I think I want to consider the promo words for producer BLANCK MASS here, rather than just pontificate. We want music and art that reflects our times and though this was a 2017 release, it still holds up.

As humans, we are aware of our inner beast and should therefore be able to control it. We understand our hard-wired primal urges and why they exist in an evolutional sense. We understand the relationship between mind and body. Highly evolved and intelligent, we should be able to recognize these genetic hangovers and control them as a means to act positively and move forward as a compassionate species. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Recent global events have proven this. The human race is consuming itself.

World Eater, the new album by Benjamin John Power’s Blanck Mass project, is a reaction to this. There is an underlying violence and anger throughout the record, even though some of these tracks are the closest Power has ever come to writing, in his words, “actual love songs.”

“Maybe subconsciously this was some kind of countermeasure to restore some personal balance,” Power explains.

On World Eater, Power further perfects the propulsive, engrossing electronic music he has created throughout his impressive decade-plus career, both under the Blanck Mass moniker and as one-half of Fuck Buttons, as he elaborates upon the sound of 2015’s brilliant double album Dumb Flesh. As massive as the sonic world of the new record often feels, its greatest achievement is in its maximization of a limited set of tools, a restriction intentionally set by Power himself.

“As an exercise in better understanding myself musically, I found myself using an increasingly restricted palette during the World Eater creative process. Evoking these intense emotions using minimal components really put me outside of my comfort zone and was unlike the process I am used to. Feeling exposed shone a new light on this particular snapshot. I feel enriched for doing so.” 

You might look at the cut and paste as lazy but I’m just going to call it efficient. If you can find words that accurately articulate what you want to say, and they do it better than anything you can muster, go for it. You’re doing readers a favor. And I do feel that we are failing ourselves as humans. We’re failing all our ideas and aspirations of what it means to be human. I think of everything that’s explored in apocalyptic science fiction and zombie films and the like. There’s always a collapse of order and civilization brought on by extreme circumstance. The sad fact of things is that we are collapsing under our own weight without any catastrophic event. We are our own catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe of dogma. We’ve invented “ideals” and started fights to defend them. We are killing to hype our own bullshit. It’s not like this hasn’t always been the case but the difference is that perhaps now we’ve picked up the pace because we know we are lying. Killing is the only way to double down on the lies to try to make ourselves believe. We are corrupt.

And we need art that reflects the decay and collapse.