Propelled by towering synth arrangements, bursts of noise and thundering drums, tracks lunge forward and stop abruptly, or fade away unexpectedly. Completed with contributions from multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and Thor Harris and Greg Fox on percussion, it is also Frost’s most heavily synthetic work to date, where the familiar timbres of guitar and piano are rejected in favour of harsh, ambiguous tones. While Frost wrote a good deal of A U R O R A on his laptop in the DRC, “under the threatening gaze of the very active Mount Nyiragongo volcano”, according to the text accompanying the release, it is a separate entity from The Enclave a self-contained project rather than a score or commissioned work. They filmed the war-torn region with infrared film that cast the people and landscape in a gorgeous palette of pink and purple hues, and Frost made the field recordings that would form the basis of the score.
In the intervening five years, Frost has worked under the mentorship of Brian Eno and taken on an impressive range of projects, from composing the score for Julia Leigh’s film Sleeping Beauty to having a hand in recording and producing Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath 1972 and Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare albums, and writing and directing an opera based on Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory.įor The Enclave, a video installation piece, Frost travelled with artist Richard Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten to the Democratic Republic of Congo. A U R O R A is Ben Frost’s first solo album since 2009’s By The Throat, and his most accomplished yet.
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