Ben Frost

Career

Ben Frost, born in Melbourne, Australia in 1980, has called Reykjavík, Iceland home since 2005. He works as a musician, composer, record producer, sound designer, and director. His music is minimalist, instrumental, and experimental, pulling from classical minimalism, punk rock, and black metal. Frost has worked on albums by Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker and American experimental rock band Swans.

Frost’s early work includes the guitar-focused albums Steel Wound (2003) and School of Emotional Engineering (2004), the latter with his band of the same name. With Theory of Machines (2007), his sound turned more aggressive and angular, a direction he pushed further on the well-received By The Throat (2009). In 2011, the Unsound Festival commissioned a collaboration with Brian Eno and Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason.

The result was Solaris, a conceptual album that rescored Andrei Tarkovsky’s film. After signing with Mute Records in 2014, Frost released Aurora, a more rhythm-driven album that earned critical praise. In 2017, he went to Chicago to record The Centre Cannot Hold with Steve Albini.

Frost has worked with contemporary dance companies, including Chunky Move, the Icelandic Dance Company, Contemporary Dance of Cuba, and British choreographer Wayne McGregor, for whose 2010 production FAR he composed music. He co-composed Music for Solaris with Bjarnason, inspired by Stanisław Lem’s novel and Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, performed by Frost, Bjarnason, and Sinfonietta Cracovia. He scored the films Sleeping Beauty, the Icelandic drama The Deep, and the 2015 British series Fortitude.

In 2012, he traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten to create sound for Mosse’s artwork The Enclave. His first directorial role came in 2013 with a critically acclaimed music-theatre adaptation of Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory. In 2015, he co-created the score for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege with Paul Haslinger. He scored the 2017 film Super Dark Times.

That same year, he premiered the installation Incoming at London’s Barbican Centre with Mosse and Tweeten, using surveillance technology to address the European refugee crisis; it later toured globally. From 2017 to 2020, Frost composed the score for all three seasons of Netflix’s German sci-fi series Dark. In 2022, he, Mosse, and Tweeten premiered their third collaborative installation, Broken Spectre, at 180 The Strand in London. In 2023, he debuted two new sound installations: Enduring Amazon at the Momentary in Arkansas and The Predatory Chord at the Megaron in Athens.

Did You Know?

• Ben Frost engineered and played keyboards on Tim Hecker's albums Ravedeath, 1972 and Virgins, which were recorded by Frost in Reykjavík.
• He was the mixing engineer on Colin Stetson's albums New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges and New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light.
• Frost participated in the recording of the Swans albums The Seer, Leaving Meaning and The Beggar, and also joined as a touring member.
• In 2005, Frost remixed Björk's song 'Desired Constellation', which was featured as the B-side to the 'Triumph of a Heart' single.