There’s a new Mark Stewart track out, appearing on a forthcoming compilation from On-U Sound. Niall McCann has made the video and it has served as a bit of a soft announcement of a project McCann has been working on for a few years now — a documentary about Mark Fisher called Lost Futures.
I’m excited for this project to come out. I was interviewed for it way back in March 2020, just before the pandemic, at the launch for Egress at the ICA in London. I’ve seen a few clips already and it looks like it is going to be amazing.
Read more from the video’s press release below:
‘Storm Crow’ by Mark Stewart is a track made for ‘Lost Futures’, the forthcoming film in development about the life and work of the influential writer and theorist Mark Fisher, and is also featured on the compilation ‘Pay It All Back Vol. 8’, the latest volume in the acclaimed series of samplers from Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label.
“I first met Mark Stewart through the film we are making about the life and work of the writer Mark Fisher. Tariq Goddard (the writer and head of Repeater Books, which he founded with Fisher) had given me the names of people we should speak to and Mark’s was one of the first names on the list. As Mark Stewart and I began discussing the film and I told him I wanted to use some of his music in it because Fisher loved the Pop Group, he suggested we collaborate on a music video for a new track of his, ‘Storm Crow’. It seemed like a perfect fit, a chance to experiment and also a way of getting the news about the film we are trying to make out into the world. We are in the process of financing the film which can be an arduous process. We’re always on the look out for collaborators and champions for the project and if people who read this feel they can help in some way we would love to speak to them.
The ‘Storm Crow’ video is an attempt to visualise the ideas of Mark Fisher and combine them with music with a similar perspective. A playful experiment in matching his ideas to the music of Mark Stewart, recontextualizing old tv advertisements (which both Marks would have grown up watching) zombie movies, along with pivotal social and political moments which helped bring us to what Fisher called “Capitalist Realism” which is the idea that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The vast body of work Fisher left behind explores Capitalism’s unassailable role in our lives, the closing off of any sense of a future different from the present, and the effects of this on us as individuals. His writings lifted up the veil and showed the world afresh to his readers, and that’s what is the core idea in the music video.
The film itself revolves around something which is central to Mark Fisher’s work: the future. When I was young the future was everywhere. It could be anything, it seemed rife with possibilities, for something better. Now, it’s only talked about as a more terrifying version of the present. This is a film about the futures we have lost and how we might start imagining new ones again.
We will use Mark Fisher’s life and his brilliant ideas as a guide through some of the most urgent questions of our time.”
Rizosfera has some more info too, with further comments from Mark Stewart, Obsolete Capitalism and Bobby Gillespie, who have also contributed to the soundtrack.