The Influence Of 'The Beautiful Fuckedness Of This Space'

"For me, all of this music is a romanticised, hyper-realised version of the natural world and in many ways, the way I wish it was. With A U R O R A, it’s about the beautiful fuckedness of this space we’re all currently occupying, the crazy divide in the extremities of the human condition,” says Ben Frost. The Melbourne-born, Reykjavik-based producer is the author of almost a dozen albums but his latest, A U R O R A, is his most visionary work. Carved from titanic shifts in electro ambient noise, with flesh-pummelling drums by Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox, Swans’ Thorr Harris and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, A U R O R A is the sound of planets colliding. For Frost, those divergent worlds are the Democratic Republic Of The Congo (DRC), where he spent time collaborating with video artist Richard Mosse, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

“There is this space in the DRC, this broken, post-apocalyptic landscape where fisherman are sitting there with these jacked Nokia phones watching the World Cup, sitting in plastic chairs next to a diesel generator and a radio with insanely oversaturated music coming out of it, when the reason the music is so loud is because they’re trying to drown out the sound of the generator which is only on to power the fucking radio. That world exists almost in parallel to the frontiers of science where thousands of men and women are bunkered down on the border between France and Switzerland, honing away at the very fabric of the universe. These two things are in parallel but don’t interact in a direct way. I can’t explain why those images make me want to make the music that I do, but that’s where I’ve arrived at.”

"There are no fucking trees in Iceland, so no birds. There are no lorikeets outside my bedroom window. I miss that."

A U R O R A is Frost’s first studio album since 2009’s By The Throat, made after a series of high profile creative collaborations, and while Frost’s career has taken him halfway around the globe and burned indelible images in his mind, he insists the most interesting space he’s explored lies within.

“We get sold this myth of finding oneself through travel or whatever but the idea that someone is at the mercy of an external landscape, or the force of a city or a culture, any of these external forces, is by a large magnitude irrelevant by comparison to the internal space. I think I spent a lot more time looking inward than outward for this record.”

Frost moved to Iceland in 2005 and remains because Reykjavik ‘just feels right’. “I make my best work when my head’s right and by and large my head’s right when I’m in Reykjavik. That’s not to say that I don’t miss Australia. The more time I spend away from Australia, the more Australian I feel… I could make a list a page long about things I miss about home, but most of them are ephemeral, deeply rooted childhood experiences that are gone. I miss the sound of birds in the morning. There are no fucking trees in Iceland, so no birds. There are no lorikeets outside my bedroom window. I miss that.”