Album Review: Ben Frost - By The Throat

By The Throat is a menacingly suggestive title. It says to me: the music contained within this package; bedecked with pictures of wolves illuminated by lonely headlights, is going to wrestle you to the ground, before it’s slavering jaws lock tightly around your neck until you give it the attention it craves. Flatly, it expects me to refuse to pay attetnion to anything else for it’s duration. Thankfully, it’s a title that is less suggestive than it is threateningly indicative.

For adopted Icelander Ben Frost has created an ambient album which defies the apparent conventions of the genre: a maelstrom of foreboding compositions which grab, grip and bite.  The eagle eyed and bat-eared amongst the music press were quick to lump this sublime record with Sunn O)))’s latest opus ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ upon it’s release late last year, due to it’s ability to give ambient music the kind of brawn and teeth that it generally seems to lack. Yet By The Throat is a very different prospect to its cowled (and in my opinion, highly overrated) ‘cousin’. Like the wolves that prowl it’s artwork it refuses to rely on brute terror and brawn, instead ceaselessly stalking the listener and wearing it down with persistent guile.

And by that, I mean that until you hear it, it’s hard to imagine anyone creating a record quite like By The Throat. This is a uniquely cinematic and affective set of compositions that single-handedly espouses the unique attributes of what is considered noise, perching somewhere between terror and beauty. Earlier I used the word sublime to describe this record, and for once, I’m not succumbing to hyperbole, if you’ll permit me a brief detour into aesthetic philosophy. The sublime is a concept of (traditionally natural) beauty which dates as far back as Plato, yet in reference to By The Throat, the theory of the sublime developed by English philosopher Edmund Burke is my touching point. Burke stated that the ‘sublime’ was a separate entity from traditional beauty, whereby what is “”dark, uncertain, and confused” could instil feelings of awe and appreciation in a way similar to that which is beautiful.

It’s this contrast between serenity and fear upon which the album thrives: the achingly dischordant strings of ‘Peter Venkman Pt 1′ coming up against the chanted refrains of a choir can be likened to the album’s most terrifying moment, which comes during ‘The Carpathians’ as peaceful strings die away to be replaced by a snarling that increases in volume until you’re sure the record is about to tear your throat open, and drag your bloodied corpse into the arctic night to share with it’s howling brethren.

There is certainly a strong sense that it’s Frost’s adopted homeland which has figured most heavily in his creative process: the glacial streams of white noise which dominate opening track ‘Killshot’ could hardly be said to come from his birthplace of Australia. Yet it’s the sparing, calculating quality with which he uses extreme frequencies and volumes which marks this album out from its peers. Frost is not a maximalist in the vein of fellow white noise weaver Tim Hecker (or indeed Sunn o))), yet another reason why I feel that particular comparison falls rather flat), yet nor does he succumb to the kind of analogue simplicity that’s so in vogue of late. Frost is in fact, an icy industrialist.

Yet his minimalism is a more classical variant, relying on strings carefully mingled with blasts of glitch laden noise, which lends his music a far more fearful and lonely aspect than his compatriots, and a far more emotive warmth than his competitors. The dull intensive care ward throb of ‘O God Protect Me’ is interrupted only by a dull drone of strings, whilst ‘Studies For Michael Gira’ is a death march of teutonic electronics, punctuated by a harrowed violin that would certainly meet the approval of the Swans frontman, if not classical composer Samuel Barber (he who penned the famous Adagio For Strings which bears his name and features notably in ‘Platoon’). Like the much vaunted Christian Fennesz, he is not above finding melody in his apparently chaotic murk of buzz and hum, and once the listener has delved a little deeper, it’s clear that labelmate Nico Muhly‘s modern piano work is often the perfect foil to Frost’s cascadingly chaotic samples: the lonesome piano of album highlight ‘Híbakúsja’ meshing seamlessly with the gulped samples, evoking the feeling that Frost’s instrumentation is literally struggling for air.  But more often it’s those strings which are foremost in the listener’s mind. Frequently beautiful, but simultaneously eerie and foreboding, it’s not for nothing that comparisons have been made to that most infamous piece of cinematic dualism: David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ theme tune.

It’s near impossible to describe the record that Frost has created without resorting to hyperbole. It really is sublime in both senses of the word, and there’s very little more that needs to be said, however much I’d like to drone on. By The Throat might be the perfect record, or it might be a simply brilliant one. Either way, the way that Frost has captured beauty, terror, fear, serenity, loneliness and warmth all in a single set of eleven compositions points to this particular LP being one that doesn’t so much as deserve your time, but physically demand it.