Black Market Karma - Wobble (2024) [Hi-Res]

A twelve-track collection of “cassette-ified” lo-fi psych-pop, ‘Wobble’ is the eleventh studio album from Black Market Karma and their first on Fuzz Club. Hailing from London and now residing on the South Coast, BMK’s prolific output is fuelled by band-leader and multi-instrumentalist Stanley Belton who writes, performs, records, produces and up until now self-released everything from his own live-in ‘Cocoon’ studio. Pooling influences from 60s pop and psychedelia, crunchy hip-hop break-beats and lo-fi electronica, ‘Wobble’ is the first of a two-part album series and is due for release July 26th 2024.

The album’s title is a reference to tape wobble / wow and flutter, subtle fluctuations in pitch characteristic of analogue recording equipment. Where once seen as a limitation by older generations, for others they evoke a welcome sense of nostalgia and that’s what Belton sought to excavate here: “Sonically, I wanted the album to feel like a collection of discarded and worse for wear instruments came to life, refurbished themselves and started to play. The sound is an attempt to give form to the often formless feeling that is nostalgia. With songs attempting to crystallise a feeling known as ‘fernweh’. A kind of longing for a place and time you’ve never experienced, be it in this world or another.”

“As formats evolved these characteristics were slowly phased out but with this album I was aiming to put them back in through different methods of sound degradation”, Belton says, “reaching for a sweet spot where the sound had a lo-fi flavour but with the punch of a higher quality recording.” Drums are recorded live, run back through guitar amps and pedals and sampled. Vintage guitars are totally warped by effects, with lead bass melodies being run through overloaded Vox guitar amps. All topped with heavily saturated vocals, mono synths, electronic flutes, mallet sounds and a bunch of other instruments and the sort of creative experiments that over a decade spent enjoying total freedom in your own ever-growing DIY studio allows for.