Cover Image: Ben Frost, whose acclaimed soundtrack work and sculptural approach to sound anchor two major installations at the Fremantle Biennale. Photo: Supplied.

Arguably the biggest name at this year’s Fremantle Biennale is Ben Frost, the Melbourne-born musician, composer, producer and sound designer whose soundtrack work has taken him from the margins to the mainstream.

Beginning with Julia Leigh’s controversial 2011 erotic drama Sleeping Beauty, Frost has gone on to provide the soundtracks for increasingly significant film and television productions, most notably the series Dark (2017 to 2020), Raised by Wolves (2020 to 2022) and 1899 (2022 to 2023).

Despite this success in the commercial world Frost is disdainful of how music is made for mainstream film and television, which he says is a far cry from the days when composers like Max Steiner, Leonard Bernstein and Bernard Herrmann created scores of such richness and power they did not merely support a movie but proudly stood beside it.

“The thing that everyone adores about classic film music — the smashing together of ideas which results in the finished work being greater than the sum of its parts — no longer happens,” says Frost during a break in setting up his Fremantle Biennale show A Predatory Chord.

“In big Hollywood productions they are editing as the film is being shot. 

And they are dropping in existing soundtrack material so they can get it to the producers. And the composers are told to replicate that score to make the whole process more efficient,” says Frost.

“I tested out the idea of being a Hollywood composer for a couple of years and discovered that it wasn’t for me. I would rather eat glass.”

Despite his aversion for big-budget Hollywood filmmaking Frost has built enough of reputation to be able to turn down offers to do soundtracks — “It’s a wonderful position to be in,” he says — allowing him to work on projects such as A Predatory Chord and Whalefall, his two pieces at this year’s Fremantle Biennale (the second is a collaboration with Biennale artistic director Tom Muller).

With A Predatory Chord Frost invites the audience to enter the darkened main space of Victoria Hall in which hangs over 40 speakers that produce both an all-enveloping sound and act as sculptures. In this space sound is not just aural but it is physical, in the sense you can feel it and you have to be careful not to bump into it, which I did (ouch!).

“I’ve always been fascinated with the physicality of my art. Musical acts ship speaker systems all around the world and then they do their best to disguise them. They are designed with an inherent invisibility. We are not supposed to look at them. They are things that deliver the idea, but not part of the idea,” Frost explains to me over coffee at the Urban Winery, the cavernous multi-purpose space beside Victoria Hall.

“So I wondered what would happen if I approached this material as a sculptural medium. There is a lot of sound art out there but it all falters at this same place — maintaining the illusion. There are speakers in corners, they are hidden, they are painted white. I want people to see and to feel where the sound is coming from,” says Frost.

While this is the fourth time A Predatory Chord has been installed — incredibly, there has been a showing in Mongolia — it is site-specific, with Frost adapting it to the goldrush-era building in the east end of High Street.

“Victoria Hall was built by convicts using trees from old-growth forests, which is a deeply troubling labor story but also an incredibly destructive extractive process. Which speaks to the work itself as the technology is the culmination of a series of extractive processes put together in some kind of sweat shop in Asia which, again, you’re not supposed to talk about,” says Frost.

Frost now lives between Melbourne, where he was born, and Greece. However, for two decades he was the Australian musician and composer living in Iceland, one of the epic-centres of global cool.

When I press him for reasons for leaving Australia he pauses, looks at the verdant surrounds of the Urban Winery and mutters something about it having to do with “the in-built wanderlust of being an Australian.”

Frost continues: “When I was a kid growing up in Melbourne I had this illuminated globe beside my bed that I would stare at before I go to sleep. I used to look at this tiny little island on the other side of the world and wonder about this place that was as far away as you could go before you started coming back.”

The RMIT graduate also alludes to a less existential reason why he instantly felt at home when he arrived in Iceland: allergies.

“My whole childhood was taken up with treating my asthma and my allergies. Australia felt like a place that was hostile to me. So when I first hit Northern Europe something happened. My body found its equilibrium. I was in the place I meant to be in,” says Frost.

It wasn’t just a climate conducive to someone with respiratory problems that drew Frost to Iceland. It was the vibrant, envelope-pushing music scene that had produced post-rock bands such as Sigur Ros. At the same time he was listening to Mogwai, Slint, My Bloody Valentine and Swans, with whom he would produce and join as a touring member.

When I suggest to Frost that I will check through his back catalogue on Spotify he rears back in horror and annoyance.

“You shouldn’t listen to anything on Spotify. It is the absolute antithesis of everything that I want from the world. Spotify has done irreparable damage to the music world. But that is changing. People are pushing back against the commodification of music. Someone said to me that we are at the moment when hair metal turned into grunge. I really want to believe that is true.”

Frost is involved with another Fremantle Biennale piece, Whalefall, a collaboration with Muller that activates the skeletal remains of the shed at the intersection of Port Beach and Tydeman Roads.

The piece was inspired by an incident in 2023 when a sperm whale was sighted off Port Beach that beached itself on a sandbar near Rockingham, later dying despite heroic efforts to save it.

Muller saw a natural connection between the whale and the building, which both left skeletal remains. 

“The beach whale left a huge impression on those who witnessed the spectacle. So it left a presence, a relic of its passing, a fleeting memory. And there is a natural parallel to this dying building across from Port Beach,” explains Muller as he joins me and Frost at the Urban Winery.

“Our idea was to do a very simple resuscitation of the whale and to give it a moment of remembrance using Ben’s field recording of whales — he loves whales as much as I do — and to use lighting that will bring out the connection to the building. And we will be using drones that will bring out the soul of the whale,” explains Muller.

The result of their work is a series of 17-minute shows during the final weekend of the Biennale in which audiences will see the sun setting between the skeletal remains of the shed and the spirit of the beached sperm whale will be communicated by 80 drones.

“It is exciting because nothing like this has ever been done in this space. It is also a thrill for two people who love to work with old buildings — me and Ben — to be given access to such an iconic structure. We won’t have much to do to it. We will be simply drawing out what is already there,” says Muller. 

A Predatory Chord
Victoria Hall
13-30 November
Entry $15 plus booking fee.

Whalefall
Port Beach Shed
(Corner of Tyedeman Rd and Port Beach Rd)
November 27 and 28
Various evening session times.
Entry free.