Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.06.2014, Page 35

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35The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 08 — 2014 MUSIC
Album
Reviews
Ben Frost
A U R O R A
2014
ethermachines.com
A journey into the hi-tech
heart of darkness
At the end of April, Ben Frost
held a concert in a packed
Kaffibarinn to premiere his
new album ‘A U R O R A.’ To say that the
atmosphere was intense would be putting
it mildly. With Greg Fox and Shahzad
Ismaily on drums and percussion, Frost
made the whole bar throb as the music
built in volume and pressure until it
almost became physical to touch. It was
claustrophobic and confrontational, yet
strangely alluring.
Listening to ‘A U R O R A’ a month
later, it’s safe to say that Frost has captured
much of that same abstract power and
totality on record. It may not have the two-
hours-plus Gilgamesh expansiveness of
modern day Swans, but Frost packs just
as much epic scope into the album’s 40
minutes, mixing high definition digital
production with extreme noise that is as
beautiful as it is fucking terrifying.
‘A U R O R A’ at times seems to be a
record at war with itself. The hard Teutonic
rhythms, chimes and bells produced by
Fox and Swan’s Thor Harris on “Nolan” and
“Secant,” stamp a mark of brutal authority
and dominion on everything before being
subjected to annihilation through blocks
of filtered noises and corroded melody
phrases. Such music is the latest in a long
continuum of artists who have looked to
harness the twin
elements of structure
and violence in the
service of music. In
the ‘80s artists such
as Z’ev and Test De-
pt harnessed the dis-
carded relics and ob-
jects of heavy in-
dustry to create con-
structivist noise sta-
tements against the
rise of the capitalist
state machine. As
digital culture ush-
ered society’s move
into the immaterial world, artists from
Burial to Actress utilised the ghosts of rave
culture and scraps of digital sounds to the
point of abstraction, while Tim Hecker
(a man who shares a similar artistic and
liminal space as Frost) creates music that
is threatened and ultimately destroyed by
the onslaught of technology and noise.
While it’s a highly overused
metaphor, Frost’s music is still best
described in a cinematic context, not in
the way that most film scores signpost
emotions but rather how his music evokes
aspects of a full cinematic world—light,
objects, shade, form, and sound design.
His albums can be seen as self-reflexive
worlds in and of themselves. 2006’s ‘Theory
Of Machines’ had a cold, clinical eye for
detail and smoothness of texture that
seemed to map out the areas of alienation
and tension in our modern environment.
Meanwhile, 2009’s ‘By the Throat’ and his
soundtrack to ‘Black Marrow’ explored a
world that was primordial ooze, a dramatic
pre-civilisation place where unnameable
beasts roamed free (along with such
wonderfully visceral track names as
“Carbon Vessel Motherfucker”).
With ‘A U R O R A,’ we see the
scale and power of his music writ large
in widescreen, painting a sprawling
future-now world of accelerated tech-
nocapitalism, as pan-global corporations
wage incessant conflicts for resources
in a post-scarcity world, the beeps and
whirrs of the machines in ‘Theory Of
Machines’ replaced with the whines
and roars of military ordinance and jet
engines. “Flex” and “Nolan” feel like one
of these said conflicts captured on record,
as the sound of compressed martial
trumpets a pounding barrage of carnage,
whooshing synths scything along the top
like tracer fire. Everything is pushed to
near maximum levels of tolerance before
“The Teeth Behind Kisses” views the
aftermath.
‘A U R O R A’ also conveys the
diasporic nature of a digital world where
dispossessed people and cultures have
long since mingled and coalesced into
a singular mass of sounds and styles,
untethered to any single point in time or
space (very much mirroring Frost’s own
tendency to drift between musical genres).
Techno and rave synths mix abundantly
on this album alongside aimless tribal
sounds and polyrhythms. “Venter” mixes
rumbling tom drums with digital pan
pipes and arpeggios while “Sola Fide”
displays the sounds of anonymous souks,
before “A Single Point Of Blinding Light”
provokes a temple throbbing collapsing of
rhythms and cadmium synth lines.
That may sound a tad melodramatic,
but it’s worth considering the origins of
‘A U R O R A.’ Frost wrote most of the
album while rec-
ording the music
for the art project
‘The Enclave’ in the
Eastern Democratic
Republic of Congo,
a place ravaged by
years of civil war and
plunder. This place,
and the rest of Africa,
has provided the
conceptual mat-
erial for ‘A U R O R
A.’ Africa today is a
place where colonial
masters, old and
new, carve up its resources, fostering
continuous war for the spoils, all the while
using it as a dumping ground for the
west’s hi-tech crap.
In an interview with The Wire
magazine, Frost talks of the noise he
experienced in the cities, where cheap
Chinese speakers wired to generators
pumped out blaring Congolese gangsta
rap, a chaotic place where people survive
on the electronic scraps of the western
world. This is the source of the noise you
hear on ‘A U R O R A.’ It’s a world of dirty
broadband and asymmetrical societal
structures, where herders trade songs via
phones with Bluetooth, 12-year-old kids
make radio transmitters with electrical
junk from the dumps, and the unregulated
black markets of Système D furnish the
generators that provided the power for
Frost to write ‘A U R O R A’ on his laptop.
With his past albums, Ben Frost
sought to create self-contained immersive
worlds, each with their own internal logic
where the tracks relate and feed into each
other. On ‘A U R O R A’ though, Frost has
taken and extrapolated the digital shards
of the world around him and created a
sci-fi body of work that instead mirrors
the hyperstructured, cacophonous world
we wallow in today. It’s formless and filthy,
and very few people can capture this the
way that Frost has done.
- BOB CLUNESS
“Frost talks of the noise
he experienced in the
cities, where cheap Chi-
nese speakers wired to
generators pumped out
blaring Congolese gang-
sta rap, a chaotic place
where people survive on
the electronic scraps of
the western world.”