ANIMATED Violence Mild, the new record by Benjamin John Power, is a blood-red slab of contradictions.

Within its grooves are some of the East Lothian-based musician’s most ferocious and most blissful moments yet; and while it’s a record born of extreme emotions, it’s also his most popular, entering the vinyl album charts at number 10.

A punk who believes in love, a composer who renders human feeling from cold machines, Power has long straddled apparently opposing forces, whether as part of F*** Buttons, the duo he formed in the mid-2000s with fellow art student Andrew Hung, or in his solo guise, Blanck Mass.

In Power’s hands, the punishing can be popular, the avant garde made accessible.

Back in the brighter days of 2012, Danny Boyle’s Olympics opening ceremony featured two F*** Buttons tracks. During the raising of the Union flag, the London Symphony Orchestra performed a version of Sundowner, a euphoric cut from Blanck Mass’s debut album, released in 2011 on Mogwai’s Rock Action Records.

He’s since moved label to Brooklyn-based indie Sacred Bones and home to the east of Edinburgh, where he wrote 2017’s World Eater, a furious response to the darkening global situation featuring hammering hell-raiser The Rat and black metal screaming.

The screaming returns early on Animated Violence Mild with Death Drop, a seven-minute ear-splitter which evokes images of Linda Blair in The Exorcist and The Chipmunks.

That schlocky sensibility was present in World Eater’s sinister, toy piano melodies and in Power’s soundtrack to Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s 2014 giallo homage The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears.

It’s there too in Animated Violence Mild’s lurid artwork, a bitten apple oozing crimson goo, and in Craig Murray’s video to Love Is A Parasite, the album’s lunging lead single.

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The album’s concept began as a visual aesthetic, says Power, designer of all F*** Buttons’s album covers to date.

“I always start with a blank canvas, and find things start to present themselves as I get a little more into my own head,” he says. His ideas began to form with No Dice, a mid-tempo funk track dripping with 1980s gloss.

“When I was writing this track I found these orchestral bits coming in, and they seemed almost obscene in that 1980s way. It was this important moment in consumerism and that supermarket, rapid-turnaround culture, and I wanted to reference that with these over-ostentatious hooks and big synth lines – not as a homage but as a jab on it.”

Power says the record was born of grief for a planet ravaged by consumerism – a “serpent which now coils back upon us”.

As the album neared completion, Power’s father died. In the subsequent weeks, he found himself painting for the first time.

“I studied visual art when I was younger but I hadn’t actually worked with paints until towards the end of last year when I was in the middle of grief,” he says. “It was a coping mechanism. There is a very heavy emotional weight to everything I do and I found it difficult to go straight back into the studio so I had to find another vessel, another form of letting go.”

Power has continued to paint, posting his most recent effort on social media the day after Animated Violence Mild, which is dedicated to his dad, hit the vinyl top ten.

“It was interesting conceptually as I had already formed this idea of grief as what we have lost as a species, as a world,” he says. “Then I had this really personal grief. It shone a new light on the whole aspect of grieving and where we’ve ended up with global mass consumerism.”

Despite its deep sense of loss, there is much light and unexpected beauty on the record, whether in the pretty harp sounds of ambient track Creature/West Fuqua, the bright hooks of Hush Money or House Vs House, an eight-minute anthem with a verse/chorus structure, a catchy melody and even a major key progression. It could almost be optimistic.

“Maybe there is a certain part of my subconscious yearning for some kind of hope in these times,” says Power. “Though there is a sense of tongue-in-cheek in terms of how pompous a lot of those elements are, there is still a part of me that feels quite cheeky regarding certain musical ideas.”

He adds: “It’s very easy to take yourself too seriously as an electronic artist. The aesthetic may be quite dark but I’m still a human being who likes to smile and laugh.”

November 23, The Art School, Glasgow, 7pm, £18.15. www.seetickets.com

Animated Violence Mild is out now via Sacred Bones. blanckmass.co.uk