Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) collabs w/ Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Mike Watt & more on 'VS' (stream 2 tracks)

The Pop Group‘s Mark Stewart has a new project called VS where each track features a different collaborator, including the late Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Front 242’s Patrick Codenys, Mike Watt, Pan Sonic‘s Mika Vainio, Consolidated, and more. The album’s out April 8.

We’ve got the premiere of “Cast No Shadow,” which teams Stewart with Stephen Mallinder of industrial icons Cabaret Voltaire, and Eric Random, whose early solo work was recorded at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studios in Sheffield. “Eric is the Jandek of our scene and to get to work with him and Mal feels like a post-punk holy trinity,” Mark tells us. It’s a grimy electro dub track and you can listen, along with the Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry collab, below.

In other news, Stewart and Mallinder also feature in upcoming documentary Rip It Up + Start Again, which is directed by Nikolaos Katranis and Russell Craig Richardson, with Academy Award winner Leon Gast, and based on Simon Reynolds’ fantastic 2005 book about the original post-punk scene. Stewart says “Cast No Shadow” is an acknowledgement of the the music documented in the film and how the circumstances that helped spawn the original era feel very similar to our current times. “Then as now feels like a burning season,” he says. You can watch the trailer for that here.