Ben Frost recently released Broken Spectre, his first album in five years, as an accompanying soundtrack to long-term collaborator Richard Mosse’s exhibition of the same name. Captured through field recordings of ultrasonics across the Brazilian Amazon, Broken Spectre gives a voice to the wildlife and nature that is suffering because of environmental breakdown. Paired with Mosse’s visuals, Broken Spectre is an urgent and overwhelming project that seeks to cast an eye upon climate change.
Kelly Doherty catches up with Ben Frost amidst the project’s ongoing premiere at the 180 Studios.
Ben Frost and Richard Mosse’s extensive working relationship began because of mutual admiration. “I saw some of Richard’s early work in a gallery in New York, and I took it upon myself to just send him some fan mail, essentially. He wrote back to me straight away, and there was an obvious interest in each other’s work.” To Frost, despite their work taking different trajectories over the last decade, there has always been a “direct conversation between the two of them”.
This mutual admiration led to Mosse and Frost’s first collaborative project, The Enclave, an audio-visual piece that casts light on the overlooked humanitarian disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pair teamed up again for Incoming, a multi-channel sound and video installation which subverted surveillance technology to document the refugee crisis across the Middle East and Europe. Following this project, Frost explains, Mosse began working in the Ecuadoran forests, making “beautiful flower portraits with ultraviolet lighting”.
Around this time, Jair Bolsonaro was elected into power in Brazil, a milestone that Frost describes as “fast-tracking a process that had already been underway for many decades in the Amazon”. “It became very clear to us it’s important to talk about the climate crisis and address it,” Frost says. “The Amazon is the focal point of that conversation.”
Capturing audio for Broken Spectre brought Frost to new technologies outside of the musical world. “[Richard Mosse] and [Trevor Tweeten] started talking about the ultraviolet light and this invisible spectrum of light made visible through satellite camera technologies.” This got Frost thinking about the “idea of bands of frequency that exist beyond the threshold of human hearing.” He quickly fell down a rabbit hole of learning how this technology works and “within a month or two [he] was conversing with bioacoustics scientists”.
After meeting with a German scientist to collect the piece of technology needed to capture the audio of the Amazon, Frost jumped on a plane immediately to “learn his way through in the rainforest” with this new equipment. “It’s not a musical device, it’s not even a particularly user-friendly device. It’s a scientific instrument”, he says. Frost brought his musical perspective and background to utilising the device. “I was approaching it from a musical point of view, from a creative, artistic point of view. I wasn’t following any rules in terms of data collection.” His discovery that “90 to 95% of the animal biomass of the Amazon is made up by insects” led Frost to give a “platform to animals who are communicating in a way that is completely invisible to us”.
Whilst using this new technology posed its challenges for Frost, he highlights relationship building as one of the most important keys to the project’s success. “What often doesn’t across in the work is the temporal aspects of a project like this and the amount of research by Richard that went into this project long, long before I was ever on the ground. He put in months of groundwork to develop relationships and build trust.” These relationships, Frost believes, “created windows of opportunity to get an insight into situations which would otherwise be far from view”.
The result is an unblinking body of work that captures sounds hitherto unexamined–from the human vocalisations of fisher bats to the sounds of a burned jaguar’s anaesthetised breathing. Broken Spectre continually commands its audience to listen closely to what we too often choose to ignore when we contribute to climate change on an individual or collective basis.
Frost is conscious of the role his listening choices played in what they captured as a part of the project. “To view these recordings as somehow objective is absolutely wrong. These are entirely subjective–the microphone in these circumstances is the lens. It is obfuscating the surrounding information and focuses on specific events and specific voices”. Despite the subjectivity of the field recording process, Broken Spectre seeks to present a truth as discovered by the project. “The aim was to present a factual, experiential document of what is a witness testimony,” Frost explains. “This is what we thought, this is what we experienced. It’s certainly not the truth, and it’s not the whole truth. But these are first-hand accounts of what we’ve seen”.
“Hopefully, any discomfort of the audience while interacting with Broken Spectre comes from a place of complicity. These landscapes are the same landscapes that we created everywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Almost wherever you are right now was once, at some point, a towering rainforest, be it tropical or temperate. It was all taken down in a process that is identical to that which is being undertaken in Brazil”.
Broken Spectre, pressed at The Vinyl Factory in Hayes, is out now, accompanied by Richard Mosse’s photography from the project and artwork by Loose Joints. A limited edition version is also available, numbered and signed by both Frost and Mosse.
