Even voorstellen – The Tallest Man On Earth  shares ‘colors’
THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH SHARES ‘COLORS’
FIRST NEW MUSIC IN THREE YEARS

Swedish singer-songwriter The Tallest Man On Earth aka Kristian Matsson is announcing the song “Colors” today, his first new music in nearly three years. Recorded by Mattson in his home studio, the song whirls and swirls with his violin, guitar playing and signature croon. Yearning for the verdant inspiration of summer, head below to listen and watch the song’s new video featuring handheld camera footage from Kristian and his crew on a recent run of European shows.
Watch/Listen to “Colors”: https://thetallestmanonearth.ffm.to/colors

The Tallest Man On Earth has captivated audiences using “every inch of his long guitar cord to roam the stage: darting around, crouching, stretching, hip-twitching, perching briefly and jittering away…” (The New York Times). He will be playing a selection of festival and headline shows in Sweden and Ireland and the Uk this summer.

Critics often draw comparisons between The Tallest Man on Earth and Bob Dylan, citing similarities in both songwriting and vocal style. Matsson himself has acknowledged Dylan's influence, revealing that he started listening to him at the age of fifteen. Fascinated by Dylan's covers, he delved into their origins, which gradually introduced him to early American folk artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. However, Matsson is quick to distance himself from being part of any specific tradition, stating, “I don’t want to be part of a tradition. I just want to do what feels natural to me. This is how I play, and this is how I write songs.”

His 2023 album ‘Henry St.’ marks the first time Matsson recorded an album in a band setting. As described by Matsson, it’s the “most me album yet, because it covers so many of the different noises in my head. Having been away from it taught me that making music and performing is what I’m doing for the rest of my life, and I’m so grateful for it. It has given me new confidence and playfulness. This is what I do. It’s unconditional.”

TOUR DATES

June 26 – Glumserud, Sweden @ Kullens Gårdsfest 2026

June 27 – Gullabo, Sweden @ Folk Från Skogen 2026

July 11 – Tänndalen, Sweden @ Musikkväll På Kalfjäll 2026

July 29 – Gysinge, Sweden @ Gysinge Live

Aug 26 – Dublin, Ireland @ National Concert Hall

Aug 27 – Cork, Ireland @ Live At St. Luke’s

Aug 28 – Bangor, United Kingdom – Open House Festival 2026

Aug 29 – Kilkenny, Ireland @ St. Canice Cathedral

Sept 12 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Supertraditional Festival 2026

https://thetallestmanonearth.com/

Even voorstellen – Black Marble – Life in small places
BLACK MARBLE “LIFE IN SMALL PLACES”
21/08 (sacred bones/konkurrent)

“Jim Carol New Year” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe7rCyhot_k

Now Black Marble, aka Chris Stewart, announces plans to release Life in Small Spaces, his first full-length album since 2021’s Fast Idol, due for release August 21st, 2026 on Sacred Bones.

Black Marble's Life in Small Spaces is an album of commentary, analysis of the music industry, discussion of authenticity, and a letter to all independent creatives in the world. Drawing on early American left-of-the-dial “college radio” staccato guitar lines (recalling Pylon, The Necessaries, and R. Stevie Moore), and live drum samples (a nod to Wire’s simple metronomic style), the album takes on more of a live sound, trading in Stewart’s usual walls of synths.

According to Stewart: “I always knew a lot of people in music struggled to make ends meet, but it surprised me to learn that the people you thought would be doing well often weren't. For me, seeing the business from the inside like that changed how I looked at things. When I looked up to see a new artist on a billboard, I started to wonder, will I one day have to pretend to be something I'm not, in order to succeed? The life of an artist goes on after your moment ends, you know? So who do you want to be in the end and how do you want to be seen by the people that know you? I made Life In Small Spaces while thinking about that, and for me, it serves as my own ideal for living an artistic life. I'm doing it as a vocation, not some last ditch effort to escape to some other world. I made this record not only as a way of saying that, but as a way of saying it's ok to feel that way. It's ok for people to sacrifice some degree of creature comfort in order to live a life you believe in. And it doesn't have to be an endless search for something just out of reach, it can be a permanent way of being and something that sustains you.”

The announcement is accompanied by the lead single “Jim Carol New Year” which comes with a video starring Chris Stewart, directed by Clayton Hunt. “Jim Carol New Year” (its title a nod to both author, poet, and musician Jim Carroll, and holiday season carols) casts another critical eye on life, rejecting false promises of religion, advice from so-called experts, or easy answers in favor of self validation and independence of thought. While drawing us in with a more rhythmic synth melody, twirling listeners into an illusion of joy, the phrase “I forgot my money” is used over and over to convey all the things the protagonist isn't buying. “If you want to be free,” Stewart says, “you have to watch out for some of life's classic pitfalls.”

With regard to the video, Clayton Hunt shares: “Chris had an idea of a house in the distance with two travelers being drawn toward it. We wanted each traveler to represent a different version of the journey. One traveler struggled unprotected against the landscape, the other was cautious, outfitted in an orange hazmat - type suit. I decided to shoot 16mm and capture everything against the green landscape, creating a vibrant contrast. That imagery helped guide the production and inform the story.”

