Dark Frost

Australian experimental electronic music composer Ben Frost was born in 1980 and grew up in Melbourne, influenced by a wide range of music from classical minimalism to punk rock and black metal, as well as sound art and design. In 2001, he self-released his debut EP, Music for Sad Children, which was well-received and led to an album release, Steel Wound, in 2003 on Lawrence English's acclaimed Room 40 label. The album was composed of treated acoustic guitar recordings made in the desolate Australian outback, combined with field recordings by English, and was warmly received by the worldwide ambient community.

In this third and final cycle Ben’s score evolves beyond the sharp string orchestrations of the first cycle and the percussive distortion of the second, towards a sea of disintegrated brass & woodwind arrangements and Eno-inspired ambience. Lakeshore Records will release the album in the Americas and Invada Records will release the album in the rest of the world digitally on July 24. The third and final season of Dark is airing now on Netflix.

Blending the current trend for all things noisy with something altogether more 'composed' we end up with a curious concoction of Cliff Martinez and Wolf Eyes, stopping at planet Badalamenti for a strong cup of Joe ("black like midnight on a moonless night"). Frost's primary influence (and sound source…) for the album was Michael Gira's seminal noise-rock band Swans, an influence which bubbles majestically on the album's central piece, cunningly titled 'We Love You Michael Gira'. The track starts simply enough; shifting, moody synthesized tones sitting eerily next to shivering waves of guitar noise before both give way to the sort of glacial blip-work that would make Mika Vainio jealous, and then it hits you; chunks of percussive noise that enter the sound-field like a serial killer bursting into the family home, gritty and abrasive, raw and untamed. The Swans factor isn't lost in this track, it's something that needs to be played so loud that it almost hurts the eardrums for full, visceral effect and proves as if proof be needed that Ben Frost is a rare producer who really knows how to use the loud as it should be used.

Ben Frost presents his first studio album in six years, Scope Neglect, via Mute. Available January 11th on limited edition white vinyl, followed by black vinyl, CD, and digital formats on March 1st. In the sonic crucible of Ben Frost's Scope Neglect, music undergoes a metamorphic alchemy. From the album’s opening seconds, the familiar aural chemistry of metal is immediately untethered, isolated in the vacuum, stripped of its cultural trappings and heavy armory, and loaded into a particle accelerator.

The music of Ben Frost is about contrast; influenced as much by Classical Minimalism as by Punk Rock and Metal, Frost's throbbing guitar-based textures emerge from nothing and slowly coalesce into huge, forbidding forms that often eschew conventional structures in favor of the inevitable unfoldings of vast mechanical systems.

The music of Ben Frost is about contrast; influenced as much by Classical Minimalism as by Punk Rock and Metal, Frost's throbbing guitar-based textures emerge from nothing and slowly coalesce into huge, forbidding forms that often eschew conventional structures in favor of the inevitable unfoldings of vast mechanical systems.

The music of Ben Frost is about contrast; influenced as much by Classical Minimalism as by Punk Rock and Metal, Frost's throbbing guitar-based textures emerge from nothing and slowly coalesce into huge, forbidding forms that often eschew conventional structures in favor of the inevitable unfoldings of vast mechanical systems.