Once upon a time, Ben Frost started out as a composer of laden ambient music. Not necessarily upbeat, more contemplative and just a little depressing of the kind that can be used to add some colour to a dip.
Take the play 'You, Me and the End of Everything, which is on YouTube available is. Compared to the score of The Murder of Halit Yozgat, experienced live in this Holland Festival, this is a sea of calm.
I ask Ben Frost, the composer and director of this production, about what happened between that composition and today.
'I wrote that over 20 years ago, following the death of my grandmother. I watched her die of cancer. It was the first time I experienced death. That's what that record is about: how I tried to give meaning to death as a boy. What has happened since then is that I have grown up. My whole life has happened since that day. I think I'm a much stronger person now than I was then.'
Known from Dark on Netflix
In those intervening years, Frost became a celebrated composer known - at least in my world - for the soundtrack of the Netflix series Dark. Visitors to the Holland Festival may still have his Aurora and Wasp Factory from the previous decade fresh in their eardrums.
Combining samples with machine-like rhythms, ripping electric guitars and massive orchestrations, Frost's music moves between modern classical, punk and death metal. Often those genres can be heard simultaneously.
At 15, I shaved my mother's head bald
The Murder of Halit Yozgat takes it up a notch. Frost creates a wall of sound that murders the audience in two hours. Quite a bit fiercer, then, than on "The End of Everything".
'I remember as a boy being very insecure about everything. I was terrified. When I was 15, I lived alone with my mother, and she got breast cancer. So I almost lost her too. My childhood, from my teenage years until I was in my twenties, were then defined by fear of loss, the result of losing my grandmother and the near-loss of my mother. That still reverberates.'
'My mother is doing well now, she survived, but the memory of the moment when, as a 15-year-old, I had to shave my mother's head bald because her hair started falling out, that did stay with me. I didn't feel that way at the time, but I can see now that that was a lot for a child.'
'The work I make now, I hope, also has much more power. I am also much better able to focus my energy outward, and be a bit less concerned with just myself, with how miserable I felt as a 15- or 20-year-old.'
An attack by neo-Nazis
The Murder of Halit Yozgat is based on a real murder, which took place at an internet café in Kassel in 2006. The murder turned out to be one in a series of attacks by the NSU, a Nazi cell that aimed to unleash a racial war in Germany through such massacres. Numerous riddles remain around the murders, which are fodder for conspiracy theories. In the case of Halit Yozgat's murder, these include the possible involvement of an employee of the German secret service, who happened to be present in the café but claims not to have seen or heard anything.
The British research collective Forensic Architecture, which - like the now better-known Bellingcat - researches crimes through publicly available sources like YouTube and Google Maps but also hires scientists to take on-the-spot measurements, made a revealing documentary about the case in 2017, which now serves as the format for The Murder of Halit Yozgat. Format and text are a meticulous reconstruction of the film released by Forensic Architecture.
A boat carrying refugees sinks within sight of the harbour
Ben Frost got to know Forensic Architecture during a project he made about the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Lesbos. He and his crew witnessed the sinking of a refugee ship, resulting in many dozens of casualties. It changed his outlook on life further:
'Both my parents work in the police as detectives. My mother was one of the first to raise the profile of violence against women in the police in the late 1970s. My father held a high rank and investigated murders and armed robberies. I was unwittingly confronted with many terrible things through their work. They did try to hide it from me, but it always played a role. As a result, I have quite a high pain threshold for such situations. I don't scare easily.'
'I was on lesbos with Richard Moss with whom I have been working for a long time, and often in situations that were quite nasty. But Greece was different. It's a disaster of biblical proportion. That huge migration of people. There was also a lot of beauty, incredible displays of humanity. That was overwhelming. To then see those dead brought into the port, that was too much. There is such a difference between reading about it or seeing images, and actually being there.'
Murder is a symptom of something much bigger
'Forensic Architecture was also doing research there and I became so fascinated by their work that I resolved to work with them one day. Their fact-finding is so important in a world that, thanks to social media, is becoming increasingly sharply divided between left and right, right or wrong. I think then what they do, investigating on the spot, will melt even the most hard-hearted thinkers.'
'Even Marine Le Pen, faced with that situation in Greece, would be the first to put a blanket over someone's shoulder. If there is just a little bit of humanity in you you get hit by such trauma.'
'An act of violence like shooting any innocent person dead is an symptom of an increasingly violent society, not the cause of it. The perpetrators are obviously responsible, but we must also ask ourselves, what kind of society are we making in which people feel called to act this way?'
'Such acts of violence are ultimately quite simple. You decide to hate someone because he has the wrong skin colour, or prays to the wrong god. And because you hate him, you go and kill him. But that pales, as far as I am concerned, in the light of a world in which invisible institutional forces are able to literally make time a weapon against the family of the victim of one of those crimes.'
The father will not know his son's fate
Ben Frost is referring to the core of Forensic Architecture's investigation, which shows quite conclusively that the secret service employee must have at least witnessed it, if not pulled the trigger himself. However, the Kassel regional government decreed that the facts that would prove this should not be published for 120 years. That has since been reduced to 40 years, but even then Halit's father will not live to see it.
