Ben Frost is an Australian composer and producer with an extensive musical background. He has lived in Reykjavik since 2005, where he founded the Bedroom Community label together with Valgeir Sigurrosson and Nico Muhly. Frost composes minimalist, instrumental and experimental music, with influences ranging from classical minimalism to punk rock and black metal.
In Mach 2024, the Australian musician –who meanwhile has been author of popular soundtracks like the hit Netflix series ‘Dark’ and Ridley Scott’s ‘Raised by the Wolves’– released ‘Scope Neglect’, a new studio album after six years of hiatus. 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. Where Scope Neglect leans sonically into metal – fuelled by progressive metal outfit Car Bomb’s guitarist Greg Kubacki and bassist Liam Andrews of fellow Australians My Disco – its true form seems to draw more upon the transcendental reveries of the West Coast minimalists. What at first appears confrontational, and ephemeral, is meditatively and methodically unfolded through time, revealing crystalline vulnerabilities.
What Frost wants us to hear, in other words, is frequently not what he wants us to feel. Scope Neglect is a deliberate opposition in terms; a dualistic game of obfuscation and obliteration, mechanics reconfigured and reengineered, old energies diverted and redirected, scope expanded, contracted and dissolved.
