Black Marble is redefining the art of making it

His latest record, Life in Small Spaces, reflects on what it means to build an artistic life without allowing the music industry’s ideas of success to become its measure. Black Marble first sparked to life in 2012, and Stewart has spent the years since writing, recording, and delivering his records largely by himself. 

Over time, he began to notice a pattern in the way the industry gauges an artist’s progress. At first, every new opportunity felt like a singular breakthrough. But after years of watching other artists move through the same cycle, he began to recognise a familiar sequence. “There are these little check marks,” he says. “You play on KEXP, you get that contract, you play in that venue, you do this, you do that… The industry offers these things to artists and, once you’ve done them, it’s like, well, am I real now, or am I still a wooden boy like Pinocchio?”

Stewart came to realise that completing the checklist did not necessarily mean building a sustainable career. He watched artists receive those opportunities, briefly become the next big thing, and then disappear as another artist took their place. The longer he stayed in music, the more clearly he saw the machinery behind those moments. “The people working within the industry remained relatively constant, but the artists were the ones constantly being replaced.”

That distinction sits at the centre of Life in Small Spaces. Working independently has given Stewart an unusual view of the gap between perceived success and actual stability. Seeing artists appear on billboards while still struggling to make ends meet made him question the fantasy being sold to musicians, and the pressure to participate in it.

For him, resisting that cycle means concentrating on what can actually be controlled. The scarcity of opportunities can make artists compare themselves with one another endlessly. “Why did another band get that label, that review, that festival slot?” he says. “Why are they moving upwards while I remain on the same rung? All of that can really consume you, and what we actually ignore is that sometimes, getting into the top tier just comes down to luck.”

His record turns those concerns into a collection of characters wrestling with dissatisfaction, delusion, and the seductive promise of an easier life. “Other Man’s Dream” questions the value of seeking validation from others, while “Anything” becomes a frustrated lament about the distance between the happiness we are told to expect and what we actually feel. 

But the questions running through Life in Small Spaces extend beyond the pressures of being a musician. On “Missing History”, Stewart explores his own complicated sense of belonging. “I actually feel like I’m missing a history,” he reflects. “Having travelled through Europe and encountered places where people seemed more connected to their heritage, I began thinking about the complicated history of the United States and its uneasy relationship with its own origins.” 

Yet he has also found something to embrace in the cultural mix of its big cities, which he sees as a truer reflection of what America is: “We all are kind of thrown in together in this country and that is an opportunity to try to find common ground with people that are different from you.”

Musically, Life in Small Spaces also represents a subtle departure. Black Marble’s pop sensibilities remain, but walls of synths make more room for staccato guitar lines and live drum samples, drawing on artists such as Pylon, The Necessaries, Wire, and R. Stevie Moore. Stewart describes the resulting atmosphere as having “this chimey, hypnotic quality, like a radio dial that is between two stations,” a fitting description for a record that hovers between eras.

That sense of solitary experimentation has always been part of Black Marble’s practice. Stewart works alone partly because it allows him to make a living without splitting an already limited financial return between a large group of collaborators. But there is something more instinctive behind it, too. As a child, he spent hours alone in his room drawing and creating things, showing the results to his family before returning to make something else. Making music, he says, still feels strangely similar – “only now the audience is the internet.”

He’s managed to turn that small room’s limitations into more of a philosophy. The artwork for Life in Small Spaces places Stewart alone in a sparse room, surrounded by an eruption of confetti: it’s a self-contained world that may look cramped or chaotic, but belongs entirely to him. “I made Life in Small Spaces while thinking about that,” Stewart concludes. An artistic life, he believes, “does not have to be an endless pursuit of something just beyond reach. It can be small, difficult, and materially imperfect, while still being enough.”