How do you approach projects differently if your work is commissioned as opposed to a release under your own name?

Working for other people rather than myself? Well that’s the principal difference really – music is an interesting thing because it works in so many different ways. When was the last time you went to a restaurant where there wasn’t music playing? The ubiquity of music is kind of a modern construct, that everything has a soundtrack. When it comes down to just listening to music on its own merits as opposed to in accompaniment of something, as a side salad, the difference is that when I’m making an album it’s not a fucking entrée to something else – it’s the main course. I really struggle a lot actually with the meaninglessness of a great deal of music. When I actually do come to make records, I feel a lot of pressure to make something that really commands its own space, that’s not comfortable as accompaniment.

Is something like Wasp Factory a project that you’d always wanted to do and just reached a means for? In that process, do you start with music or something else?

Music came first, of course. Everything else kind of serves the music, and that’s the whole point. Opera is one of the last art forms we have in which the music is paramount.

A lot of your work has a cinematic quality – do you have a visual or direction in mind or that you hope might pass through to the listener?

Well, I think the thing about making records is that ultimately it’s not really for me to say what it is they mean in the greater context. I can tell you what it means to me in that moment, and I can put some lines in a press release and guide your view towards a certain conclusion, but ultimately, through the passage of time, it’s really not up to me what those records are actually about because maybe I don’t have the foresight, the view that’s wide enough, to actually see what I’m doing at the time.

Which factors influence where you choose to live? Does that become where you make most of your music as well?

I’m not my music – I’m not my job in the same way that a man who works in an office building selling shower curtains is not that. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the job of being a music maker that your personal life is somehow an extension of, if not an integral part of the music making process. For me, that’s not necessarily true. I’m at work right now – I love my job, don’t misunderstand me, but I can draw a line between the two for the most part. I don’t live a lifestyle by which my art is somehow a direct reflection of me. If anything it’s very romantic music, I think, in the sense that I’m trying to synthesize a space that doesn’t exist. It’s somewhere outside of reality – romance in the truest sense. Not the Hollywood version of it, but the idea of the romanticized reality, imagining the world as it should be and not as it is.

Are you aware of the other Australian Ben Frost? Are you all in competition at all? I saw that his website is benfrostisdead.com, which would be a weird exhibition to stumble into.

Of course! It’s not like the world’s most original name.

Do you wonder if you’d be doing something different today if you’d been born Ben Smith or something?

Would I not be making music if my name wasn’t as cool? [laughs] I don’t know about that.

What draws you to noise or distortion in music?

I don’t know. We live in mediocre times, and I feel very strongly that it’s my role to punch through this kind of grey medium space that we’re all presented with. I don’t know where that comes from; all I can tell you is that I feel very deeply that my job is to push the edges of my work. I’m very dissatisfied by anything less than something that feels like it’s on the verge of coming apart. I’m sure I could spend a lot of money in a psychologist’s office unraveling where that comes from.

Looking at your back catalog, you’ve passed through a number of different methods at sounds. Thinking about something like Steel Wound, would you take the opportunity to re-record or alter it today, or is that an artifact of its time?

No, I look at that record now and I know I was in a very busy city in Melbourne. I lived in a very small apartment that was noisy, my life was very at-odds with where I wanted it to be at the time, and there were a lot of jagged edges to my reality. That record is, in a weird way, all these huge reverberant spaces and round edges, not a harsh record at all. In hindsight, I think it was my attempt to find some equalizing force against that, a reaction to my personal space in that it’s using these wide reverbs and very open spaces with this warmth as a way of reacting to a space that was anything but.

If you could decide how your music was delivered to the listener, what would you choose?

The biggest possible speakers in the smallest possible venue.