Sound

Ben Frost "Scope Neglect" ft. Greg Kubacki & Tarik Barri

Hardly anyone has made such imaginative, sensitive and ecologically inspired noise in recent years

About

Ben Frost is an Australian composer and producer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Frost composes minimalist, instrumental and experimental music, with influences ranging from classical minimalism to punk rock and black metal. Ben fuses intensely structured sound art with militant post-classical electronic music. He shape-shifts physical power with immersively melodic minimalism and rupturing metal.

His albums include:‘Steel Wound (2003), School of Emotional Engineering (as part of the band School of Emotional Engineering) (2004), Theory of Machines (2007), By the Throat (2009), Sólaris (with Daníel Bjarnason) (2011), Aurora (2014), The Centre Cannot Hold (2017), and All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated (2018). He has collaborated with contemporary dance companies Chunky Move, the Icelandic Dance Company, as well as the acclaimed choreographer Wayne McGregor. In 2010 he composed the music for Wayne McGregor’s work FAR.

Frost co-composed with Daníel Bjarnason Music for Solaris, which was inspired by both Stanisław Lem’s original novel, and the 1972 Tarkovsky film Solaris. Commissioned by Unsound Festival, it was performed by Frost, Bjarnason and Sinfonietta Cracovia. He has also composed music for the films, Sleeping Beauty, the Icelandic drama The Deep and the 2015 British television series Fortitude. The Fortitude III (Music from the Original TV Series) album was released in 2018. In 2017, he provided score for Netflix’s German supernatural thriller Dark and the film Super Dark Times.

In 2013, in his first directorial role, he premiered a critically acclaimed music-theatre adaptation of the Iain Banks novel The Wasp Factory.

Frost has done multiple works with Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten, including travelling to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2012 with Mosse, Tweeten and John Holten, to score the sound for Mosse’s artwork The Enclave. In 2017, Frost, Mosse, and Tweeten premiered a new installation entitled Incoming at the Barbican Centre in London.

Frost’s upcoming works include the original score to Baran bo Odar’s Netflix show 1899, and "The Murder of Halit Yozgat", an opera inspired by a rigorous counter-investigation by London-based research agency Forensic Architecture into the assassination of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in his family’s internet café on April 6, 2006.

Programme Text

Gggnashhh. The sweet sound of bursting glaciers as Ben Frost tosses them into his sound basins. Hardly anyone has produced such imaginative, empathetic, and ecologically inspired noise in recent years as the guitar and laptop wizard from Melbourne, Australia. Scope Neglect is the name of his new album – his first in six years, which he will present at donaufestival. Classic industrial grating noise alternates with high-speed black metal thunder, all the while the minimalist spirit of Terry Riley hovers above, casting an iridescent web of sonic textures over the scene.