photo credit: Börkur Sigthorsson
The 10th anniversary vinyl edition of Ben Frost’s acclaimed album, AURORA, is out now on Mute, presented on red vinyl with alternative artwork and an exclusive download of his blistering 2014 live performance at Berlin’s Berghain.
Purchase the 10th anniversary vinyl of the album HERE.
The album, which has lost none of its visceral potency in the intervening years, was greeted with universal acclaim and went on to be featured in the Albums of the Year at NPR, Rolling Stone, Spin, Clash, Crack, FACT, Stereogum, Washington Post, Exclaim!, Popmatters, Under the Radar and more.
Starved of all the adornments of its predecessor, AURORA is wholly absent of guitar, piano, string instruments and natural wooden intimacy. The album is a defiant new world of fiercely synthetic shapes and galactic interference, pummeling skins and pure metals.
Performed by Ben Frost with Greg Fox (ex-Liturgy), Shahzad Ismaily and Thor Harris (ex-Swans), AURORA was largely written in Eastern DR Congo, while on assignment with visual artist Richard Mosse, and aims directly, through its monolithic construction, at blinding luminescent alchemy, not with benign heavenly beauty but through decimating magnetic force. This is no pristine vision of digital music, it is an offering of interrupted future time, where emergency flares illuminate ruined nightclubs and the faith of the dancefloor rests in a diesel-powered generator spewing forth its own extinction, eating rancid fuel so loudly it threatens to overrun the very music it is powering.
The album release followed Frost’s first opera, the compelling production of Iain Banks’ “unadaptable” debut novel, The Wasp Factory, 2013’s collaboration with Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten, The Enclave, and was his first studio album release since 2009’s BY THE THROAT. Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten went on to create a series of accompanying films, which you can watch HERE. Tweeten also shot the artwork to AURORA.
Ben Frost has been touring worldwide following the release of his latest album Scope Neglect, described by Pitchfork as “[his] radical new album of deconstructed metal, in which the riffs are only as important as the silence that yawns between them.”
Frost's diverse impact reverberates across film, television, and stage, earning acclaim for his score for Julia Leigh's Palme d’Or-nominated Sleeping Beauty and scores for TV series such as 1899, a collaboration with Ridley Scott on Raised By Wolves, Fortitude, and the cult series Dark. Additionally, his opera creations, including The Wasp Factory and The Murder of Halit Yozgat, have been performed at London's Royal Opera House and Hannover's Staatsoper, cementing his position in the world of contemporary music and live arts.
Following successful exhibitions for Broken Spectre, his latest collaboration with Richard Mosse, at London's 180 Studios, Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria, SFMOMA and others. Following the acclaimed solo installation work A Predatory Chord which Frost presented in Athens last May, Ben Frost's latest solo installation Among The Petals is on show at The Momentary Museum. He is also sometimes a member of Swans.
BEN FROST LIVE DATES 2024:
11/21/2024 – London, UK - Fabric
PRAISE FOR AURORA:
“Unrelentingly menacing… a 40-minute suite of VHS grinding, wistful Blade Runner synths, howling white noise and broken Detroit techno” - Rolling Stone
“… best album yet” - Pitchfork Best New Music
“Frost’s most fully realised album” - The Quietus
“…rich and rewarding electronic shamanism” – Crack
“…the darkest and most powerful recording of his career.” – Resident Advisor
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