Ben Frost has Me by the Throat

For those of you that haven't had the pleasure of hearing Ben Frost already, think of an anthropomorphic, classically-trained lawnmower with explosive diarrhea (and the diarrhea is beautiful and you love it).  Frost has been one of the greatest contributions to noise in the last decade, making other noise acts like Black Dice seem amateurish and uneventful.  While noise has often been criticized for being unexceptional and indulgent, Frost's compositions are alive, melodic, expressive, and exciting. 

A native to Austrailia, Frost now resides in Iceland (the other middle of nowhere), where he has collaborated with the likes of Bjork and Nico Muhly.  The album I am reviewing today, By the Throat, was originally released last year, being the first full length recording since his critically-acclaimed breakthrough Theory of Machines, and is now finally available on vinyl (here, for instance).  Frost continues his style of glitchy fuzziness accompanied by moments of acoustic instrumentation (not unlike our favorite Azusa Plane).  At other moments, the music is undeniably electronica, but it's represented tastefully through this skewed, dark lens, decorated with distortion.  The music moves endlessly without tiring you, with huge, dense swells of static and warmth, engulfing you in its giant waves of controlled chaos.  I think of Frost's music as I do David Lynch's films, walking a thine line between the avant-garde and the accessible with perfect balance, with constant and (mostly) seamless shifts between moderate harmony and noisy intensity.  This is by far my favorite record of this year and last.