Ben Frost took it to the next level in Melbourne
Luke Howard, fronting a band, charms the crowd with sweetly-chilled music that features lightly jazzy piano motifs and minimal symphonics played on synthesisers. It’s an easy musical vibe that has the relaxed crowd inclined to adopt almost supine positions on the floor.
My Disco, after transmitting subliminal messages on Morse coded on strobe lights, completely smash the mood. Playing in near darkness, My Disco seem to have become even bleaker and more punishing as they pummel us with their metal-inflected grind that’s filled with dread and blind terror.
Ben Frost kicks off his set by getting brutal with a guitar, mashing up its loud distorted grunts into chaotic abstraction before drifting into uneasy electronic ambiances that come spiked with jarring industrial noise. Showcasing material from his latest and critically lauded album, A U R O R A, it’s from behind a table of gadgets and two laptops that Frost completely blows the crowd away with a noise that goes off like a nuclear bomb. It’s a harsh, ugly blast of sound delivered at volumes designed to liquefy everything in its path. Although Frost references techno and experimental electronica, it’s the terrifying intensity of what he does that finds him taking the concept of industrial music to another level. Under stark white lights and blaring strobes that sear the eyeballs, Frost hypnotises as his sounds weigh heavily on our ears. The deep bass throbs and when it doesn’t feel as though our insides are vibrating, it sets the entire stage off with intense vibrations. Flourishes of synthesised orchestral swirls add a majestic layer of compositional detail. Ambient passages that ebb and flow through the set offer soothing respite but inevitably Frost shows his true colours by swathing us in thick clouds of tense claustrophobic noise. Frost, a one-time Box Hill local now resident in Iceland, sounds as though he’s determined to create something new from the existing palette of electronic music