Ben Frost - The Wasp Factory (CD)

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The Wasp Factory is the very first opera from Ben Frost, and is an adaptation of the Iain Banks novel. It was first premiered at Austria'€™s Bregenz Festival and finished up in London'€™s Royal Opera House. This is the first time the audio has been released.

The materials Frost works with here are perhaps warmer than one might expect from the composer of electronic experiments like Aurora and Theory of Machines. Now, the focus is on the '€˜live'€™ sounds of a small string ensemble and, for the first time, the human voice. Over the repeating, tessellating musical cells of that string accompaniment, he sets Poutney'€™s text to tuneful, even soulful vocal lines; an extraordinarily unreliable narrator describing scenes of extreme violence and horror in music of incongruous loveliness.