Black Marble hummed to life in the fall of 2012, switched on by the early aughts New York City synthwave revival. Today, fourteen years on and seven releases later, Chris Stewart continues to make records hunched over machines that warm to the touch when turned on and need to be coaxed to stay in tune. His albums, written, recorded, and delivered solely by Stewart, remain singular visions, with songs that seek to convey a diffuse pastiche, now shaped by a desire to wrap the whole thing in a message that speaks to where he’s been and where he wants to go.

His latest vision, Life in Small Spaces, sees Stewart comment on the music industry and his role within it, reflecting on how underground music has changed over time, and how a blueprint for keeping things simple and being true to oneself is the only ideal for living in this complicated landscape.

Stewart's desire to span time with his ideals intact shows up in the songwriting, which retains the project’s pop-sensibilities while adding new tricks to the bag. Life in Small Spaces trades walls of synths for more left-of-the-dial, “college radio”-inspired guitar. Stewart explains the reason for the change as a way to “create this chime-y hypnotic quality. Like a radio dial that is between two stations.”

On a first listen, the album lives up to this billing as sounds seem to come from some lost radio station during a Saturday night mix. However, on second listen, certain themes and characters emerge from Stewart's stories. Overarchingly, these are people expressing some of life's deepest dissatisfactions or labouring under some cartoonish delusion that affords them some immunity.

“It Always Comes to Me,” introduces a self obsessed and arrogant protagonist that believes they can talk their way into and out of anything. Lost in the delusion that looking out for oneself at the expense of others is a mantra, not knowing that ultimately, they are the architect of their own isolation and loneliness. A new sonic landscape is the backdrop here, with leading bass and guitar tones that hail in the warmth and personal touch of a live performance, guiding us into the album’s first chapter.

Stewart stands firm in his convictions on “Other Man's Dream” – “I could never go crazy, for the other man's dream, to be free of the sad life that's coming after me” he sings as he points out that people that we seek validation from aren't the people who have to live with the results of our decisions. In life's spaces, big and small, it's us who have to live out the lives we've chosen and only us who can determine its value.

“Anything,” sonically the most upbeat song on the record, is in its message anything but. “I want to dream us up. I’ll do anything, but it’s not enough!” is a lamentation full of snarling frustration with the gap between perceived and felt experience, and a message for anyone who’s ever felt like an imposter, unable to feel the joy that society tells us comes so easily to everyone else.


Through Black Marble’s entrancing electronic tones, Stewart further confronts difficult themes, “Missing History” with its more synth-centred clinical feel explores the idea of lacking a true cultural identity and heritage, and the lasting weight of a nation’s past. “Panopticon Calls” with its jivey beat and bouncing bass melody, shifts perspective to a paranoid, shut in person, pulled deeper under the influence of media and external pressure before breaking free.

Visually, Life in Small Spaces features Stewart alone on the cover in a sparse room, surrounded with an eruption of confetti – an image that reflects a self-contained world that may appear small, bleak and cluttered, but is fully his own. A fitting frame for a record that embraces limitation as a form of clarity, and one that tells the story of choosing a simple life, giving up stability and comfort for an existence of bold and engaging connections. This further reflects Black Marble’s confidence in not only his artistry, but the community that has grown and evolved around the project over the years. “[Life in Small Spaces] is what I want to talk about as an artist. It's where I am at this exact moment and I know I'm not alone in how I feel.”

This sentiment isn’t a disclaimer. It’s the point. Life in Small Spaces, with its introspective lyricism disguised neatly within Black Marble’s radiant musicality, is an earnest analysis of the pressures that shape artists. It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.

Tracklisting
1. It Always Comes to Me

2. Jim Carol New Year
3. Anything
4. Get Back Up
5. Other Man's Dream
6. Guess
7. Life Without
8. Missing History
9. Panopticon Calls
10. Picture When
11. Sonny Boy

Nouter Club, Dranouter – events Luwtesessies
Verborgen locaties, kleine concerten en hopelijk geen regen ?
Na een eerste zonovergoten editie trekken we deze zomer in samenwerking met Gemeente Heuvelland opnieuw de velden in voor de Luwtesessies: intieme concerten op geheime locaties ergens tussen velden, bomen, kapellen en andere plekken waar Google Maps het soms ook niet meer weet. De exacte locatie krijg je pas de dag voordien doorgestuurd. Een beetje vertrouwen in het leven mag.
Op het programma:

• 02.07 - MICHIEL LIBBERECHT
  Mooneye-frontman trekt voor het eerst solo en in het West-Vlaams naar buiten. Klein, eerlijk en zonder franjes.
• 10.07 - WHOMAN
  Brusselse indieband die dromerige folk, subtiele elektronica en introspectieve indierock in elkaar laat overvloeien alsof dat de normaalste zaak van de wereld is.
• 16.07 - ABEL GHEKIERE 
  Minimalistische jazz, folk en field recordings van een van de interessantste muzikale dwalers van het land.
  24.07 - MOOSJER
  Lokale held Lieven Cardoen schakelt moeiteloos tussen blues, reggae en verschillende talen. Ideale soundtrack voor een zomeravond met de tenen in het gras. 
  
  Alle concerten starten om 20u. Een stoel meebrengen mag. Existentiële vragen ook.
  
  Check gerust ook de andere events 
  www.nouter.be