Ben Frost

You mention drones and you immediately picture dark, deep, impenetrable litanies. Only to discover that there are also trails that can be far gentler and sweeter, or, conversely, wicked and ferocious. Whether Ben Frost settles into the first, second or third category, I've never quite managed to work out. He can be tender in the most turbulent instants, and just as shadowy in the quietest ones. A Methodist Evangelical church, its tall vertical windows, its soaring ceiling, offer the chance to grasp this whole picture, this chiaroscuro design that opens the sound up to something well beyond perception.

Australia gave him life, Iceland made him what he is. That stern gaze behind the machines, the blond beard of a man from the north, and a guitar dangling in mid-air, almost left to its own devices. And a packed crowd, more polite and respectful than even the rosiest expectations could have hoped. Or perhaps it was simply down to the music, to an unbroken flow that petrifies you, that estranges you from your surroundings, that makes you lift your eyes upward, trying to work out what lies beyond that ceiling, beyond the sky and the stars.

Howling wolves to open, a sound that swells its harsh ranks in a brutal, horror-struck motion, before turning, in short order, into an impetuous, towering drone unlike any heard before: I was trembling, trembling in my chest, the windows shrieked, the walls vibrated and gave back to the machines the sound they were releasing. In a continuous give and take, an empathy took shape that was as communal, in the sound's expansion, as it was intimate and private for each person. And then here it is: a deep, dry beat once again cutting across the faintest, most glacial drones, rising now suddenly, now with skill and patience. And again the ethereal flow of subterranean trails, with the guitar hinting at chords that stretch out their notes, letting them slide across the icy floor and lift up into that cavern. The reverberations, extraordinary, multiply.

But the outcome doesn't change, nothing changes. Everyone standing still there, some with cameras, some shaking their heads, some motionless. Everyone there, in a true pagan rite. In the end, in an encounter of natures, the mass fades out faintly, in a numbing pulse that dies away into a silent isolationism. Long red hair in front of me like the thread of a song, half-closed eyes and a face that now dipped, now rose. Falling in love takes an instant; seeing your life and your universe right there takes just as little.

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