A U R O R A
Sound artist and composer Ben Frost can both scare the pants off you and transport you to a distant place where, for a brief spell, nothing really matters except the aural experience around you—and it’s incredibly freeing. Frost’s work compels the listener to listen—he doesn\'t make music for backgrounds. On his fifth album, the artist cements his fondness for unexpected textures and drones, loud-soft lurching, and unsettling noise. From the muted chimes and bells set against the percussive clatter and dissonance of the remarkable “Venter” to the sustained, cicada-like hiss on “No Sorrowing” and the high-frequency static on “Sola Fide,” Frost continues to create sounds that feel unquestionably *his*, as experimental as they may be. “A Single Point of Blinding Light” is filled with mesmerizing, dread-filled, industrial clatter and chaos. “The Teeth Behind the Kisses” is a ghost in the machine, silently lurking and threatening although it’s barely there. Much of *Aurora* was composed while Frost was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, collaborating on a film reflecting the region’s notorious violence. Forget “Eraserhead.” This is the new industrial revolution.
A U R O R A is Ben Frost’s highly anticipated fifth solo release, his first since the widely acclaimed 2009 album BY THE THROAT. A U R O R A aims directly, through its monolithic construction, at blinding luminescent alchemy; not with benign heavenly beauty but through decimating magnetic force. This is no pristine vision of digital music, it is a filthy, uncivilized offering of interrupted future time where emergency flares illuminate ruined nightclubs and the faith of the dancefloor rests in a diesel-powered generator spewing forth its own extinction, eating rancid fuel so loudly it threatens to overrun the very music it is powering.
The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer returns with his best album yet. 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 and Swans’ Thorr Harris.
A masterfully cataclysmic overture to extremity, this is a record that extols the virtues of submission and perserverence.
A U R O R A is Australian-born, Iceland-based composer Ben Frost's fifth official album, and his first since 2011's Solaris, his collaborative project with Daníel Bjarnason.
Album review: Ben Frost - 'A U R O R A'. "Both testing of boundaries and transcendental of beauty…"