Ben Frost

Broken Spectre is the music Ben Frost made for Richard Mosse's installation of the same name, a multi-channel film about the destruction of the Amazon. It opened at London's 180 Studios in October 2022. Between 2018 and 2022 Mosse, Frost and the cinematographer Trevor Tweeten travelled through remote parts of the Brazilian rainforest, documenting fires, logging and mining with scientific imaging and sound technologies. The Vinyl Factory presented this double album as his first in five years.

The sound was gathered along the BR-230 Trans-Amazonian Highway in Rondônia, Amazonas and Pará, along the BR-163 "soybean highway" in Mato Grosso, in Yanomami and Munduruku territories and in the Pantanal wetlands. Frost used quarter-inch analogue tape together with an ultrasonic recording system able to capture frequencies far above human hearing. He then re-pitched that spectrum several octaves down. Over 90 per cent of the animal biomass in the rainforest communicates at those wavelengths, so bats, birds and insects come into earshot. From thousands of hours of documentation and electronic composition he shaped twelve pieces conceived for the four sides of vinyl, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road.

The record moves between field recording and synthesis, and the two keep pushing against each other. Report From An Obscure Planet opens with dense forest sound set against a hiss of white noise, while The Index throbs loudly enough to bury the jungle around it. Fisher bats vocalise with strangely human inflections. On The Burning World a single bird call gives way to the crackle of deliberately lit fires and cascading analogue synthesizers. In one section the listener stands in an operating theatre, beside the anaesthetised breathing of a jaguar treated by volunteer vets for severe burns. The closing side runs from Low Flying Aircraft to The Crystal World.

Mosse described the subject as a catastrophe "too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive, and too normalised to see". The project was co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Westridge Foundation, VIA Art Fund and the Serpentine Galleries, and the London show ran until April 2023. Reviewing the album for Igloo Magazine, Chang Terhune heard in it "a stark sonic document of the damage made by humanity".

Standard edition: double LP on 180-gram black vinyl, pressed on the EMI 1400 press at The Vinyl Factory in Hayes, in a sleeve designed by Loose Joints with photographs by Richard Mosse.