Despite his young age, Australian-born Ben Frost has entered music history as one of the leading decipherers of contemporary experimental and electronic music, and it is no accident that his name is mentioned increasingly often as an important source of inspiration in interviews with musicians. He has lived and worked in Iceland since the early part of the last decade as part of Bedroom Community, a local collective specialising in contemporary music. Both a composer and performer of live productions applied to the theatre and concert stages, he works with old-fashioned tape loops as well as computer editing and layered guitar notes. He has collaborated with a host of important artists from Björk to Brian Eno and countless others. Frost was assigned a unique task by the organisers of the Polish Unsound Festival when he was asked to create a stage piece based on Stanisław Lem's classic science fiction novel Solaris, which was also the basis for a cult film by Andrei Tarkovsky. The event organisers brought in the Sinfonietta Cracovia orchestra of Kraków to help achieve the full effect, while Frost was supported by his friend Daníel Bjarnason from Iceland, a conductor/composer and fellow Bedroom Community collaborator. Both are currently at the peak of their creativity, Frost having recently released his album By the Throat, while Bjarnason’s Processions has made major waves on the international contemporary music scene. Solaris is a complex work based as much on newly written software with the ability to generate complicated structures as it is on the orchestration of 29 string instruments, piano and guitar. Brian Eno's Film Manipulations lend the production a unique visual appeal. Solaris is about how deep-rooted and traumatic fantasies can become reality, which is why Frost was always unhappy with the film’s original soundtrack, believing it to concentrate disproportionately on external sci-fi aspects while “failing to appropriately examine the inner human world.” He has now seized the opportunity to bring to life the deeper meanings at the heart of the story. Presented by: Palace of Arts

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