Video: Ben Frost Releases 'The River Of Light And Radiation'

Following the celebrated release of his first album in seven years, Scope Neglect, via Mute last month and a successful US tour, Ben Frost has shared the video for “The River of Light and Radiation”, directed by Jason Akira Somma, which premiered this morning on Cool Hunting.

Speaking on the video, Jason Akira Somma says: “Whilst developing the material I thought about the ‘river of light' in the history of moving image. Hence the layering of film, analog, and digital, so it has the entire history of moving image within itself. The film I used is from film rolls that expired many decades ago, the same film made from the minerals stolen from Native American land, nodding to album title Scope Neglect.”

In the sonic crucible of Ben Frost's Scope Neglect, music undergoes a metamorphic alchemy. It's the beginning of a new chapter in Frost's career that's uncanny, unexplainable, familiar yet entirely new and groundbreaking, like a curious mathematical anomaly.

"There is always a shape and a sense of proportion that I am looking for. And with these elements, I was looking to sort of recalibrate some familiar mechanics with the hope of creating something new." 

Once again, Frost has genuinely created something that feels unlike anything else. There are touches of metal throughout, but these sit alongside crackling electronics, field recordings, breathing animals, and deeply contemplative explorations, resulting in something impossible to pigeonhole.

Scope Neglect owes much to the violent presence of Greg Kubacki's guitars. In the natural environment of his band Car Bomb, this acrobatic virtuosity propels forward at such a frantic rate that riffs seldom repeat, let alone linger long enough to gain any kind of familiarity. But here, the unfolding sequences smolder relentlessly over time, echoing the tape loop fantasies of Terry Riley. Through this meditative focus, frenetic logic gives way to an almost transcendental calm.

At Candybomber Studios, situated at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, Frost, together with engineer Ingo Krauss, upended the recording process from the outset, applying innovative recording techniques inspired by the well-documented approaches of Mark Hollis' Talk Talk recordings. Frost revealed only parts of the arrangement to his collaborators, forcing their hand in one direction, only to repeat the process with an entirely different set of elements audible, thus pushing the dynamic somewhere else entirely. In many cases, Frost created entire orchestrations, constructed with the sole intent of driving Greg Kubacki and Liam Andrews' ferocious performances, only to delete them entirely afterward.

"You can't play like that, into the void. And so it demanded these convincing initial structures, which I had no intention of keeping. I wanted this sense of music that is listening... that has an awareness of something we can't see. That produces a wholly different kind of silence."

Scope Neglect is a deliberate opposition in terms; a dualistic game of obfuscation and obliteration, a sonic universe stripped to its most elemental core where the mechanics are reconfigured, reengineered, old energies diverted and redirected, scope expanded, contracted, and dissolved.

Frost's diverse impact reverberates across film, television, and opera, earning acclaim for his score for Julia Leigh's Palme d'Or-nominated 'Sleeping Beauty' and scores for TV series such as '1899', including a collaboration with Eliot Sumner (AKA Vaal), '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, Photo Elysée, and The Momentary Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2023, the New York debut of 'Broken Spectre' ran through mid March at the Jack Shainman Gallery. Meanwhile, following the acclaimed solo installation work 'A Predatory Chord' which Frost presented in Athens last May, Ben Frost's solo installation 'Among The Petals' is on show at The Momentary Museum.

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