In Ferneaux

Benjamin John Power has spent the best part of two decades making music that feels enormous, first as one half of the duo Fuck Buttons and, for the past decade, as Blanck Mass. In Ferneaux, his fourth album, released today on Sacred Bones, distils ten years of accumulated field recordings into just two long-form pieces: twenty-minute journeys through drone, industrial grit and, in places, a tenderness that will surprise anyone familiar with the battering force of 2019’s Animated Violence Mild. Shaped by grief and written through lockdown, it’s a record that aches—and, eventually, consoles.

Phase I opens in murk, distant voices and captured weather sinking beneath a slow, tectonic drone. Over its twenty-one minutes Power assembles the piece with real patience: sheets of low-end rumble swell and subside, whilst clattering industrial percussion arrives in waves like something half-remembered, each hit drenched in reverb and smeared into noise. Just past the halfway mark a rare melodic idea surfaces—a wavering, analogue-sounding pad that hangs in the air like a voice trying to speak—before the machinery reasserts itself.

Phase II is the record’s consolation. Shorter at nineteen and a half minutes, it’s warmer in temper: the drone feels weighted with heavily processed strings and wordless harmonies, and the bass, though still substantial, moves slower and softer. The piece builds to a passage of sustained chords that comes closer to melody proper than anything on the record’s first half, and in its final minutes the field recordings return to the surface—wind and room tone replacing the machines—closing the album somewhere quiet and open.

It would be easy to call In Ferneaux difficult, and it is, in the sense that it makes no concession to the skip-forward economy of streaming. But as catharsis—the word already attached to it since its first playbacks—it works precisely because Power earns the release. The tenderness feels hard-won rather than decorative, and the drones never tip into wallpaper ambience: there is too much dirt and friction in them for that.

A bold structure for an artist who could easily coast on the brute force of his club-facing work, and In Ferneaux justifies it. Put it on loud with the lights low and its two long arcs do what the best ambient records do—make you feel the time passing, and leave you different at the end of it.