Immense, elegiac space music from Ben Frost and composer/arranger Daniel Bjarnason. Arising out a 2010 commission from the Unsound Festival in Krakow - hometown of Stanislav Lem, writer of the original Solaris novel - Frost and Bjarnason's SOLARIS is also a response to Andrei Tarkovsky's famous film version. Though outwardly a work of science fiction, SOLARIS is really a meditation on time, memory and mortality, and Frost and Bjarnason's music is accordingly grave, pensive and moving. They clearly revel in the possibilities of working with an orchestra, inducing the 28-piece Sinfonietta Cracovia to replicate, in acoustic "reality", the effects of digital decay and delay, and contributing their own arsenal of electronics to the brew. The beautifully sculpted results are subtle, sensuous and often majestic, and will appeal to fans of William Basinski, Johann Johannsson, Gavin Byars, Roly Porter, Nico Muhly and Fennesz, to name but a few.
