Ben Frost & Daniel Bjarnason: Solaris

Lots of wax and wane in Ben Frost & Daniel Bjarnason’s Solaris. It’s cold, not cold in a small pinched way, but cold in long flows, like streams of very contemplative melted snow running across a fairly level plain and never meeting. A stream starts off, thinking that it’s going somewhere, but then it reaches that place, or doesn’t, and the place is disappointing, and it drains away with a moan. Other sonic streams are running concurrently and doing the same. The two composers were inspired by the Tarkovsky film, hence the inward focus of the sounds, their isolation from one another, the grieving and the fading, the subtle repetition–the music remembering itself. It’s in the minimal amount of color of the sound-scape. Frost and Bjarnason took a string orchestra, let’s say that’s the snow; they fed it through a computer, there’s the melt.