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Scottish Alternative Music Awards (SAMAs) Return

  • Published in News

The Scottish Alternative Music Awards (SAMAs) are back and will take place at Saint Luke’s on Thursday October 25. The awards are sponsored by Glasgow’s Rebel Rebel barbers and exist to showcase and celebrate Scottish artists through seven unique music awards. Since the awards launched in 2010 winners have included the likes of Colonel Mustard & The Dijon 5, Gerry Cinnamon, Be Charlotte, The Ninth Wave and many more artists who are finding great success in the global music industry. Each award has four nominees, and is identified from 21 music industry judges, the winners are then decided by the public.

The first act announced to perform live at the ceremony is Edinburgh based electronica artist Benjamin John Power or otherwise known as Blanck Mass. Tickets for the ceremony are available now (£10 / £20) via Eventbrite.

The SAMAs ceremony will also raise money for Help Musicians Scotland’s mental health charity, ‘Music Minds Matter’. The nominations and public vote will take place in September.

The seven awards are:

Best Rock in association with Eventbrite UK

Best Live Act in association with XpoNorth

Best Newcomer in association with The Academy of Music & Sound

Best Hip Hop in association with Help Musicians UK

Best Metal in association with Hard Rock Café Glasgow

Best Electronic in association with citizenM

Best Acoustic in association with Assai UK

 

Other event partners include The Skinny, Pistonhead Lager, Jagermeister, BRAW, and The Print Box.

 

SAMA founder, Richy Muirhead, said: “After hosting the SAMAs Paisley Takeover and showcases at Xpo North earlier this year, I’m very excited for the 2018 awards process to begin! The ceremony will be a giant celebration with the 7 awards, performances, and bringing together the music industry and music fans. Scotland has always punched well above it’s weight, and it’s important we take a moment to celebrate this culture!”

 

 

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Blanck Mass, Oslo, Hackney

  • Published in Live

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, your body is a shell, and Ben Power’s new album as Blanck Mass, Dumb Flesh, has as its theme that very subject - the fatty casing of flesh - the body. At Oslo in Hackney, Power heads onstage smiling. The man that used to spend his gigs screaming into Fisher Price toys, opens a beer, positions himself in front of his laptop and gets stuck into a set in which it’s fair to say there’s quite a lot going on - samples, drum machines, modular synth and banging techno that provokes the unsettling feeling that something is approaching.

Power begins with Dumb Flesh opener, ‘Loam’ (a clay-based soil - good for growing certain types of plant, although presumably not the subject of the song in this context) then without a break heads into lead single ‘Dead Format’ (which speaks for itself). He begins to nod, the speakers start to shake, and the crowd begins to nod with him. After the grandiose space opera of his first Blanck Mass LP, Power’s latest, ironically, is more ‘traditional’ fare, much more similar to his output with Andrew Hung in Fuck Buttons. He has turned his gaze from out towards the outer limits, inwards, towards the body - its facets and its limits. From the ambience of 'Loam' to the sinisterisms of 'Cruel Sport', the album provokes the question - if we are who we are, but the body is just a body, what else is in there?

Although at times it feels like there is an inherent nihilism to the sonic landscape of Dumb Flesh, as Power stands on the stage in front of a laptop patching modules together, the lights flash and the floor shakes, one feels like in fact the dumb flesh he’s referring to might in fact be the big mass of bodies bobbing in front of him.

 

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