Ben Frost and Brian Eno's 'Music for Solaris' at Romaeuropa Festival

At the Romaeuropa Festival in Rome, Ben Frost (electronic guitar and laptop) and Daníel Bjarnason (orchestral direction and prepared piano) performed with the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The concert, held in the Sala Santa Cecilia, featured a minimalist composition balancing classical music with electronic distortions, creating an ambient soundscape. The visual component, created by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson, reworked frames from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film 'Solaris' but was deemed less convincing, with superimposed images that did not significantly enhance the performance. The 45-minute live set was shorter than the advertised 60 minutes. 'Music for Solaris' is based on the 2011 album 'Solaris' by Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason, produced by the Icelandic collective Bedroom Community. The piece was first presented at the Unsound Festival in Kraków in 2012 and debuted in Rome at the Romaeuropa Festival, co-produced with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The performance was a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Stanisław Lem's novel 'Solaris', which inspired Tarkovsky's film.