Fuck Buttons - Drones towards the stars

In the beginning, Bristol was trip-hop. The sacred triad of Massive Attack–Portishead–Tricky cemented the primacy of a gloomy suburb, one even disparaged by the English themselves. Then came Goldfrapp, who first painted it with their enchanted mountain, then dressed it up in glitter and paillettes. Still, in the last five years the city has offered up one genuinely significant act, Fuck Buttons, who have won over an extremely varied audience and now sit right on that thin line separating the underground world from the indie one.

They're noisy enough to be hard to stomach for Camera Obscura fans, dancefloor-minded enough to appeal even to a Regis afecionado, and melodic enough to win over almost everyone. In short, they draw in an entirely mixed audience. And the roots of their music are about as varied as you could possibly find, so much so that calling them a one-of-a-kind creature on the musical landscape hardly seems like heresy. They draw on the kosmische-ambient vein of the Seventies and Eighties, the sinuous electronics of Jean-Michel Jarre, Underworld and their techno sui generis, but also Black Dice, Growing and their electro spasms. If there's one constant quality, it's surely the sense of being in the presence of music taking shape before your ears. They seem to almost be telling you a story. And the story flows in a cohesive, harmonious way, with a remarkably well-defined sense of consistency.

The Mogwai stamp of approval speaks for itself. After the explosive 2007 single "Bright Tomorrow", released on Atp Recordings, they set off on tour. And it's precisely alongside the Scots and their label Rock Action that they made their debut, on a split release. In truth, the duo had already been touring with their artistic manifesto, the half-hour-long "Let's See If There Any Ghosts In Here", handed out on CD-R at their earliest shows: a spatial trip of pulverizing electronic distortion and grotesque moans that implodes into malfunction, is reborn as a monster of malevolent energy, transfigures into a ritual of electronic hominids, reaches ecstasy, and finally dances a carioca step, dragging the whole cosmos along with it.

But 2008 is the golden year for Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power. Drones, melodies, harsh noise, circular loops, brutally filtered vocals: it's all here in Street Horrrsing, a primordial, dreamlike full-length debut aimed at reaching an ecstasy that's always ambiguous, always teetering on the edge of a sound that, appearances aside, reveals a real pop freshness. As the sound grows more impenetrable and physical, the hypnotic power of its melodic shivers grows right along with it, so much so that the long harsh-noise agony of "Race You To My Bedroom/ Spirit Rising" ends up conveying a strange, unsettling sense of inner peace. Mysteries of a musical synthesis whose strength lies precisely in that ambiguous emotional "depiction".

Every panel, moreover, moves toward a crossing of lines and shapes that can only be reached through a path of ascent/asceticism. In the masterpiece "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", then, it's clusters of notes and rising frequencies (as well as the deformed voices themselves) that make the sense of a slow, placid pilgrimage immediately perceptible (see also "Okay, Let's Talk About Magic", with its carefully calibrated saturation).

Elsewhere, on less-trodden ground — perhaps truly the most "personal" ground — the palette offers up percussion and vocal flourishes ("Ribs Out") and cosmic magma ("Colours Move"), chasing a balance between the goofiest instinct and the more squared-off, well-defined side of the sound.

The debut is an immediate success. For an album like this, it's practically a miracle.

A year later, if the Fuck Buttons' horoscope had predicted they'd make a record fit for dance addicts, even they probably wouldn't have believed it. But it's exactly that ray of light glimpsed in "Bright Tomorrow" that seems to have pointed them toward new horizons. The connecting thread between their records is there, and it's clearly visible. And as if that weren't enough, Tarot Sport confirms them as the freshest, most surprising thing the electronic world has produced in recent years.

Having shed the role of noiser tout court, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put on an entirely new outfit: a luxurious yet essential suit, bright, colourful, tribal. The English duo, aided in production by Andrew Weatherall, zero in with real conviction and awareness on the ideas sketched out on their debut, blending them with a new direction. Building on the recent work of acts like Black Dice and Growing, Fuck Buttons sketch out a breakdown of form in a game with almost Picasso-like traits, shaping a creature that can rightly be placed within that approach to noise that goes hunting for the beat. Gone are the vocals (for the better?), replaced by an ultra-technical approach reflected in constant use of effects and an imposing mixing job.

The spinning blades of "Surf Solar" cut through the air right from the start, hurling the listener into a parallel, alienating universe. A ten-minute trip, obsessive and cold at first, that gradually opens up into a raw, utterly pure melody, moving in waves that change direction at regular intervals. Crowning the perfect climax is a majestic explosion that unleashes the sonic energy and sheer scale of drones fired off at full force, before slowly fading out.

