Record Shopping, Morricone and Attenborough: TLOBF meets Blanck Mass

“If you listen to it, you have to listen on good headphones, you can’t listen off your laptop speakers, because you’ll miss so many frequencies and stuff… It’s awkward in that sense, you should be able to listen to a record wherever you want but I do think you need to give this one some time, otherwise you’re going to miss things out. There are so many subtle shifts there, energy shifts and things… I’ve always thought there’s a difference between songs and pieces of music, anyway, and I didn’t want to write an album of 10 songs, I wanted the thing to be coherent as a whole. It’s not a sing-a-long record – you could have a go, I’m not going to stop anyone trying!”

For the moment, Benjamin John Power is probably better known for his work with his other musical project, Fuck Buttons. In June, he released an album through his solo project, the eponymous Blanck Mass, a collection of instrumental productions which strive to represent the purely natural, through very modern means.

“I’ve been involved in musical projects for years, but this is the first thing I’ve put out on general release that’s just me. As for Blanck Mass and Fuck Buttons, I see the two things quite separately, so there was never any ‘oh god, where’s my mate? Where are the other people?’ It’s just something I’ve always done, and this is the first time it’s been put out. I’m really happy with the record, I was listening to it a lot as I was making it and I never found myself drifting away from it, or losing touch with it. So I was happy to just put it out.”

Blanck Mass is an album which triggers visions of wide open spaces, of lush green scenery, of television programmes about untouched landscapes, sprawling sea-scapes and rolling hills. An apparent fascination with the concept of cerebral hypoxia and “the beautiful complexity of the natural world” at the time of writing all contributed to the tracks on the album, so where did this interest come from?

“I think it was a subconscious thing.” replies Power. “I’m a big fan of Attenborough, and when I was a kid, I’d have to go to the Natural History Museum when I came to London with my Mum or I’d be in tears for days. I wasn’t necessarily trying to make something that could be used as a nature soundtrack, but it is something I’m very interested in so that probably had some psychological impact on what I was making when I was on my own. And not really listening to a lot of contemporary music at the time of writing, I guess I was trying to fill my brain with science and nature documentaries, so I guess that’s how it manifested itself.”

With delicate and subtle nuances, phrases and frequencies guiding the listener through the record, the production process was demonstrably a very considered process. “I did everything at home – I wrote and recorded it all in a flat that I was living in in London, all onto a laptop, all the instrumentation was DI-ed, there were no amplifier experiments – all textural experiments with whatever equipment I was using. And that was quite an interesting process, I’d be spending 14 hours a day in a crazy little flat with strip lighting. It was quite oppressive, but I quite liked it. I could just escape and get involved in this thing. I don’t know if it’s the healthiest work environment, psychologically, but it’s definitely a good place to shut yourself off from anything else. I live in Dalston, and if you want craziness, you can just step outside your door and you’ll find craziness straight away. The flat was good for that.”

A prominent theme in reviews of Blanck Mass has been the cohesiveness of the record, each track melting into the next with a sense of effortless fluidity. “They didn’t follow on chronologically,” comments Power on the writing of the record, “the order was very different when I was writing and recording, and then I kind of tried to put them together with some kind of coherent narrative that had an interesting feel and flow. It feels like a bit more of a voyage. The idea of a strong narrative is quite important to me, although having said that, I don’t like the idea of forcing any mental imagery on anyone. It’s nice for whoever’s listening to it to be able to make-up their own visual hook, but as an album, I think the structure is important. It’s not always the easiest thing, especially if you don’t have any lyrical hooks, so you have to draw narrative from the sounds and the dynamics in the tracks as well. There are some tracks that jump straight into another one, there are some tracks that fade out and another will fade in… I put as much consideration into that and the overall thing as I have the individual components of each track itself.”

” The whole thing is a big experiment, so there’s a combination of manipulated samples, art patterns, heavily processed guitar, just whatever seemed right. I think there’s a misconception that there’s a violin on the record, but there’s no violin. There’s no string section, there’s a lot of heavily manipulated guitar that sounds like a string section, but there’s no instrumentation in there.”

