Ben Frost

ANW and R5 welcomes composer and producer Ben Frost. Born in 1980 in Melbourne, Australia, Frost relocated to Iceland in 2005, where with Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nico Muhly he formed the Bedroom Community record label and collective. His solo albums, including Steel Wound (2003), Theory of Machines (2007) and BY THE THROAT (2009) fuse intensely structured sound art with militant post-classical electronic music, shape-shifting physical power with immersive melody, concentrated minimalism with fierce, rupturing dark metal.

Frost regularly collaborates with other musicians and artists; in the production of albums such as Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath 1972 and Virgins, SWANS The Seer, Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare and on various Bedroom Community releases. Frost has produced scores for stage productions including work by choreographers Wayne McGregor/Random Dance, Akram Khan, Gideon Obarzanek/Chunky Move, and Falk Richter. He composed the score for the Palme d’Or nominated film Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh, and Djúpið by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (with Daníel Bjarnason). The pair continues to work together on a range of projects. Frost travelled deep beyond the frontlines of war-torn Eastern Congo with artist Richard Mosse to produce The Enclave, a multi-channel video and sound installation that premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2010 he was chosen by Brian Eno as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé program for a year of collaboration, one of the outcomes of which was Sólaris, a re-scoring of the Tarkovsky classic for Poland’s Sinfonietta Cracovia. 2013 also marked his debut as a director with the première of Frost’s first Opera, based on Iain Bank´s infamous 1984 novel The Wasp Factory.

Frost’s latest album, A U R O R A, “defiantly eschews its predecessor’s delicate, nocturnal vision of growling beasts and deconstructed chamber music and offers instead a new world composed of fiercely synthetic shapes and galactic interference, pummeling skins and pure metals.” The album was released this year on Bedroom Community.