★★★★★
To dive into this new Blanck Mass record, let's examine its title, Dumb Flesh. How can flesh -- you might be wondering -- be "dumb"? The word dumb as an adjective is complicated, despite its almost universal use as unintelligent or stupid. While it's easy to see how it can be contrasted to intelligence, doctors and grammarians might still use it as an (albeit offensive) synonym for muteness, the phenomenon when someone has an inability to speak, or refuses to speak, as in the case of some yogis...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2015-05-28
★★★★★
It doesn't feel appropriate to describe Benjamin John Power's music as "noise". As either one half of Fuck Buttons, or in his solo guise as Blanck Mass, there is simply far too much melody, askew beauty and demented euphoric energy going on in his output for reductive genre labels to capture it all. Not that it isn't noise too. It's loud, and prone to puzzlingly appearing in Olympic ceremonies, and so forth...
- thequietus.com
2015-05-26
★★★★★
In his solo work, Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power takes one element of his band's sound and magnifies it a thousand-fold. On his 2011 self-titled debut as Blanck Mass, he stripped away drums and propulsion to create gigantic cosmic drone-scapes. On the very different Dumb Flesh, he has taken Fuck Buttons' rampaging energy, turned everything up to 11 and, paradoxically, created his most accessible music yet...
- www.residentadvisor.net
2015-05-21
★★★★★
In his solo work, Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power takes one element of his band's sound and magnifies it a thousand-fold. On his 2011 self-titled debut as Blanck Mass, he stripped away drums and propulsion to create gigantic cosmic drone-scapes. On the very different Dumb Flesh, he has taken Fuck Buttons' rampaging energy, turned everything up to 11 and, paradoxically, created his most accessible music yet...
- www.residentadvisor.net
2015-05-21
★★★★★
Since 2008's Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons has served to sublimate the noise genre into something that fans with lower tolerances for extreme music might enjoy. From the band's unlikely (but fittingly epic) use in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, to its status as festival mainstays, Fuck Buttons have brought music of the most punishing variety to an unusual level of popularity...
- pitchfork.com
2015-05-13
★★★★★
As one half of the Fuck Buttons, Benjamin John Power has spent the best part of a decade challenging our expectations of modern electronica. But when he's not redefining genres with collaborative partner Andrew Hung, his extra-curricular activities have proven him equally adept in crafting dense, fluttering ambience as Blanck Mass. But unlike previous releases under that pseudonym, Dumb Flesh sees Power finally unite the two sides of his career; layering dense atmospherics over imposing beats...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2015-05-13
★★★★★
his second solo album by Fuck Buttons mainstay is grandiosely billed as "a comment on the flaws of the human form in its current evolutionary state". The thrill of having the LSO perform his song Sundowner while the union flag was raised at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony seems to have gone to Power's head, as the totalitarian self-regard of these bombastic modular synth symphonies owes more to Queen's One Vision than it does to Kraftwerk's ...
- www.theguardian.com
2015-05-10
★★★★★
If the main function for a musician releasing solo work is to stretch out from the uniformity of their main gig, Benjamin John Power has certainly made the most out of his Blanck Mass project. As one half of electronic psych drone purveyors Fuck Buttons, Power originally created Blanck Mass to explore beatless and formless ambient music. With the release of his follow-up, , Power abandons this singular musical mode, bringing with him myriad recording styles and techniques...
- exclaim.ca
2015-05-09
★★★★★
With his , almost inadvertently created a stone cold classic in the epic instrumental synth music genre, easily ranking alongside the epochal likes of Jarre's , Schulze's or Vangelis' score, all from an entire generation ago. It felt like a trip to the melodic beating heart of Ben Power's other band, Fuck Buttons, surgically removing almost every beat, and injecting a heavy dose of benzodiazepine in the process, leaving behind ten slow-moving, drone-heavy atmospheres...
- www.drownedinsound.com
2015-05-08
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