Ben Frost - Aurora LP

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, of piano, of string instruments and natural wooden intimacy. The album is a defiant new world of fiercely synthetic shapes and galactic interference, pummelling 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, whilst 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.