The album's leitmotif can also be traced in tracks like "Rough Steez" or "Phantom Limb", strange synthetic episodes with a Dadaist flavour that recall the crooked arrangements of "Ribs Out". And while "The Lisbon Maru", following the pattern of the opening track, further emphasizes the tribal, geometric element, "Olympians", with an intro that's vaguely dance-flavoured, hits the accelerator, turning out superlative in its excessive, unrestrained unfolding.

But it's probably with the last two songs that Fuck Buttons reach their peak. "Space Mountain" lives two parallel lives: one in the relentless rhythm section that, without ever overdoing it, runs underground along the track's spine, the other in the symmetrically shifting kraut structures. The closing "Flight Of The Feathered Serpent" flies sky-high, brushing up against the heights of Field, amid dance tribalism and a drone overdose.

Updating the dream-techno lesson of the Nineties for an age of noise and drone, and moving with innate ease between kraut-style grooves, triumphant à-la Jean-Michel Jarre openings and sonic evolutions bordering on progressive, Fuck Buttons have built a work that's hard to pin down, a "Guernica" for our times.

The tours keep coming, the fanbase keeps growing. And the duo seem to want to take a break. It's no coincidence, then, that Benjamin's side project under the alias Blanck Mass released a self-titled album on Rock Action in 2011. The basic influence of the duo's sound is certainly still present here, though stripped of the tight beat of their latest LP. What's left in between? Drones of cosmic bass tones, celestial ambient unfolding, and an ever-forming sense of totality. Labelling it as just another same-old dream-ambient record, identical to itself throughout its run (aside from rare forays into lukewarm noise), wouldn't even be that far off the mark — if it weren't for the fact that, even though similar albums come out by the dozen (just think of Bvdub's latest, drab effort), only a few truly manage to capture the spirit of a cosmic totality, one that's often merely sketched and rarely takes on a truly fully-formed shape.

The crystalline, airy advance of "Sifted Gold" ripples foamily through loops straight out of the Fuck Buttons playbook, while "Sundowner", opening on quiet vibrations, unfurls its boreal trail across eight minutes of pure placidity. But the range of reference points widens further: "Chernobyl" follows in the footsteps of Fennesz's "Vacuum", "Raw Deal" opens up to glitch and field recordings, the underwater teeming of "Sub Serious" speaks the language of Emeralds reined in at their most impetuous, "Land Disasters" again cites the Austrian's "Black Sea" amid curtains of epic, ecstatic drones, "Fuckers" is new-age purity chiselled out of trails and muffled voices, while "What You Know" picks the cosmic thread back up.

Clean, simple, unpretentious. These are the qualities that define Power's solo debut. Shedding his Canadian shirt, he manages to play with finesse, blending cosmic music, field recordings, and ambient into an album that makes evocativeness its strongest suit.

Fast forward to 2013, and it's time for something new. Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power rise to new heights on Slow Focus, unleashing the classic third album that meets and synthesizes everything they've been so far, while opening the door to new perspectives. The duo's journey, as deep and chaotic on their debut as it was tribal and acid on Tarot Sport, finally reaches its definitive peak.

We spoke of roots, the ones that anchor "Brainfreeze" to the ground, a track that remains rock-solid in its progression, built on a syncopated rhythm section with an almost EBM feel (does the latest work by Prurient on Blackest Ever Black ring a bell?). The motion is truly martial, relentless. A war waged that finds a truce in the splendid analog glow of "Year Of The Dog", a sonic experiment not so conceptually different – much like "Prince's Prize" – from Lorenzo Senni's "Quantum Jelly" on eMego.

And so what Fuck Buttons theorize turns out to be nothing less than a journey from earth toward other worlds, one that, as it dematerializes, draws in their previous works too. A process of abstraction from reality that finds its first substantial astral synths in the single "The Red Wing", coated in an acid streak building toward a progressive climax. The tribal zombie dance of "Sentients" pushes straight ahead through its rising back-and-forth motion, eventually breaking every barrier thanks to sinister synths that widen its disruptive, Carpenter-esque reach. But the grandeur of "Stalker", the ideal freeze-dried, glucose-dense counterpart to "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", pushes the mind toward an immaculate paradise. The mood is genuinely aggressive, almost brutal, save for dreamy layers that recall, almost, Blanck Mass.

You'll be hit by a blinding white light, an immensely powerful nirvana in the making that finds its ultimate illumination in the closing "Hidden Xs". Drones of celestial sound signaling new dawns. A civilization that, unlike the post-atomic universe of the contemporary "Tomorrow's Harvest" by Boards Of Canada, reclaims itself in a dimension that is no longer earthly. Muffled drums grinding away from the very start, and sweet drones rising ever higher. Then a moment of stillness, and the stop&go serves as a setup for one of the most staggering sonic accelerations in memory: the synths chase each other like horses, galloping toward the stars in a motion that's moving in both its power and precision. It's a universe of boundless scale, yet it becomes geometric as it expands. And with the same force with which all this grandeur rose, it then gently fades away into a trickle of pastel-colored loops.