This is unpalatable, Ben Frost believes. 'They're saying: we know things you're not supposed to know, and you're going to die before we release that information. That is much more violent than a single fucking idiot with a gun. And we are all part of that violence. That makes me feel very uncomfortable.'
A not exactly soothing wall of sound
So now Frost has also turned that into a pretty uncomfortable piece of musical theatre. The work follows the film of Forensic Architecture fairly closely, but puts a wall of sound around it that is not exactly soothing. Moreover, the repetition, up to six times, of the reconstruction is quite something that appeals to the spectator's tolerance limits.
There is, in short, a lot of anger in the performance, and by the end the stage is populated by people in white suits as snow falls. Frost doesn't really offer a solution, he acknowledges. 'I don't have a solution. The only weapon we have is to keep talking about it constantly.'
The empathy is up to the audience, not the singers
The film by Forensic Architecture features footage of the real 'suspect', Agent Temme, interspersed with footage from the reconstruction the ensemble later made in its own studio, and during Documenta 14, with others playing his 'role'.
For his staging at Hanover Opera, Frost extends that fact. The singers switch roles with each repetition, making the lyrics, taken directly from Forensic Architecture's video, sound different each time.
'I don't like it when actors or singers really get into someone's skin. That's why I chose to rotate them all the time, leaving the texts and actions free of interpretation. That's up to the audience.'
'My favourite form of theatre is the theatre where you are constantly reminded that you are in the theatre. You are constantly aware that you are participating in an illusion. That's how it gets stronger.'
Always a different perspective, courtesy of Eno
'I am also hugely influenced by Brian Eno in my work. Playing with structures. All the voices are written around the central C note. Only a soprano sings higher than a baritone and so that gives different accents to the lyrics all the time. So the music is largely the same, but the voices change and with them the atmosphere and meaning.'
'That way it comes closer to the story of Forensic Architecture's investigation: you keep getting a different perspective on the event. You see the same image in The Matrix, where you see a bullet being drained while the camera moves around it.'
The annoyance you feel is really necessary
Or Rashomon, the Japanese courtroom drama where every witness has a different story and the truth disappears behind those stories? Here the repetition causes hope for change, but that change does not come, except that it becomes increasingly clear that that secret agent must be involved. Each variation makes the alternatives more implausible.
This also causes annoyance, Frost acknowledges: 'This is humanity at its best: we use everything we have at hand to find out the truth and don't rest until we have it. This can be lengthy, because it involves small details. The annoyance arises because you find that all that good and detailed work does nothing against the institutional violence, which is so amorphous and so big and so elusive. Who are these people keeping this information from us? Where is that hard drive? The inability to find that solution is the real terror.'
You can really hear a 130-decibel bullet in the back of a theatre
Sound plays an essential role in the performance. Not only is the music loud, there is also a speaker on stage exclusively for making the three gunshots sound at exactly the volume at which they also sounded during the attack (130 dB). 'I was able to use the original sounds and play them at exactly the volume at which they originally sounded. They are played during the music, which is already loud, and no matter where you sit in the hall: you hear those shots clearly.
'That someone who sat nearby in a quiet internet café can insist that he didn't hear them is incomprehensible. I make that palpable now, and it's more effective than in a YouTube video. And so then the question for all of us in the room is: we all know he is lying, so now what? Therein lies the frustration. Halit's family has to live with that every day.'
Then there is the end of everything anyway
The end comes with a completely dishevelled stage and creatures in white capes wandering around searchingly. An image that raises questions. Are we in the new ice age, which scientists say precedes the deadly warming of the climate in north-western Europe? Is it not snow, but fallout after a nuclear war? For Frost, the question may remain unanswered: 'I'm interested in the question of when an ordinary news story becomes mythology. Why does it happen in one story and not in another? Time plays a role in that.'
'In the end, the story becomes more important than the act itself. For me, this case contains all the elements of a myth. It happened in 2006, so we don't see it that way yet, but all the elements are ready. Time is going to show us, through the myth, when the news has long since moved on to other things.'
'And meanwhile, that news, about the disasters coming our way, makes us lose our empathy. I notice it myself: the longer disasters last, like in Ukraine, the more I shut myself off from them. I have friends there, note, but still I catch myself saying that part of me doesn't want to care. It's exhausting. That's what my music is about, too. It doesn't stop, it keeps repeating, it goes on and on. That at some point people think it goes on long enough, is conceivable.'
The play must cross a line
Wouldn't you then just get even more extreme and repeat it not six, but six hundred times, until the last spectator falls over? 'Honestly: yes. We had a lot of conversations about it during rehearsals. Whether it doesn't go on too long, whether there shouldn't be a 'loop' out of it, or whether the loops should gradually get shorter, and whether perhaps there should be fewer silences in it. My answer was always: yes, it should be shorter, but we're not going to make it shorter because the very fact that it goes on too long is why we make it.'
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