Nearing a decade residing in Iceland, Ben Frost has steadfastly established himself as one of Australia’s premier electronic exports, pushing boundaries on record, on stage, and in extracurricular artistic pursuits. Latest record A U R O R A, Frost’s first since 2009’s By The Throat, needles confronting frequencies into all-obliterating leviathans of noise.
“I wouldn’t say that they are the noises going on inside of my head, as in ‘this is what the inside of my head sounds like’,” Frost explains while ordering coffee nearby his Icelandic home. “But there is definitely an element, more often than not, of trying to realise something in an external form that I’m able to hear and want to exist outside of my head. It’s a weirdly visual process as well, often they’re not specific sounds in terms of where they’re coming from or what their inherent nature is – they are these sorts of shapes. It becomes about mediating between the idea in my head and what’s coming out of the speakers. Trying to balance the relationship between those two things. There’s a definite element of reaching out for an idea.”
It’s easy to attribute the extraordinary scope of Frost’s aural constructions to a geographical standing in the isolated realm of Iceland – a fallacy, especially seeing how A U R O R A was primarily composed in DR Congo.
“I really wonder about this romantic notion of the geographical locality as a driving force. The music I’m striving to make, often these attempts end in failure – my career is a ten-year document of different kinds of failure – they’re all attempts at ecstasy of some kind, a kind of euphoria, a kind of oblivion, somehow. That’s what I demand of all art. Anything that affects me is going to be doing that on some level. I think that’s what we’re drawn to. Rooting that in a fundamental realism, saying, ‘This occurred in that place’, I think that’s effective at selling records, but not really effective at affecting the listener.
“I remember vividly the months of fallout after my album Theory Of Machines, we were bombarded with these ‘glacial landscapes’, fuckin’ ‘wind-swept polar Bjork-inspired blah blah blah’, all this clichéd bullshit about Iceland, when the truth is I wrote most of that record in fucking Queensberry St, Melbourne, Australia. I’m not saying those things are not true, I’m saying the truth is actually a subjective thing. It’s less glamorous to put in a press release that you wrote most of an album in a British Airways business lounge. It just doesn’t sound as cool.”
The ‘drop’ is an intrinsic element to EDM, found all over the airwaves and huge festival environments. The dynamic can be found on A U R O R A, but instead of a cheap ploy to stoke gurn-faced fist-pumping, A U R O R A instigates teeth-shattering terror.
“That avoiding cliché, circumventing the pitfalls of uninteresting music is often a case of pushing harder and further into the idea that scares you, the very idea of that ‘drop’ of the big chorus, the big chords, and in the case of A U R O R A, the light. I’m very hopeful people will hear a radiance in this music that I’ve never really attempted before. This isn’t a record that dwells in the shadows and deals in darkness as currency. It’s a record that is concerned with light, this blinding luminescence. It should feel alive.
“A track like Secant, one of the images that was forefront in my mind was what has been achieved in the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] in Switzerland, that striving for attainment of a higher understanding, reaching out into the dark – taking something from a finite point and exploding outwards in a shower of energy and movement. In a small way, what I’m aiming at with this music is a breaking up of these ideas. Maybe even some of those clichés. I don’t want to be a musician who’s afraid of being uncool. It’s a strangling, horrible place to be. Worrying about how something is going to be perceived is the first step in ensuring it’s shit, basically.”
As for the challenges in finding avenues to release music that is by no means conducive to laptop speaker listening, Frost’s resolve manages to conquer such obstacles. “That’s the part of me that is very Australian, and will always be: fundamentally, I don’t give a fuck. I will find a way, and I always will. There is always a way.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
