summon specters of 80s-past – “you’re the owner of a lonely heart” – float somewhere in the ether alongside quivering synths coloring the choruses. The lyrical content could be about anything, but for me it’s about driving to the Hot Dog Shack to get my wife and I something to eat less than 12-hours after the birth of my son, Arthur.

Merely 48-hours earlier, April 25th, 2023: I was sitting in my dimly lit garage-turned-office with a leaky-water-heater writing an essay on the classic tactical role-playing game “Tactics Ogre” for my virgin computer-games-website ‘oncomputer.games,’ listening to – among other things – “It’s Immaterial” by Black Marble. I was on week-one of six-week-paternity-leave from one of those cartoony-soul-crushing-sales-jobs; the paternity-leave started a week early because my wife was way-overdue and missed two due-dates already; Arthur clearly didn’t want to come out. The next day we had an appointment at the hospital to get my wife induced, or more accurately: our lives changed forever.

And that’s what we did. It was a nice hospital room in the maternity-wing with bright-white-lights that I immediately adjusted to the dimmest possible setting, big windows overlooking a courtyard with flowing curtains that I promptly drew to keep the light out, a wall-mounted and very-ancient-CRT receiving high-definition cable through a coaxial that I immediately tuned to whatever channel played the bass line from Seinfeld (the TV setup, as you can imagine, was true-low-def; the mismatched input-output-combo created terrible picture quality with fuzzy-lines-forever and malformed-aspect-ratios consisting of very-large-black-bars-baked-in). There was also a small blue couch with hard cushions and thin blankets that I slept on a few times before realizing that it folded out into a full-sized-bed.

Without delving into the biologicals-of-birthing (something I will likely never write about), the induction was a success; a beautiful screaming baby boy with a full head of red hair was born on April 27th, 2023 – my wife insists the hair gave her heartburn and after we cleaned him off, we promptly styled that heartburn-hair into a fauxhawk and gave him lots of kisses on the head. My wife held him close, skin-to-skin, and he was ours forevermore. That night, he slept by our side in a transparent bassinet; we woke every few hours to a nurse checking on us and piercing-newborn-cries quickly solved by warm bottles of formula. 

We didn’t have a care in the world; working was irrelevant and mortgage payments were immaterial; nothing mattered except what was right there in that spacious hospital room.

We had to stay at the hospital for a few days, primarily so the doctors could test Arthur’s bilirubin-levels (or something) and make sure my wife was fit enough to go home. Naturally, a day after my son’s birth, both my wife and I wanted something-other-than-hospital-food so I decided to take a drive to the local Hot Dog Shack and pick something up; I ordered two large fries and a plain hotdog and she ordered some-sort-of-sausage-thing; so, I packed my things – wallet and keys – and left the hospital for the first time in two days; the double-doors opened for me with infrared sensors (or: Jedi Mind Tricks); the harsh sunlight burned my retinas and the moderate coastal heat felt like a sauna after the cold of the hospital, but I was hungry so I hopped into my Toyota and pressed the modern ignition button; the car revved up and the bluetooth connected my phone to the stereo system and the last song I was listening to in the garage-turned-office started playing.

It was ‘Self Guided Tours.’

I drove through the busy midday roads to that Hot Dog Shack with a back-and-forth bob to the smile on my face, singing loudly and privately along with the music. Happy. And that’s how it happened.

The psychic etching complete; and now, whenever I hear ‘Self Guided Tours’ or – literally – anything from “It’s Immaterial,” I am psychically transported back to that snapshot of late April, 2023. If I had known this etching would occur maybe I would have picked something with relevant lyrical content – something cliched like Will Smith’s version of ‘Just the Two of Us’ – but it just happened.

Before I knew it: Black Marble was in the soundtrack of my life.

