Black Market Karma Mellowmaker

Releases on June 6 2025

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Following 2024’s ‘Wobble’, ‘Mellowmaker’ is the second chapter in Black Market Karma’s two-part album series on Fuzz Club. Crafted entirely by Stanley Belton—who writes, records, and produces everything himself—the record embraces analogue imperfections and tape wobble, splicing them with modern techniques to create a “cassette-ified” lo-fi psychedelia blending ‘60s pop, ‘90s neo-psych, and crunchy hip-hop breakbeats.

"Mellowmaker was made immediately after Wobble, I kinda see them as two sides of each other", Belton says. The washed-out saturated vocals and jangling Vox guitars are there, but the in-built fuzz and repeater sounds on his cherished vintage Ultrasonic get some heavier usage here. Synths take more of a back-burner in favour of dreamy mellotron samples. Drums are still recorded with one mic and ran through guitar amps or mixed with drum machines, but lean even more into 60s dancefloor breakbeats.

At its core, Belton states that ‘Mellowmaker’ attempts to give temporary permanence to the timeless and intangible, a liminal feeling permeating the eleven tracks here: "With these two albums I've attempted to crystallise how it feels to be stuck between a feeling of amnesia of the soul and the earthly experience of piloting a meat suit... I’m still chasing that longing intangible ‘Hiraeth’ feeling. The sense of wanting to find our way home to a place that maybe doesn’t exist."