Say Psych: Track Review: Blanck Mass – Starstuff

Blanck Mass, the project of musician Benjamin John Power, has this week released ‘Starstuff’, the first track from his new record In Ferneaux which will be released on Sacred Bones on 26 February. 
 
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, 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. 
 
‘Starstuff’ is undoubtedly an electronic track, but there is much in here that will appeal to the psychedelic fan – this being a journey through space and one which with eyes closed, can transport the listener to another realm; if that’s not psychedelic then I don’t know what is!