Black Market Enlightenment

Black Market Enlightenment is the seventh album by the UK art rock band Antimatter, released on 9 November 2018 by Music In Stone.

It is the 4th consecutive Antimatter studio album to be written entirely by Mick Moss, the previous 3 being Leaving Eden, Fear of a Unique Identity and The Judas Table.

[3] Speaking in December 2018 to Progressive Music Planet - "The concept is about how I used to view LSD and cannabis when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and the irony of how I ended up actually suffering from a deep existential crisis, coupled with psychosis, panic attacks, chronic paranoia, derealisation and agoraphobia, despite the fact that I was convinced those drugs were the path to enlightenment."

[3] Speaking with Headbangers Lifestyle - "I decided very early on that I would not reach into my archive of unreleased songs whatsoever (something I haven't done since 2003's 'Lights Out'), thus forcing myself to create an entirely new work from a blank canvass.

[6] Guest musicians were drafted in the form of Fab Regmann (drums), Carla Lewis (vocals), Julie Rodaway (flute), Paul Thomas (saxophone) and Vardan Baghdasaryan (kamancheh).

The image, similarly to their previous work together 'The Judas Table', was executed by Nevado from a specific concept by Moss, who says he "asked for a crash-test dummy in a shitty armchair in a shitty apartment, with the Buddhist 8 arms, each hand holding a different specific item of street drug or street drug paraphernalia ...and in the background, the universe is creeping in...".

The items in the dummy's 6 outstretched hands are, clockwise L-R, a hash-pipe, a small sheet of 'strawberry' LSD tabs, a rolled up UK £10 banknote, a cheap cigarette lighter, a cannabis joint and a bag of amphetamines.