The Australian noise composer sits down with Noisey’sKeagon Voyce to talk ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’, his latest call to arms recorded with Steve Albini.
“Ben Frost’s new record, The Centre Cannot Hold, feels like the dream of a dying world. I’ve listened to it every couple days for the past two months, riding the dynamism of its abrasive pillars of sound and moments of reflective reverie. On more than one occasion, when I felt closest to the music, I envisioned moldering worlds, where pieces of land were stripped from the earth to drift into space during some indeterminate doomsday. We industrious humans, in desperation, fashioned an earthen imitation from fire and steel, refusing to let our planet—even a barely recognizable one—become lost to the cold vacuum of space.
“An Australian composer and producer who’s lived in Iceland since 2003, [Ben Frost] is known for creating dense, resonant sound structures that have the tendency to overwhelm in this way—to conjure apparitional visions of space and doom and human beauty and render them in vivid color. His last studio album, 2014’s AURORA, largely written while collaborating on a project with photographer Richard Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is particularly vibrant. The album was conceived on a laptop in the often tumultuous eastern realms of the country and later aided by instrumentalists at the forefront of heavy music like Greg Fox (of Zs, Liturgy, and more), Thor Harris (Swans), and Shahzad Ismaily. True to its namesake, the record feels like the charged electric particles from the sun that tear colors into the sky.”
Ben Frost performs live at the first edition of Sonic Fiction – our new series with Norient and Schauspielhaus Zürich – on Saturday, 21 April. Watch the video for ‘Threshold of Faith’ below and learn more about his performance at: Sonic Fiction.
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→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1_sSbXoDH0