Australian-born and Iceland-based composer Ben Frost has been putting out nuanced electronic music from the outer reaches since 2003.

His latest album, Aurora, breaks from his previous work and steps deeper into experimentation. It has found him a new audience, with one reviewer declaring Frost is “reshaping the landscape of modern music”.

Not only has Aurora been picked out by Rolling Stone magazine as one of its best albums of the year so far, but Frost also received a cover feature in deep-thinking music magazine The Wire in June. Its profile described the album as having “burning technological intensities”.

Intensity is an adjective Frost picks out as he talks to The Guide from LA, a few weeks before coming to Brighton for one of only two UK dates. Although he says: “I don’t consider my music to be a documentary.” – part of the reason Aurora is intense is thanks to four weeks he spent in Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo).

He had been in the troubled African country to work on a soundtrack commission for artist and photographer Richard Mosse.

The resulting film, a visual feast called The Enclave, won the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

In DR Congo, Frost ended up writing his own music as well as the soundtrack as he battled against time and worked on a laptop powered by a generator. He now says a hotel room in Burundi is the place which delineates a change in his life and sound.

His career had begun in the Australian experimental scene with The Husbands before making his 2003 solo debut album Steel Wound. In 2005 he moved to Iceland and got involved in the Reykjavik collective Bedroom Community, which guided his following releases, Theory Of Machines and By The Throat. Later he joined Brian Eno’s Protégé programme, collaborated with dance choreographer Wayne McGregor, made music for films and directed and scored the first stage adaptation of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory.

But listen to Aurora and you get the sense of Frost’s time in DR Congo – you are pushed outside your comfort zone and rewarded for it.

Frost, however, refuses to accept direct links between Aurora’s sound and DR Congo.

“It does not read well in the press,” he says.

“One of the things the project was trying to get away from is simplified text – especially in regard to DR Congo. Beforehand, my understanding of the situation down there was based on Wikipedia.

“And when the world is funnelled into these collective texts written by well-educated white people it makes the world seem a lot more matter of fact than it is. But there is a pervading chaos in all of these situations. It is far more complicated than you can ever imagine.”

He prefers the idea that being exposed to the country first hand means “it’s gone through me... but it’s my interpretation, it’s not the truth.”

Another recent project which seems to seep into Aurora is Death Is Elsewhere. After the Congolese collaboration, Time magazine invited Frost, Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten to travel to aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to document flight tests for the X-47B drone. He remembers it was “like visiting the death star”. The trio pretended to be journalists to gain access.

“In my way [that] is the joke of the whole thing. That is entirely what that job [journalism] is about – it is interpreting a situation, and we just happened to interpret it in a different way.” He is one of the few people to have learned the tricks of field recording from former Cabaret Voltaire keyboardist turned sound-recordist Chris Watson. These skills came in useful when Frost was on the boat in the middle of the Atlantic. He had a pair of earphones and ear muffs connected to a shotgun microphone which “becomes the lens with which I perceived the situation”.

“Everything else is blocked out,” he adds, “and it becomes this hugely interpretive process. In that moment, in that one second where you start listening to the surroundings, you are already augmenting the experience, you are already making decisions, you are changing the truth and you are manipulating the listener.”

That’s important for Frost because not listening experience is pure.

“Then when you get into studio you are further abstracting the reality, and it becomes an expression of an experience rather than a definitive image.”

You could argue it’s the same with Aurora.

Before he departs he remembers that the last time he played in Brighton the electricity cut out early in the set. He will not let it happen again. It’s a wrong that needs to be made right, and I’m excited about making sure that happens.”