The 10th anniversary vinyl edition of Ben Frost’s acclaimed album, AURORA, is set for release on 11 October 2024 via Mute, presented on red vinyl with alternative artwork and an exclusive download of his blistering 2014 live performance at Berlin’s Berghain.
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. Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten went on to create a series of accompanying films, which you can watch HERE, and Tweeten shot the artwork to AURORA.
Ben Frost is currently touring, following the release of his latest album Scope Neglect, described by Pitchfork as “[his] radical new album of deconstructed metal, in which the riffs are only as important as the silence that yawns between them.” – Full details below including a newly announced London date at Fabric on 21 November.
TRACKLISTING – AURORA
of heat
1 Flex
2 Nolan
3 The Teeth Behind The Kisses
of Light
4 Secant
5 Diphenyl Oxalate
6 Venter
of the sun
7 No Sorrowing
8 Sola Fide
9 A Single Point Of Blinding Light
BEN FROST – TOUR DATES
- 18 September – Lisbon, Culturgest
- 25 September – Ghent, Wintercircus
- 26 September – Leuven, Labozaal
- 28 September – Reims, Cartonnerie
- 3 October – Helsinki, Kuudes Linja
- 5 October – Uppsala, Otherworldly
- 21 November – London, Fabric
