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Bleach For The Stars

Visit my 'Blog' area above for reading lists on pertinent issues relevant to the perspective of this site, drawn from my personal home library, and then my further periodic jottings and recordings in what has become a pedantic, never-ending audio-literary diary on the harrowing collapse of sound European civilization.

 

Otherwise, consider browsing around this site for more external book readings, or, if you would like to pass a few minutes, to listen to some of my learner's improvised neoclassical and traditional folk proto-musical experiments. 

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More of this material can be found in my self-published print book, "The Less Than Jolly Heretic: The Philosophy of Hurt Children and An Adult's Transvaluated Moral Principle", clocking in at 788 gruelling pages of Speaking Truth to Power (which would itself have made for quite a good alternative title save for the irony that it's nigh-on the complete opposite of what everyone else in it is doing).

Expect a candid opening autobiographical essay on a difficult life detouring into the matters of science, high culture, history, and society that interest me, followed by a selection of personal letters and an extensive, no-holds-barred diary covering the two-and-a-half years between early 2022 and the Summer of 2024, and then a selection of personal poems, artworks, Nature photography, and home life pursuits, plus a lengthy, categorized bibliography of useful literature drawn from my home library. 

Book specifications: 

788 Pages, US Trade, Standard Colour, 60# White, Linen Wrap (Hardback), Glossy Cover, £49.

 

If you'd like to order a copy, visit my 'Shop' link at the top of this page.

 

Alternatively, I can give out a flattened PDF e-book version for £7. My business email address is at the bottom of the page. Email me if you'd like this e-book version, so I can give you my PayPal address, and can subsequently email a copy to you.

Origins

The project name Bleach For The Stars (BFTS for short) that I utilize for my website and - primarily - for one of my musical solo 'bands', was picked as a sardonic wordplay on the showbiz idiom "reach for the stars" which means to achieve something difficult, but which also evokes mercantile qualities that I find rapacious and that I associate with the crass, sell-out attention-seekers of the music industry.  I was instead seeking a spiritual principle of life and beauty, based on the fundamental physical laws (and near fundamental, if one considers structure, form, and multicellular complexity) laid out by Nature. 

There's something saccharine and banal about the original motto also, especially in overuse. Not everyone can attain mastery. As both Alexis de Tocqueville and - with a life-time's torturous precision - Friedrich Nietzsche have pointed out quite well enough already (let alone Murray Rothbard), egalitarianism is for slaves. There are plenty of them about to promote it, certainly, or at least to unconsciously act out the principle daily, regardless of an awareness of the linguistic terminology or an investment in the texts of this philosophical religious doctrine, a creation of Paul the Apostle, given over one thousand seven hundred years of deep pedagogic introjection in a civilization brutalized by Christianity, and the secularized Christian values of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. A genuine European civilization favouring the lives of physical European bodies, and not simply their ideological soundness and conformist orthodoxy, did not really outlast the Fall of Imperial Rome. The West itself is a theocratic construct, carried on too long, even as that alien desert god is jettisoned for an atheist's holy 'reason', and the humanist determinism and reductionism of soul-dead materialists, a terrible nihilism that jeopardises our science and voids us from the spiritual, and the awe-inspiring.

My project title was also intended as a serious reflection on what I personally deem "psycho-cosmology", which one could alternatively interpret within a framework of deistic teleological cosmopsychism or indeed panentheism, with an encouragement to clean up and whiten our perceptual universe – to think clearly, and purely, in bodily health, and to pursue truth; to find our fundamental conscious purpose within the vast, cyclical aeons of the physical realm; the only reality. The stars, looking down coldly on us, a blinding light appearing brighter than the Sun, would be as good an inspiration for that cleansing Renaissance as any. Under their dazzling glares, we can observe ourselves, near indistinguishable in our servility. It's good to be optimistic generally.

