Niklas's thoughts

In Ferneaux is my favourite Blanck Mass album. It may be his most intangible, the most musique-concrète-meets-electronic-procession album he's made, and it's a monumental ride.

When David Holmes released Let's Get Killed in 1997, it wasn't just sample-looped boogaloo like what Propellerheads were doing at the time for the dancefloor, it was street recordings in New York City, drums picked up by a cheap recorder, deeply-felt synths into the darkness, viciously-beautifully engineered paths to something that mixed Sly Stone with Kraftwerk; the album now seems, to me, like a sort of stepping stone to In Ferneaux.

'Phase I', the first out of two ~20-minute tracks on In Ferneaux, starts with an electronic tingle of face-on scramble, not unlike how Blanck Mass starts his album World Eater. On this album though, after eight minutes, time blurs into a hypnotic drone: imagine SUNN O))) set loose on a bunch of tibetan bowls.

One could argue that it's simple to set up some sweeping synths and then have them harp on, but I think it's even harder to do that – which follows after the SUNN O))) moment – and then have a song go into something that sounds like Einstürzende Neubauten on valium.

I joke, of course; there's nothing funny about the album, even though Blanck Mass rarely takes his music seriously enough not to set it up for a piss-take.

The music is beautiful.

Then, 'Phase II' starts. The beginning of the track astounds me every time I hear it: a man talks about recognising misery:

how you handle the bitch-ass misery. Do I stay the same? I dunno! [...] I'm over here being powerful, not knowing your shit. Look at me, 55 and no drugs.

This kind of reminds me of the song 'Rodney Yates' by David Holmes, where a poet raps his stuff into a mic on the street. Or, so it sounds.

Direct human connection.

'Phase II' quickly contains flowing, beautiful synth overlays, the type of sounds that the wonderful artist Florian Fricke, aka Popol Vuh, may have loved. It's absolutely lovely to hear the human voice over these sounds.

To create this, to do this, demands a lot of humanism. I truly believe so, This is beauty.

Three minutes and forty seconds into the song, there is only wondrous composition. Ligeti couldn't have made this (in a good way). Then, flourishing sinus-wave stuff, gurgly synths —– absolute distortion.

Noise.

It's like being cleansed.

It's clear that this album followed World Eater as it's filled with some of the same sounds, the type of sounds that Blanck Mass used before getting into making soundtracks; in a way, In Ferneaux is the arc between his older self and what turned into the soundtrack to Ted K.

In Ferneaux is a singular project. There are others like it, but none that I know of that in modern time evokes what Blanck Mass did with the album. As it stands, it's therapeutic, beautiful in its wonders.