![]() ![]() Even the way the album ends, with the fauna cacophony of ‘The Crystal World’ cutting off into silence after four minutes and fourteen seconds, paradoxically lacks drama. If this is a comment on the dangers of deforestation impacting the planet’s lungs it feels trite and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that hit Brazil especially hard, it seems in terrible taste. Perhaps this is a recording of something in ‘Nature’ manipulated to sound ‘Human’, but if so it merely reinforces the unfortunate binaries that have landed the world in the mess that it is in. ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is what appears to be a human being on some kind of ventilation, a breath coming in mechanically-assisted gasps. Something bad is happening to this ecosystem, Frost seems to be telling us, as if we didn’t already know. The trebly lunges of ‘The Index’, for instance, are merely overbearing, almost macho, something reflected in track titles like ‘The Killing Ground’, A Guide To Virtual Death’ and so on. Frost’s source material is manipulated, edited and creative decisions made that push the sonics not towards meaning and engagement but towards at best a curiously bland evocation of the ominous – like some old painting of mountains or forests that sought to reach the sublime in nature, now mass reproduced as a souvenir tea towel. It seems as if it was Frost’s intention to do something similar here, and he could perhaps have succeeded were it not for the rather jarring collision of the sounds of the rainforest and his own interventions. As depressing as it is, field recordings can also become reminders of what is threatened, and eventually, what we have lost. The sound recordist Chris Watson, for instance, is just one of a skilled team who work on David Attenborough’s increasingly polemical television series. Courtesy The Vinyl Factoryįield recordings are a vital part of the tapestry of serious wildlife documentaries that have the potential to push people towards greater environmental awareness. Mosse pointed thermal imaging cameras at the rainforest foliage while Frost slowed down his field recordings to try to capture the sounds of fauna and flora usually inaudible to the human ear, along with insect hums, mammalian hoots and bird calls.īen Frost, Broken Spectre, 2022, cover art. A failure of our democracies, a failure of political will, a failure of imagination, and creatively, my own failure to communicate through sound the vast scale of the Amazon and the ongoing damage inflicted upon it by the policies of Jair Bolsonaro.’ In this admission of failure is an implicit assumption that Frost had believed that, as an electronic musician of impeccable pedigree and international repute, this project would have been able to achieve… what, exactly? If he arrived in the rainforest, expecting to record an album that would neatly sum up the unknowable power yet vulnerability of the rainforest ecosystem, perhaps Frost was doomed before he even began, like Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo trying to lift his steamboat up over a jungle mountain ridge.īroken Spectre also serves as the soundtrack to visual artist Richard Mosse’s installation of the same name, on view at London’s 180 Studios until 30 December. The Australian-Icelandic experimental producer Ben Frost writes that Broken Spectre (2022), his first studio album in five years is ‘ultimately a document of failure. How is it possible to make the vastness of the jungle quite so boring? ![]()
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