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A U R O R A

A U R O R A

RRP: £11.74
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This briefly romanticised and simultaneously scorned moment passes into the dark void of “The Teeth Behind Kisses”, a much simpler and more terrifying beast in its limited instrumentation, powered briefly by cymbal slaps and distal, echoic bells before slowly circling into a quiet, juddering and menacing hole of barely there drone. Even more awe inspiring is “ Venter,” which makes its slow ascent from apocalyptic tattoo into claustrophobic death rave. Mixed, Mastered and laid to rest by Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios, Reykjavík Iceland in December 2013. And after that slight disappointment experienced by all avid listeners that comes with a significant change of tone; if not of style, it’s easy to see the two records as near companion pieces.

Vote up content that is on-topic, within the rules/guidelines, and will likely stay relevant long-term. This album to me is probably the only album I find 'unlistenable', and i don't mean 'unlistenable' in the sense that the themes are so awful and hateful you have to turn it off (the good way), I mean that some of the production literally causes pain to my ears. A U R O R A is, in a sense, the proper companion to 2009’s excellent By the Throat, but it’s shaggier and more intense.Sound artist and composer Ben Frost can both scare the pants off you and transport you to a distant place where, for a brief spell, nothing really matters except the aural experience around you—and it’s incredibly freeing.

The resulting atmosphere is dense and airless, with real-world signifiers largely absent – although the insect-like whine on ‘Sola Fide’ and a groan-like wind raising dust on ‘Diphenyl Oxalate’ hint at the surrounding environment. There's a cello that plays really low-volume in the third-to-last song and it sounds like it's dissonant! Diphenyl Oxalate” once had a melody, but it’s been mauled and eviscerated until only a wall of discord is left.Ben Frost hasn’t lost the knack of creating beauty from opposing musical forces, and on ‘Aurora’ he’s right in your face with his most dynamic and unhinged album yet. That last one is almost graceful, standing poised in contrast to the brute force you get everywhere else.

This is no pristine vision of digital music, it is a filthy, uncivilized 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. It’s telling that Frost selected Griffin: the kind of clinical, controlled, yet simultaneously explosive violence that characterises his playing style is omnipresent in Frost’s music. Opener “Flex” arrives on an initial, quiet wave of drone, a distant but quickly closing glimmer of light that before long is on top of us, a piercing light in the darkness that has brought along some of its friends with throbbing pulses of bass and stuttering percussion edging it closer and closer until it’s directly overhead, kicking up dust and framing us in its glare before it passes abruptly, the fear dying away rapidly as we move quickly into a forgetful future with “Nolan”, one of my favourite tracks of the record. Instead of the noisy, meditative openers of past outings, A U R O R A's first track, “Flex”, sounds like an airplane taking off; the steady, escalating synthesizer gives way to frantic jazz drumming partially consumed the crackling, loose wires around it.Swirls of some heavily processed and entirely unnameable instrument growl overhead and smother the underlying but fundamental driving percussion before falling away, leaving us to slowdance alone with these heady beats for a time. The frighteningly cacophonous and the creeping minimal dominate the album, leaving little room for the barren middle ground where Frost truly excels. Pre-release single “Venter” relishes the fresh darkness with its simplistic, percussion driven beginnings, these creatures of the night given free reign for a vast majority of the piece slowly gearing up with mob-like mentality towards the explosive and destructive finalé as the pent up energy is spun out in rather anticlimactic waves of devolving, aggressive cymbals and empowered synth lines. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Ben Frost is one of those musicians that I sometimes forget about and don't really like to discuss, even though the music is definitely up my alley. In opting to follow the cagey By the Throat with the pummelling A U R O R A, there’s perhaps an element of recognition that the formula of that 2009 record couldn’t be bettered, that lightning can’t be bottled, at least not more than once. Frost hasn’t won this war yet, his peers are more cohesive and even in their craft, but for sheer crushing power, it’s hard to find anyone more talented than Frost. Sharp, disfigured melodies fight against the might of pounding bass drums and disfigured analog noise, the track’s anti-anthemic ascension bleeding into the festering near-silence of “The Teeth Behind Kisses”, a rare mournful respite serving as a truce between two trouncing battles.With the fog parting on the horizon and the sun rising urgently in the East, the album splinters into full-blown technicolour on the glitchy introspection of “Sola Fide” and closing, techno-tinged highlight, “A Single Point of Light” – a triumphant ten minutes of intent-drenched transmutation and steady disintegration. Where By The Throat stalked unobserved - a malevolent spectre that lingered constantly out of shot - A U R O R A immediately surges into sharp focus, the prologue-like “Flex” bursting free from the shackles a vengeful, almost incandescent beast. A moment of barely restrained panic as the music parts for a brief time before “the cut” happens sees a thin slice of drone stutter into a stellar tumble of breathtaking synth catharsis, a luminous and all consuming tumult of sound but one that only has a short time in the limelight like everything else.



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