Mark Stewart "The Fateful Symmetry"
The groundbreaking, enduringly influential artist Mark Stewart presents his eighth solo album The Fateful Symmetry, a vital new masterwork completed shortly before his untimely passing in April 2023.
Across an illustrious career of pioneering music with The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & The Maffia and as a solo artist, Stewart has produced a seminal body of work, galvanized by the DIY ideals of punk, radical politics, protest movements, theory, philosophy, technology, art and poetry. With The Fateful Symmetry, Stewart’s abiding legacy as a ‘“revered countercultural musician” (The Guardian) is sustained, with an album as fearless and visionary as his best work.
Testifying to his prolific, unrelenting ingenuity, and signifying one of his most intimate, empowering statements, The Fateful Symmetry is an astonishingly expressive and innovative record; a fierce and beautiful manifesto for a better world. The inimitable, titanic Mark Stewart, never normalized, always extraordinary.
Nicolas Bougaïeff "Sunday Summer"
Nicolas Bougaïeff returns to NovaMute with Sunday Summer, the final instalment in his Prime series following Primal Extensions and Prime Function.
Across the trilogy, Bougaïeff explores prime rhythms—polyrhythms derived from prime number ratios—inviting deep listening with disorienting grooves. Opener ‘Sunday Morning at Panorama Bar When Things Go Sideways’ is built around a 5:4 groove at 136 bpm, used as a pivot to mix in a middle section at 170 bpm, capturing the chaotic energy of its namesake. ‘Blue Seventeen’ unleashes high-velocity chaos with freakish pulses, laced with a subtle 17:4 pattern at the end of synth line phrases—first introduced in Bougaïeff’s earlier track ‘Tesseract Jazz’. ‘Organelle’ ups the pressure with muscular drum loops, gritty textures, and dystopian melodies that feel like otherworldly transmissions. Finally, ‘Summer Beach Bar Where Jodie Foster Goes in the Movie Contact’ is a red herring: the calmest track on the EP but also the most rhythmically complex, built around a 19:5 main riff with a dash of 23:5.
With Sunday Summer, Bougaïeff delivers a cerebral and emotive finale to the Prime series—full of tactile textures, asymmetry, and raw sonic curiosity.
Sababa 5 "Nadir"
A must-listen album for fans of The Heliocentrics, Khruangbin, The Dap Kings, and Moğollar.
Sababa 5’s latest album, ‘Nadir’, delves into a darker, more sophisticated, and cinematic fusion of psychedelic soul and Middle Eastern rock. The title, Nadir, is an astronomical term referring to the point on the celestial sphere directly beneath an observer, diametrically opposite the zenith. Metaphorically, it signifies the lowest point or a moment of adversity. This duality resonates with the band’s exploration of contrasting musical themes—melding the cosmic and the terrestrial, the ethereal and the grounded. The name encapsulates the album’s essence, reflecting a journey through deep, introspective soundscapes that are both otherworldly and rooted in raw, earthly grooves.
The Whimbrels "The Whimbrels"
A Whimbrels show involves racks of guitars tuned in different and unconventional ways, with the players constantly switching between them. There are counterpoint choirs, dueling e-bows phasing against each other, chunking poly and cross-rhythmic interludes, soaring arias of distortion from Westberg and Evans’ melodic and inventive guitars.
The New York Times once placed Arad Evans on “an index of creative or experimental electric guitar-based music in America – young lords of the wild in the post-rock tradition.” That description fits The Whimbrels perfectly. You may need earplugs.