Now if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past couple of years, you’ve likely come across several posts on Blanck Mass, the solo side project of Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power. 2015’s Dumb Flesh was written and recorded over the course of a year in several different locations — Power’s Space Mountain Studios, a windowless attic space in Hatch End, North London and Power’s Edinburgh Scotland home. Reportedly, changing recording spaces influenced the album’s dark and sprawling compositions, which frequently meshed tense and abrasive industrial electronic music with sensual, hard hitting, deep house, along with punishing, tweeter and woofer rocking beats and shimmering synths bubbling from a hot, molten iron-like surface, and as a result it gives the material brief moments of stunning beauty bursting from a murky and uncertain mix. Thematically, the material focused on the inherent flaws and frailty of the human body — in some way, the album evoked the sensation that our flesh couldn’t protect us from what feels like certain catastrophe.
World Eater, Power’s third Blanck Mass album is slated for a March 3, 2017 release through renowned indie electronic label Sacred Bones Records and the material on the album was inspired by a year teeming with anger, violence, confusion, frustration and despair — and in some way, it evokes a wild, untamed beast chewing and gnawing at civilization, compassion, good, and progression. As Power explains in press notes, “The title is a reference to both the inner beast inside human beings that when grouped en-masse stops us from moving forward towards good.”
World Eater‘s latest single “Silent Treatment” builds on the idea of civilization being chewed apart and of impending doom as sonically the song consist of chopped up chorale and vocal samples, abrasive industrial clang and clatter, stuttering drum programming, twinkling arpeggio synths and enormous boom-bap beats — and although while managing to be a subtly more atmospheric, the song retains the tense and murky feel of Dumb Flesh; in fact, the song manages to emphasize the growing sense of impending doom, confusion, and destruction that many of us have felt over the past 10-15 days. Interestingly, as Power explains of the song “‘Silent Treatment’ is about the problems that arise when we don’t communicate. We often grow apart when we don’t understand each other. Being left int he dark can lead to fear.” May this song be a visceral warning — and may it remind us of all that we have at stake.