Black Marble, in its current iteration, is just one guy: Chris Stewart, a once resident Brooklyn New Yorker and bygone fixture of the Brooklyn ‘darkwave’ scene where he – and former bandmate Ty Kube – made a name for themselves as ‘that band that sounds like Joy Division’ by playing at local New York clubs before releasing their first record, “A Different Arrangement,” on October 9, 2012. While it’s easy to point at the Joy Division influences, Black Marble sounds far more like early New Order with some “A Broken Frame”-era Depeche Mode thrown in for good measure. Stewart primarily dons a bass guitar in live shows, playing ultra-repetitive but memorable Peter Hook-styled bass lines, while Kube contributes synthesizers, laying down electronic drum loops and cascades of neon-hued bleeps-and-bloops, with a touch of shimmer and gloom. Stewart and Kube went their separate ways when Stewart left New York for Los Angeles, but – being Stewart’s baby – Black Marble never truly dissolved.

I sort of took the man-of-leisure approach to the city, and after living there for so long, you get to a point where you’re just like, “Well, I’ve been to every party, I’ve been offered crack cocaine by Natasha Lyonne like six times already, or whatever,” and you sort of reach an end … obviously, I’m not with my old bandmate [Ty Kube] anymore and people are like, “What’s up, dude? Is there a rift?” And I always made all of Black Marble’s music, so I was always going to find a friend wherever I was to help. If Ty felt like moving to Los Angeles just to be in my stupid band, he could, but he’s got more shit going on, hopefully, than that. I was just sick of New York, and there isn’t really a better answer than that.

Chris Stewart, 10/18/2026 CLRVYNT Interview

Chris Stewart had written all the music for “It’s Immaterial” before his move to Los Angeles, and it was written with big-moves-in-mind. This results in an album that – while superficially dark on the surface – flickers effervescently with optimism’s flame; this dichotomy is on full display from the start of the record, with ‘Interdiction’ or: something not dissimilar to a Merzbow track that I would turn off immediately: noise, horror-ambiance, frivolity – a sine scream, electronic oscillations, robots powering-up-and-down-again, futuristic occultations, and more sine screams. ‘Interdiction’ is a ‘mood,’ as someone like Anthony Fantano might say; a horror-driven mood like hungry ghosts escaping from the machine. Black Marble wants you to think this is the ‘essence’ of the record, but that is very much not the case and serves only as an unpleasant waste of time – the opposite of what follows immediately afterwards.

‘Interdiction’ flows into ‘Iron Lung,’ which takes the Peter Hook bass lines and puts them on an Evo Firewire surfboard riding a gnarly wave while Stewart sings in baritone-echo-tones over sparsely-sparkling-synths; it’s obvious ‘single’ material, that one song on every album begging to be overplayed to the point of nausea, and will be. ‘It’s Conditional’ follows, setting the tone with the sound of a marble dropping on hard floor as a reminder that: ‘yes, you are listening to a band with the word ‘marble’ in their name’; and while this all seems very tacky on first read, ‘It’s Conditional’ is one of the most unique stand-out tracks on the album, with all the similar bassy-synths wrapped in moody pop packaging just in time for Halloween.

And that’s the crux of ‘It’s Immaterial’: not a cemetery at night like the first filler track tricks you into believing, but a moody pop record with hints of beautiful optimism sprinkled throughout that hits all the right nostalgic notes, getting the synapses spinning like a hard drive writing memories in real-time. From the poignant lament of ‘Missing Sibling,’ with its simple reflective chord progression driven by fuzzy bass tones, to the sea-saw synths of ‘Frisk,’ the rubber bands and minigun firing blips-and-bloops of ‘Golden Heart,’ and the starry-skied-and-hopeful electronics of the closing track ‘Collene.’ It’s all very popful; and if you replaced Chris Stewart’s ghostly baritone with Madonna’s mezzo-soprano, you’d have a Billboard Top 100 in no time.

The girl on the supremely iconic “It’s Immaterial” album cover is Halle Saxon Gaines of the Los Angeles-based band Automatic. She stands in front of upper-class-suburban-coastal-homes with a cold, scornful glare into the camera, gesturing in Thelema, dressed in a white collar and black blazer. She is looking down on you but it’s all a facade; like your neighborhood crush in high school who – over summer break ‘04 – discovered The Cure, dyed her hair black-black, and ‘went full goth’; underneath the dark Covergirl eyeliner, black Revlon Colorsilk, and all the doom and gloom: that bubbly girl you used to trade Pokémon cards, explore homes-under-construction, and ding-dong-ditch with is still there, bursting out at the seams.