I regularly attempt linked concept albums, each building somewhat on the previous, so there are a few common themes I return to. Musically, I compose bleak Electroacoustic and Post-Industrial experiments, ominous Dark Ambient, morose modernist Neoclassical and even a varying selection of fairly accessible Folk-Industrial (or perhaps electronic drumming Neofolk) crossover pieces, as well as synthesizer based 'vintage' soundtracks, with an eye to history. It's quite hard to categorise, as many of the albums are completely different from each other, and freely mix different styles of European music, from ancient pre-Christian rhythmic influences, to Germanic and Celtic motifs, to the traditional Western harmonic style and the genuine, and to the primitive Bacchic decadence of the contemporary, the latter unfortunately affected at times by the African drumming utilized by folkish rock music, albeit with sequenced drumkits. Some tracks have poetic spoken word lyrics, delivered in a rough, acerbic speaking voice, rendering them better understood as "songs", and some don't. Some instrumental pieces too are driven social observations, cautionary warnings, mournful reminiscences, and memorials, and some remain ephemeral, numinous, or reflective, almost opaque, but never entirely so by active design. I have never been interested in writing commercial lyrics, so do not make any conventional popular music theory concessions. Most of the verses began as structured poems, with formal metre and rhyme, re-arranged slightly later when I set them to music.

I refer to my project as 'middlebrow' in that it's too intense and serious in concept for casual listening, and more elitist than is generally expected in the mass of low IQ gibberish that passes for 21st Century lyrical popular music and yet is still a very long way below the beauty of Classical music, the real, only, music of Western civilisation. There is no compare. I'm working on bringing it closer to a Classical structuring, or at least proper Folk, minus any aspect of the soiled, degenerate modern world. I think I take too much pleasure in unorthodox scales and live improvisations. In my home, I listen solely to Classical music, and am quite selective within that even, and simply compose these amateurish pieces as timewasters and pot-boilers, having progressed with violin only as far as grade 5.

 

I despise autotune manipulation and look at the much-lauded quantizing process with near-total contempt, seeing yet another sterile, mechanical gimmick, the go-to artifice of spoilt, trammelled snobs. Much of what is deemed as professional modern production merely serves as an uninspiring corporate tool for the psychoacoustic marketing of bullshit to asinine minds, bolstered by advanced computational linguistics research, a brightly spray-coated polystyrene packaging for the ear, prepared by factory robots, just more white noise despite it all.

I favour live physical instruments and have a violin, autoharp, ocarina, and acoustic guitar to work with, plus a few others occasionally, as well as utilising an M-Audio Oxygen 25 keyboard running piano emulation software such as PianoTeq7. I compose most of my drum rhythms from scratch using the Re-drum software drum programmer that comes with Reason 12 but am also fond of implementing found sounds & field-recordings, and home-made percussion picked up on Dictaphone. I am extremely fond of Goldwave, and would be totally unable to complete 100% of my song-crafting process without it

 

Note: if you click on the small crotchet symbol with the three horizontal bars to the right corner of each album player below, you can listen whilst reading my personal notes.​​​

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The first piece of music I ever wrote, an untitled melody for Scottish Bagpipes inspired by The Green Hills of Tyrol and The Carles Wi' The Breeks, found in The Highland Bagpipe Tutor, Part 1, released by Seumas MacNeill and Thomas Pearston of The College of Piping, 1997.

Eternal MissionBleach For The Stars
00:00 / 06:13
BFTS Sampler (short excerpts from recordings)Bleach For The Stars
00:00 / 13:48
Global Collapse (personal reflections)Benjamin Power
00:00 / 13:27
Agrarianism and Socialist Prepping (personal reflections)Benjamin Power
00:00 / 19:53
Why Are We Bothering with Electric Vehicles? (personal reflections)Benjamin Power
00:00 / 01:11
Old Liars in Public Places (personal reflections)Benjamin Power
00:00 / 09:48
Teleonomic Panentheist Biophysics (unrefined idea)Benjamin Power
00:00 / 05:02

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