BLANCK MASS
Shares new video for “Starstuff”
New record ‘In Ferneaux’ out February 26th on Sacred Bones
Two long-form journeys worked from field recordings made over a decade
Blanck Mass, the project of musician Benjamin John Power, has shared a video for “Starstuff,” an except from his forthcoming LP ‘In Ferneaux’ which is to be released on February 26th via Sacred Bones Records.
Following 2019’s album ‘Animation Violence Mild,’ ‘In Ferneaux’ explores pain in motion, building audio-spatial chambers of experience and memory using an archive of field recordings from a decade of global travels.
The new video was made by director Danny Perez. Power comments: “I have been a fan of Danny’s for years, I feel a strong connection to his use of texture and colour in an emotional sense. I felt that because the music of In Ferneaux is highly expressive, emotive and insular; by giving Danny free creative control of the video for Starstuff, it would only add to the experience. I always find it exciting to see how others interpret my music visually.”
In the first glimpse of what will be an all-consuming orchestration, Starstuff immediately pulls you into its ethereal world, filled with shimmering tones and apocalyptic bursts of ferocious and challenging electronic elements, brash tone clashes, and complex rhythms. Surging intensity fills this composition, the excerpt began as such a cosmic and mystical instrumentation before we embrace the unpredictable and intoxicating nature of Blanck Mass. The expansive soundscape that Blanck Mass constructs is something so monumental.
Isolation gave Blanck Mass an opportunity to make connections in a moment when being together is impossible. The record is divided into two long-form journeys that gather the memories of being with now-distant others through the composition of a nostalgic travelogue. The journeys are haunted with the vestiges of voices, places, and sensations. These scenes alternate with the building up and releasing of great aural tension, intensities that emerge from the trauma of a personal grieving process which has perhaps embraced its rage moment.
An encounter with a prophetic figure on the streets of San Francisco presented the question of “how to handle the misery on the way to the blessing.” This is the quandary of the impasse we now all find ourselves in, trapped in our little caves, grappling with the unease of the self at rest – without movement, without the consumerist agenda of “new experiences.” The possibility of growth, always defined by our connections with others, held in limbo. Sartre said that “Hell is other people,” but perhaps this is the Inferno of the present: the space of sitting with the self.
A blessing is often thought of as a future reward, above and beyond the material plane. With ‘In Ferneaux’, Blanck Mass wrangles the immanent materials of the here-and-now to build a sense of transcendence. Here, the uncanny angelic hymn sits comfortably beside the dirge. The misery and blessing are one.
‘In Ferneaux’ will be released on February 26th. Pre-order it here: http://sacredbonesrecords.com/products/sbr267-blanck-mass-in-ferneaux
‘In Ferneaux’ tracklist:
1. Phase I
2. Phase II
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