“I felt like I almost envisioned ‘Raw Deal’. That was one of the tracks where I had an idea of a landscape, or some kind of ‘scape’ that I wanted to try and recreate. I felt like it was a moment I’d never be able to recreate again, because it was in my head. I heard these sounds and saw a particular landscape and I was really striving quite hard to recreate that, I think I got as close as I can. The moment is lost forever, but this is me trying my best to recreate it again – I was pleased with that track, I think it does its job quite well.”

Is this transference of visual inspiration into sound a regular feature of Power’s writing process, then? “Sometimes, sometimes it’s purely from experimentation. ‘Sundowner’ was another of the tracks where I had a visual idea. I was really interested in the idea of the supposed feeling of euphoria that someone gets before death through drowning. That idea, I thought was pretty profound, the hopelessness but the wonder in the unknown. It feels like a striving towards a better understanding of something in ‘Sundowner’, perpetually trying to reach and I think that’s kind of my mindset when I was writing ‘Sundowner’, and something had happened at that time in my life that wasn’t great, so I guess that had an impact on it, but following the same kind of idea I think.”

http://soundcloud.com/in-house-press/blanck-mass-land-disasters

As an album which is best listened to through good headphones, in a quiet environment where all of the nuances and frequencies can be heard and appreciated, the inevitable question arises of whether or not this album would be able to be transferred to a live setting, something which Power has been considering. “I didn’t even think there was going to be a record, so that never really crossed my mind. And when it initially happened, I thought it was a studio record. I’d like to do it at some point, out of curiosity, see how it’d work live. It’d be an interesting project to try and figure out how to do it. I’d probably need to grow 4 other pairs of arms or borrow 3 other people…”

As the interview draws to a close, and we prepare to head down to Rough Trade East to check out Blanck Mass’s music tips, there’s one last subject to broach – the name, Blanck Mass. “Phonetically, it does have a certain resonance.” replies Power. “I’d just watched a documentary about the library of Alexandria, so there was an idea in my head that I wanted to get that idea across – the ongoing battle between religion and science, so I took Max Plank, he’s the forefather of quantum physics, and a black mass is obviously a religious ceremony, so I mashed the two up together as a comment on the battle between the two. I don’t think that has any relevance within the narrative of the album, that was just something I found interesting, and also annoying at the time! The nature of stuff like this, especially nowadays with how rapid everything is, the turnaround time between records is crazy compared to what it was 10 years ago so it doesn’t have to be a literal translation of the recorded output, you can do anything. Anything I do on my own now is under the moniker of Blanck Mass, so anything could happen! But I like that.”

Blanck Mass’s Record Picks :

We stopped off at London’s Rough Trade East to delve a little further into Blanck Mass’s musical tastes, and found ourselves planted firmly in the Kraut Rock and Soundtrack sections, looking for anything Morricone or Roedelius.

Infinite Body – Carve Out The Face of My God

“This is amazing. This is Infinite Body – he uses a lot of loops, I guess it’s quite shimmery, landscapey kind of stuff. Some of it sounds almost Lynchian. He has another one called White Hymn which I think is really great too.”

http://soundcloud.com/ongoodadvice/11-carve-out-the-face-of-my-god

Roedelius – Lustwandel

“Roedelius is fantastic and the first track from this is amazing. It’s a piano piece that’s really beautiful, and he actually played at the Dalston Jazz Bar a couple of Sundays ago, but I missed him.”

Tangerine Dream – Phaedra

“I think that was one of the only records I ok-ed to be on the press release!”

Excepter – Presidence.

“They’re a really great band from New York – definitely check this out.”

“The first record I’ve bought for ages was this thing called Chasing Voices, acidbathory, I think it’s a collective of producers from New York. It’s an amazing record – such a slow build, then it gets really, really intense, it’s amazing…

I‘m intrigued as to what section they’ve put Blanck Mass in…”

Blanck Mass is available now through Rock Action Records.