Artist : Ben Frost
Album : Under Certain Light And Atmospheric Conditions
Label : Mute
Link : https://ethermachines.com/
Style : Electro
Reykjavik-based Australian Ben Frost turns timbres into sonic drones, leading him away from ambient and towards avant-garde electro on Under Certain Light And Atmospheric Conditions.
Ben Frost is an Australian musician and sound engineer who grew up in Melbourne. He released his first EP in 2001, which evolved into his debut album in 2003. Not feeling at home in Australia, he settled permanently in Iceland, where he became a member of the Bedroom Community collective. His electronic music is inspired by classical, noise and minimalism; as you’ll have gathered, the artist is fond of collaboration and experimentation. A jack-of-all-trades, he worked alongside Brian Eno in 2010 for the “Rolex Arts Initiative”, and has been at the helm of numerous soundtracks, including those for the Netfllix series Dark and 1899.
This album contains three previously unreleased tracks from sessions on the previous Scope Neglect album, and is constructed from material captured during live performances, improvisations and field recordings. The result is not devoid of a certain hermeticism, distancing itself from any melodic velleity with a kind of dark, gothic ambient, where the saturation of the guitar may suggest a kinship with drone metal. However, the electronic treatment and the various aspects of this radical music are far from the norm, as this is clearly experimental electronic music.
Ben Frost’s music is dominated not by timbres, but by sonic textures. Depending on the track and the quality of your system’s phase, these will be more or less fluid and their differentiation more or less obvious. Good definition or headphone listening will help you to unravel this lacework of sounds reprocessed in the studio, or sometimes simply integrated as they were recorded. If you listen carefully, you’ll be able to admire the work that has gone into shaping these pieces of music, while retaining their rough, raw quality, blended with the cold, mineral feel of Iceland.