indie only magenta colored vinyl version - "I think your destiny has been very hard and traveling," says a voice halfway through Benjamin John Power's sprawling fifth album as Blanck Mass. It's a fair assessment of both the lives of touring musicians in general and Power's electronic odysseys in particular. Blanck Mass records are intense, energetic affairs, harnessing the most kinetic elements of EBM, industrial and noise to fuel songs that are expansive in structure and propulsive in tempo. Be it the bristling blitzkrieg of 2017's World Eater or the climactic trance drops of 2019's Animated Violence Mild, Power's music often resembles some monstrous version of a perpetual motion machine.
So what does it sound like when that machine comes to a sudden and unexpected halt? In Ferneaux is a satisfying answer to that hypothetical. Made mostly during a period of COVID-imposed isolation, it consists of two tracks that hover around the 20-minute mark and run the gamut from placid drones to Merzbow-esque peals of paint-peeling static. Whether Power would've made such a record outside of the pandemic is impossible to know. Regardless of his motivation, In Ferneaux is a significant pivot, the moment when he takes his previously aggressive approach and sublimates it into something slower and more ethereal.
