Ben Frost And Tim Hecker @ Sydney Opera House

As part of Sydney Festival, a packed house attended the Joan Sutherland Theatre on Sunday night to get a rare glimpse of two master sonic craftsmen in the flesh, both touring their greatest accomplishments to date (Aurora for Ben Frost, Virgins for Tim Hecker). As expected, they each provided wholly unique aural (and in some respects, visual) experiences.

Anyone in attendance hoping to inspect Tim Hecker’s equipment to try and get some understanding into how he makes the sounds he makes might have been sorely disappointed. He performed his unbroken, hour-long set in almost complete darkness, standing under only a lone, incredibly dim spotlight and shrouded in smoke. It served as a mission statement: he’s known as a sound artist, so sound is all the audience gets. It’s a bold, perfect choice.

Hecker’s music is riddled with contradictions – organic yet synthetic, relaxing yet tense – and they all work together to make him as compelling as he is. Without a distracting, self-described “dazzling” light show that seems de rigueur for anyone performing anything new sonically, the audience was forced to latch onto Hecker’s pieces, creating a one-of-a-kind show in which each new sound source evoked a new mindset and 60 minutes felt like five minutes and three hours at the same time. As the music faded into silence, I noticed that my heart was racing, and I had no idea the entire time. Incredible.

Ben Frost followed, and any sort of peace the crowd felt after Hecker’s set was instantly eradicated. Frost opened his set with screaming feedback performed on guitar before setting off a sample of a jet taking off, pushing the sound system to its limit. While Hecker played in darkness, Frost played with a constant, blinding strobe coming from one of five lights behind him that intensified with the music. While he was onstage, you were powerless to do anything but sit up and pay attention.

Frost is more traditional than Hecker in a couple of aspects. Having live visuals of any kind, for one thing, but also inherently in his music. Hecker’s is all his own, while Frost is expanding on the approach set out by IDM kings Aphex Twin and Autechre and taking it to subtle extremes. That’s not to say he’s any less compelling. Frost plays actual songs that reach satisfying climaxes and flip the usual rhythms of dance music on their head, while still obeying the trademarks of the genre. He closed his set by making what sounded like a hospital bed sound both ominous and danceable, which oddly works as a summation of his live show in general.