Ben Frost talks about his music and his mentor
On his biography, as the son of two police officers:
I was conceived in the back seat of a police car in the streets of Melbourne. My Dad’s family are very aggressive, very bold and up front. They were the sort to get really fired up around the Christmas table. You’d see the best fights ever at Christmas. On the other side, my Mum’s family were quite the opposite. They were devoted Catholics and it was a very quiet household. I am the by-product of those opposites, but ultimately more my father’s son.
On moving from living in Australia to living in Iceland:
It is moving from one extreme to another. I suppose I thought that something dramatic was inevitably going to happen. That was a result of reading about the clichés of Icelandic music, that it was glacial, bleak, epic, and I imagined I would be affected by that. The more I travel, the more I realize that, in fact, I have very distinct boundaries in terms of what I’m interested in aesthetically and that doesn’t really change wherever I am. If anything, Iceland supplies an absence of environmental information, which I like. What really counts in terms of where I am in the world is my reading or listening habits. They don’t change much between Australia or Iceland or wherever I am, in whatever hotel room, airport or different country.
On whether he wants to create the musical equivalent of “like nowhere else on earth”:
Absolutely. In that sense it’s chasing the essence of romantic music – not Hugh Grant romance, but something Wagnerian, creating something that is the ultimate version it can be of itself and the creation of something that is not a reflection of the world as it is, but of the world as you imagine it to be.
On Brian Eno:
Brian likes to imagine future world histories where people are looking back at genres that in fact as history turned out never really happened. He creates an alternative future history and tries to make music from these genres that never were. It’s a great way of making the sort of music that doesn’t already exist and I’m very much interested in making something new. I don’t understand making a facsimile of music that already exists. I don’t understand musicians who are happy to make music that already exists. It really disturbs me actually. I find it offensive. There is a lot of music around at the moment, and I’m not saying that everyone should do what I do, and I’m not saying what I do is obviously better or anything, it’s a genuine frustration I have that I don’t understand what their real motivation is. Yes, it is obsessive, and I admit I do get obsessed about the integrity and originality of music. My girlfriend tells me to calm down. She has the ability to have the iPod on shuffle, which I just hate, and when a piece comes on that to me seems wrong, I have to leave the room. She says it’s just music. I’m going: no, it’s not!
On the violence of his music:
I’ve always been attuned to the dark side of...anything really. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve often wondered if I am into aggression because I am an aggressive person or I am an aggressive person because I’m into aggressive things. The music I like most is always the most visceral. I like to play my music really loud. That’s as close to God as you can get.
On hunting for food, sounds, on fear and danger:
I hunt. I quite like it. I don’t do it for the sport. I do it for food. I would never kill anything I was not going to eat. There is something about hunting that fires the same neural pathways that go back to when we were living in the darkness of caves, scared of what might come in through the opening. It gets my blood going, getting back to a natural state of being. When the (Eyjafjallajškull) volcano was erupting on Iceland (in 2010), I went to the very top and I was genuinely scared. I realized that it was the first time in my life that I had been genuinely terrified of something. It was something completely and utterly old that you could not reason with and you couldn’t change it or protect yourself against it. It was so much bigger than anything you could possibly grasp. It could just end you in a moment without there being any pause. It’s like playing the guitar in front of a mountain of amplification. It’s the process of losing control to the point where it could be dangerous to your hearing and the audience’s hearing, where the electricity flowing through everything becomes real. You become a little less human, or more human, certainly more naked. I remember travelling up north of Iceland to go fishing and I’d lost my knife, but I didn’t want to stop fishing. I dragged this trout out of the water and then, without thinking about this big fish thrashing about in front of me, I grabbed a rock and crushed its skull. Nobody trained me to do that. I didn’t read about that in a book. It was something that came from deep inside me and it was a little bit shocking when it appeared. And then I ate the fish. It was great.