Live Concert Photography: Blanck Mass at Baby’s All Right 3/7/16

Live Concert Photography: Blanck Mass

Baby’s All Right

March 7, 2016

Blanck Mass is the solo side project of Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power, and his latest effort under the Blanck Mass moniker was written, recorded and produced over the course of a year in several different locations — Fuck Buttons’ Space Mountain Studios, a windowless attic space in Hatch End, North London, and Power’s Edinburgh Scotland UK home. And reportedly, changing recording spaces helped to contribute to a changing sonic palate throughout the album — while thematically speaking, the album focuses on the inherent flaws and frailty of the human body.

Now as you might recall, last year I caught Power play a Northside Festival set at Saint Vitus in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and much like his Northside Festival set, his Baby’s All Right set on Monday night featured Dumb Flesh‘s dark and sprawling compositions, which meshed tense and abrasive industrial electronica with sensual, deep house and hard house, punishing, tweeter and woofer rocking beats. Shimmering synths occasionally bible from a molten iron surface and arched upward, creating a brief burst of ethereal beauty from crushing, dystopian darkness. At points the material managed the heady trance-inducing sensation of shoegaze and psychedelia but with a danceable feel. In many ways, the material evokes the constant anxiety of modern life — and the sensation that we’re on the precipice of complete catastrophe and are too blind, too dumb and too selfish to do anything to stop from falling over.

Thanks to a surprisingly enthusiastic and packed late night crowd at Baby’s All Right, it was one of the more memorable electronic sets I’ve seen in quite some time. Check out a few photos from the set below.