Icelandic based and Melbourne raised modern composer, Ben Frost, resonates with universal theories of creativity in his interview with Resident Advisor. Some of the questions and answers here are concurrent with ideas I have within my own practice also. From audience reaction to my work, or ideas of process and what work should be or why I do it, some answers can be found in parallel to Frost's notions here.
A friend once told me that after listening to By the Throat for the first time, he felt sick. To play psychiatrist for a moment, how does that make you feel?
It's increasingly more difficult to get that kind of reaction from people, so I guess my immediate reaction is [that] it's a positive thing. For all our grandstanding about the heightened level of evolution we have apparently achieved, the idea that my music can invoke a physiological reaction in a person says a great deal about that illusion.
Why do you play in the dark?
In the same way, I don't want to make didactic albums, I also don't intend to perform didactically. That's one of the principal reasons I loathe the element of video in music performance. Telling your audience what your visual image your performance is supposed to evoke is frankly insulting to an audience. This postmodern obsession with turning every live concert into a cinematic experience is just fucking insulting to me as an audience
When you use video in a live show you are effectively saying to me two things. One: You are completely and utterly incapable of engaging me in your performance and are compensating. Two: You think I am a moron, and have no imagination of my own.
That said, I played at a festival the other night with Kanding Ray and he had "video"—but what was interesting about it is that there were no images, barely any colour. It was like a swarm of pixels that backlit his band and, occasionally but not always, made these synesthetic gestures of syncing with the beat—making very powerful kinetic relationships. There was no lighting and, as a result, it was lighting design rather than film. And I really, honestly loved it.
You obviously know (on some level) that there are images that are associated with your own ("earthquakes, volcanoes and fear of predators in dark") that most people already have in their minds when they approach your work. Does it bother you that potentially all people get is the dark stuff?
Contemporary music is going the way of the James Cameron school of storytelling: Remove any element of suggestion or subtlety and replace with a fucking sledgehammer. It's like: YOU. WILL. FEEL. THIS.
...I suggest things in my work, and my records certainly have an angle. I draw on everything that I absorbed while creating a record. They allude to images, texts, ideas, and I do try to frame what I've done...and obviously I see things in a particular way, which I can try to visualize on the cover of my record. I mean, it's my record, right?
...I think if you have strong ideas, there is no need to orchestrate the way in which they come together. The concept will reign.
I would like to think I respect the intelligence and—moreover—the imagination of an audience to draw the lines between things, dramatically. The void is far more fascinating than anything I could fill it with. I just want to map out my territory, and piss in the corners so you know where the edges are. You can work out—and make up the rest—on your own.
-Ben Frost 2010
The full interview can be found here:
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1173
To purchase Ben Frost's work you can find it here:
http://www.bedroomcommunity.net/artists/ben_frost/
OR
http://www.room40.org/releases-frost.shtml
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