And so the mind surrenders to these sounds, to this grandiosity. An end in itself? Probably. But far from being a flaw, it simply makes you dream. And just as dreams are fleeting, so is this one, brief. Nothing else really matters. Fuck Buttons are playing at the highest level here, fusing elements, flipping them inside out, and extracting surgical outputs. "Slow Focus" is an attempt to conceive music for the mind. The result may well be something else entirely. Nothing more, nothing less than music to expand space itself.

Power followed up his project with Dumb Flesh (2015), on which he surrenders with little compromise to a maximalist aesthetic that seems intent on catapulting us toward immediate trance: relentless loops, almost always built on brazenly danceable percussion and synth lines that recall the darkest incursions of iamamiwhoami ("Atrophies", "Double Cross"). The only sinister notes come from the deformed, inhuman voices that surface from the dense streams of the tracks. Only with the closing "Detritus" do we find Power's noise-rooted side again, with a corrosive soundscape that spills over into a relentless charge – a track that could easily have fit on the tracklist of "Slow Focus". It's an exhilarating listening experience that, through the thematic echo of its artwork, delivers on the idea of a chaotic yet tangible physicality, like a sweaty, pulsing dancefloor. Looking closer, though, the devices at play feel all too convenient: Power doesn't bother building rising atmospheres, going straight for the jugular with stunning dj-set-style attacks, denying us a gradual, deep immersion that would have been more effective had it truly been developed over the long haul. In short, "Dumb Flesh" stops at skin-deep sensation, however enticing in its free, immediate expression.

The other half of the sky, Andrew Hung, made his solo debut with the two EPs Rave Cave Level 1 (2015) and Rave Cave Level 2 (2015), followed by the soundtrack for The Greasy Strangler (2016), essentially a collection of childish techno-pop and hip-hop sketches built on cheap electronics and helium-filtered vocals.

Just "two" years later, we find good old Benjamin in dazzling form, once again among the flagship names of the New York label, but with a new, intriguing goal to chase: turning everything, or almost everything, upside down. World Eater, his third LP in six years, is first and foremost an inversion. A genuine frontal assault, as suggested by the snarl on the cover, primarily aimed at upending the proverbial calm of a producer whose electronic sound has generally leaned toward achieving a clear, celestial sensory ecstasy, now giving way to an unusual fury that was evidently held back far too much in previous releases. The album plays out as a genuine concept piece on humanity's fate, viewed through the knobs of synthesizers caught in a delirious abstraction, a kind of cinematic horror brimming with industrial blasts ("Rhesus Negative") and filthy, murderous electro charges ("The Rat"). There are jolts, chilly pauses, harmonic deconstructions that contrast with the disturbed climax. Sure, the mad context from which it's genuinely hard to make sense at first remains. But after a couple of listens, everything starts to take on its own cohesion, its own direction.

Benjamin John Power has thus tried, for the first time in his solo career, to expose something deeply "intimate" and indecipherable, something halfway between rage and dream, fury and stillness, instinct and heart. And listening to the seven tracks of this remarkable third album, we can only confirm just how brilliantly that goal was achieved.

Having set aside the role of agitator and kitsch provocateur with the forgettable Animated Violence Mild, released in 2019, Benjamin John Power in 2021 tries to immerse himself in the cosmos with a two-suite concept titled In Ferneaux, reaching for a transcendent dimension, ending up, perhaps unknowingly, sounding at times like Reinhard Lakomy, at others like a field-recording sampler from some random nerdy label in search of its own identity. An unusual mix on paper, in which the English musician aims to "manage misery on the path to blessing", as stated in the album's presentation. To do so, he lays out two roughly 20-minute phases: "Phase I" and "Phase II". The first half, which effectively constitutes the work itself, is exactly what was just described: a progressive-electronic-tinged escape alternating with cosmic background noise aiming to reach a parallel reality. Something halfway between, indeed, hell and paradise.

The other half of the record, "Phase II", instead flows between new-age writing and sudden metallic thuds. Sonic rifts that open abruptly, in a rapid rise and fall between heaven and earth. It's a back-and-forth of opposing sensations that turns tribal in the third part, amid random screams and assorted wails, before musically reworking its own imagery, overflowing with contrasting effects.

"Misery and blessing are one and the same", Power concludes. An ancient message that the producer translates in his own way, with results that are at times uneven, in an intimate, elusive concept album. In Ferneaux is, ultimately, a sonic immersion between the world of demons and that of angels – ambitious going in, and only partly fully successful coming out.

*contributions by Michele Palozzo ("Dumb Flesh"), Giuliano Delli Paoli and Angelo Molaro ("World Eater", "In Ferneaux")

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