Search - Mark Stewart, Mafia :: Learning to Cope With Cowardice

Fantastic bizarre industrial/dub cut-ups

Aussiemystic | Wollstonecraft, NSW Australia | 06/26/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This seminal album is arguably the finest from Mark Stewart and MAFFIA. It's not an easy listen but if you know what Mark Stewart is on about and dig it, this is a must-have.



An underlying philosophy of the album is an aural version of the "cut-up" technique pioneered in literature by William S Burroughs. It's no accident, then, that excerpts of Burroughs speaking appear on the album's centrepiece, "The Wrong Name and the Wrong Number", a 12-minute audio assault.



Anyone familiar with Adrian Sherwood's dub production work from On-U Sound will recognise many of the base tracks on this album, some of which have been pillaged from the On-U collection and re-voiced, reworked, dubbed, reversed, blended and distorted. The tone is set by the opening title track, which begins as a conventional enough dub track, albeit topped by Mark Stewart's agonised vocals (which made such an impression backed by The Pop Group) but which gradually deteriorates into a chaotic and relentless mix. What follows vary between reasonably straightforward tracks (eg Paranoia of Power, To Have the Vision) and more extreme fare (Blessed are Those Who Struggle). One track which has been acknowledged by many as a classic is his cut-up of the old British standard hymn "Jerusalem".



Stewart later went on to a more electronically-based, industrial sound backed by members of Tackhead (still under the monicker of MAFFIA), but the roots of his sound are in the audio manipulations of dub, and this album is arguably where he is most at home."