Ben Frost, an Australian composer currently based in Rejkjavik, Iceland, brought his new album Aurora to NYC. The show on Saturday was the first one in a music series, Tinnitus, produced by Pitchfork’s Show No Mercy in collaboration with Blackened Music . The idea behind the series is to showcase composers of “extreme sound” and Tim Hecker is set to play a show in November.
The Wick is a spacious place in the heart of Bushwick with exposed brick walls, high ceilings and not much else as far as the décor; it has raw and industrial feel to it and it easily created a perfect atmosphere for the obscure experimental music that filled the space on a Saturday night.
The two opening acts before the main show included Oneirogen and Julianna Barwick. The first opening act was far more appealing to my sensibilities than the slow, dreamy one-woman act by Julianna. Her playful use of voice, both live and sampled, was just a tad too slow and repetitive to sustain my interest.
Perhaps If you like ambient music and can go for ghostly high-pitched voice overlayed with samples, continuously floating in space and ringing until it dies off, then you probably would have liked her music. The crowd sure seemed to dig her set. But the next set brought a totally different energy and vibe to the Wick’s stage.
The dark, violent and almost evil sound that Ben Frost poured onto the awed crowd at the Wick was bouncing off the walls and you could physically feel it: the sound waves vibrating through the body and warping the mind. The set up – drummer Greg Fox on one side of the stage and Shazad Ismaily playing percussions on the other side with Ben hovering over a giant table in the middle of the stage felt like a scene from an underground movie with the strobe lights intensifying the mood to the point where one could easily feel lost and disoriented.
While Frost looks almost like a caveman with his long beard and hair, all dressed in loose black clothes and walking around the stage barefoot Shazad looked more like Gollum on drums, his silhouette disappearing into the darkness in between the flashing light. Visually, the show was almost as intense as it was musically. The encore at the end of the show was very appropriate – it was an epic performance musically as well as visually.
