“For any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self destruction.”
– Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
When the Australian composer, producer and musician Ben Frost, returned from a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2012, he brought home to Iceland a plethora of Congolese music. Speaking over the phone from Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavík, Frost explains, “I loved everything that I was hearing. You walk into these record stores in Goma at 10 o’clock at night, and there are these gigantic, cheap, imported Chinese stereo systems, with huge speakers and flashing lights all over them. They’re turned up so loud that everything is compressed and distorted, and it’s over saturated to the point where it’s quite invasive.” He adds, “there’s this competitive aspect to it as well, where you have to be louder than the guy next door to you, so the whole street just becomes this roar of massive sound systems.”
“What’s also interesting, is intertwined in the sound is the omnipresent hum of the diesel generators that are actually powering the sound system. So it’s this really bizarre feedback where the thing that is powering it, is actually making so much noise, that the thing that is being powered needs to be turned up, in order to compensate for that. It becomes this strange snake eating its own tail.” This strange loop creates a sound, characteristic of the very system it is being played through, questioning, just what is sound fidelity? He adds, “where it goes even further, is that I brought this music home and was listening to it in my house and I thought, this sounds terrible. This is not what I was in for. And of course I realised very quickly that what was missing from it, was that over-saturation and really aggressive delivery, which for me, is actually part of the sound. It’s part of the very architecture of the music.”
Frost has inadvertently touched on the nature of sound production and reproduction that academic Jonathan Sterne explores in The Audible Past. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’ in the seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Sterne writes, “aura is the object of a nostalgia that accompanies reproduction…the unique presence in time and space of a particular representation, its location in a particular context and tradition.” What Sterne is drawing attention to, is the transformation, through sound recording, of the nature of originality and authenticity, where sound fidelity becomes “an ever shifting standard for the functioning of sound production technologies, a means by which to measure the distance between original and copy. It was an impossible vantage point from which to assess the fidelity of the machines to a fictitious external reality.”
It is apt, that Frost, an accomplished sound producer who has worked on albums for Tim Hecker, SWANS and Colin Stetson amongst others, was in the DR Congo gathering field recordings for the soundtrack to The Enclave – a multichannel video and audio installation made in collaboration with the artist Richard Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten. Based on a photographic approach Mosse had developed in his series Infra, The Enclave was shot using specialist 16mm infrared film, that registers an invisible spectrum of light in shades of pink and red. Shown initially at the Irish Pavilion during the 2013 Venice Biennale, it portrays, both literally and metaphorically, an invisible landscape of a war-torn country.
Frost recalls the serendipitous set of circumstance that gave rise to his involvement with The Enclave, not long after completing a year under the mentorship of Brian Eno through The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative: “I was walking around the Chelsea galleries with Brian Eno and the art curator Diego Cortez. We ended up in Aperture, and literally as we were in the building, a Fedex box arrives with the first edition of Infra, Richard’s book. I became immediately obsessed with it. Later that day, I wrote to Richard, without any pretence at all. It was just fan mail…and he wrote back straight away.”
It wasn’t long until Frost found himself in utterly new surroundings. “The first time I was in the Congo, I was in shock for a few days. It’s a very confronting environment to adjust yourself to, especially coming from Iceland. There’s a lot to deal with. I was very much an observer to begin with, but as time went on I became more comfortable with the environment.”
While in the DR Congo, Frost was also working on his own material, formulating what would eventually be his forthcoming album A U R O R A, a highly anticipated solo release after his widely acclaimed 2009 album By the Throat. Released this May by Mute in collaboration with Bedroom Community – the latter, a label Frost co-founded with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson and composer Nico Muhly – A U R O R A is accompanied by a series of films shot by Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten. “A U R O R A and The Enclave in many ways are cut from the same cloth,” explains Frost. “They are connected in a very complex sort of way.” Speaking of the films, he says “It’s the same people, it’s the same energy…The whole idea was for us to continue the working relationship, but I’ve been very careful to separate the visual identity of the record from The Enclave.”
Taking inspiration from the all encompassing technology of the Congolese sound system Frost heard late at night in Goma, he says “A U R O R A is not intended to be performed quietly. It’s not a record to perform cleanly. The music is written from and drawn from a space of saturation. And to bring things around, is pushing the visible spectrum of the sound into making the upper harmonics move, making everything more visible. To sort of shed light on a different aspect of the inherent quality of the music, through that euphoria of noise. It’s not a question of volume as much as it is a question of texture, and you know, it’s not an effect. It’s not some kind of post-production effect. The music was written from that position from the outset… of being always driven through a preamp that couldn’t handle it. And making sure that that feeling was always at the root of what it was I was doing. Which I guess in my mind, was a way of pushing the visible spectrum into a different space.”
While many of the key elements in The Enclave “were born out of the failure to achieve something else… the car gets stuck in the mud and we can’t move it, so then we have to turn around, and end up in a refugee camp that we otherwise wouldn’t have gone to.” With A U R O R A, the key elements were born out of the self-destruction of a Congolese sound system. After all, “The history of technology is a history of failed machines,” as Alice Bell states in a recent Guardian article titled How the Refrigerator Got its Hum.
In reusing and reinstating the title of a much earlier essay by Ruth Schwartz Cowan from the book The Social Shaping of Technology, Bell outlines the failed futures of technological invention, by addressing the social contexts that shaped the emergence of certain technologies over others. In her article, the focus is on the silent and efficient refrigerator running on gas, versus the hum of a motorised, electric refrigerator, backed by powerful electrical companies. The refrigerator got its hum, not because it happened to be a side-effect of the most efficient and technically superior model, but because of social, political and economic power structures, that placed importance on profit for the producer rather than cost-effectiveness for the consumer. The hum of the refrigerator demonstrates that the needs of the technological system can be seen, and in this case, heard in the actual design.
In many ways, Frost’s approach to A U R O R A brings to the surface the social function of machines, and the inextricable part society has in technology, but rather than do so in an obvious way, he acts as an invisible medium that subtly force feeds the beast its own tail. Touring with two live drummers – Greg Fox and Shahzad Ismaily – Frost’s live act creates what Sterne describes as “a vanishing mediation, where sources and copies move ever closer together until they are identical.”
Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, includes an illustration depicting a phonograph with vibrations emitting from a record. The sounds produced by the record, combined with external sounds in the vicinity, cause the phonograph to vibrate to the point where it breaks down through an act of indirect self-destruction. I can’t help wonder what would happen if A U R O R A were to be played on the technological system on which it is based, a cheap sound system in Goma, cranked up to the max in order to be heard over its own hum. Has Frost created his own version of the record “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X”?
Ben Frost’s new record A U R O R A is out on 23rd May on Mute Records. He plays the Button Factory on Thursday 15 May, tickets are available from here.
Words: Sharon Phelan / Photo: Börkur Sigthorsson
