Ben Frost’s interests are vast, and that includes the way he approaches his music. The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer has written scores for dance companies, soundtracked films, and collaborated with visual artists and poets. He cast himself as a kind of endurance artist on the cover of his 2007 album Theory of Machines and, in 2013, directed his own theatrical adaption of Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory. Frost also co-produced experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare, Volume 3 in 2013, played “fire” on Swans’ The Seer a year earlier, and is an important collaborator for Tim Hecker. Outside the studio, he’s articulate when discussing what he’s doing, loading comments about his work with heavy concepts and meaning: his interviews fold in references to biology, astronomy, literature, nature, art, professional basketball. For all this, his music is equally fascinating when you strip away the context and simply let the sounds he’s making overtake you.
Frost’s latest album, A U R O R A, offers his best example yet of this sort of aural suffocation. The uptick could partly be due to a new approach: Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox, Swans’ Thorr Harris, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. A U R O R A is, in a sense, the proper companion to 2009’s excellent By the Throat, but it’s shaggier and more intense. Still, Frost is able to maintain a sense of spaciousness amid the feedback.
That feeling of distance coincides with the facts of A U R O R A’s creation: Frost wrote most of the collection on a laptop while working with photographer/filmmaker Richard Mosse in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, in turn, made a series of grainy films—explosions, volcanoes, bullets through bodies—as a rollout to A U R O R A, as well as the album’s cover art). He also recorded in Empac, New York, and Reykjavik—where he mixed the record with Valgeir Sigurdsson—and somewhere along the way, Tim Hecker provided sound design and post-production work.
Despite its scattered creation, I tend to listen to A U R O R A as one long piece, letting the different modes congeal into a whole. You hear minimalism buried in the fuzz, and it’s also easy to tell that Frost is fond of industrial, punk, and metal. Instead of the noisy, meditative openers of past outings, A U R O R A's first track, “Flex”, sounds like an airplane taking off; the steady, escalating synthesizer gives way to frantic jazz drumming partially consumed the crackling, loose wires around it. This bleeds into “Nolan”, a track that would fit easily on Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet, featuring a percussive thump—sticks rattling, synthesizers lapping. Like much of A U R O R A, it feels like a battle between the human and the digital, Frost’s cold synthesizers and laptops vs. his collaborators’ sweaty percussion.
But the album is not all violent stoicism; there’s dark humor here as well. “Diphenyl Oxalate”, a track named for the chemical used in glowsticks, hits like a black metal rave, and it’s one of a few places where Frost seems to be creating dance music, or at least music that makes your innards move. In this mode, he fits in line with producers like Container, Sandwell District, Demdike Stare, and Vatican Shadow, but he never stays in one place, and the album is filled with variety and a great sense of dynamics. The previously mentioned “Nolan” takes an Eastern turn, and mixes in wind chimes beneath a gale force surge. “No Sorrowing” is a hazy, restful drift. The warping “Sola Fide” sounds like loose wires and firecrackers, but maintains a melodic side. (In the liner notes, Eddi the Bomb is credited with “explosives.”)
If the album has a center, it’s “Venter”, which has a little of everything Frost does well. It opens with a blend of clean and distorted hand drums, which are joined by a distant, crystalline synthesizer that grows stronger over the first two minutes before practically being buried by the sound of bells and chimes. For the remaining four and a half minutes, these strands fluctuate, growing more intense, but also more refined. Then, at the four-minute mark, almost like offering some kind of introverted, experimental take on an EDM drop, the track gains a new kind of force and momentum on the back of whiplashing electronics. It’s an epic track, the kind of song that fills up a room.
Frost named "Venter" after biologist Craig Venter, the first person to create a cell containing a synthetic genome. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said the scientist would be his dream collaborator: “It would be about getting some face time with the guy who literally synthesized life—he made life. It just makes me feel so small and insignificant.” A U R O R A can be heard as Frost’s attempt to create something physical, and it stands above the rest of his discography.
