“My Greatest Enemies Are Women and the Sea” rises to a vertex right in the middle, as the title line is sung, flooding it with climactic power. It’s nested in the shape of the song, an inexorable grip and release. A single bass drop on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” tells a whole story in seconds. (If you’ve been listening to art music by the likes of Jenny Hval, let alone Shara Worden’s chamber operas, you’re almost there.)įrost is well suited to a narrative form like opera because his music is dense with acoustical narratives, interlocked from the atomic to the cosmic level.

The belling timbre on “Blyth” is very Björk, while the indecorous bellow of “Wrong!” on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” is midway between Benjamin Britten, composer of Peter Grimes, and Nicki Minaj on “Monster.” If you’ve been looking for an accessible way into contemporary opera, this could very well be it. The vocal lines are lean and soulful, more like jazz, blues, cabaret, and pop. Don’t expect Italianate phrasing or proper coloratura. It’s not the only way The Wasp Factory bucks operatic convention. This is captured in a recording of rapt, intrusive closeness, the singers lunging into your face, unlike the polite remove typical of classical music. As always, Frost’s hyperreal acoustical shapes don’t seem symbolic-they just uncannily exist, deforming spacetime. It’s By the Throat inverted, foregrounding classical and recessing electronics, with no entropy in Frost’s signature blend of concussive brawn, delicate tissue, and intricate logic.Ī small string ensemble pulses in tight swarms, slashing out parallelograms in a holographic medium of bass and distortion. Though the focus is now live sound and the human voice, The Wasp Factory should still resonate with fans of his ambient music. He combines post-minimal finesse with modernist severity and Wagnerian daring, charging into the deepest abysses of quiet and storming up the fieriest peaks of noise. The Australia-born, Iceland-based Frost is popularly known for his electro-acoustic hybrids of classical music and heavy metal. With justified ferocity, they chew and spit Frank’s infernal confession, and Frost’s music, played by the Reykjavík Sinfonia, coldly stokes the flames. Not merely aspects of Frank’s psyche, they’re like the Furies, bearers of divine retribution. On this newly-released Bedroom Community recording-the opera premiered in 2013-they are sung with wicked charisma by Lieselot De Wilde, Jördis Richter, and Mariam Wallentin. Then he assigned the three roles to powerful women, entirely omitting Frank as a character. Frost solved both problems in one stroke by asking Pountney to split Frank’s phantasmagoric monologue into a trialogue.

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