Ben Frost — By the Throat (2009)

The sound of Ben Frost dosen't fit in any niche, it isn't easy to classify. It's certainly cinematic music or it could be called ambient music with an agressive edge. He claims influences from both Arvo Pärt and Swans, and you can certainly feel them in the sheer intensity and simplicity of the music. It is also possible to find some influences of post-rock, industrial music and even black metal in Frost's music. He has recently moved to Iceland and is now part of Bedroom Community Label and collective of artists. He has also collaborated with renowned musicians (Tim Hecker among others) and did remixes for Björk, Machinefabriek and irish black metal group Altar of Plagues, to name a few.

By The Throat is really an album like no other. Put on some good headphones and turn on the volume. Here is an album that is a truly immersive, visceral experience. Listening to this album is something physical. I often can feel the hairs on my arms rise up when the first song kicks in. Something you don't experience often in music, unfortunately. The sounds are sometimes delicate, other times downright scary. Mixing electronic sounds, guitar, samples of wolves howling, Frost manages to keep the listener on the edge during the duration of the album. And this is really what this is about. That's the music of survival, of the force of nature over man. Not surprisingly Ben Frost's blog is filled with pictures of nature's power: Forest fires, thunderstorms, predatory animals. The album is also accompanied by impressive pictures of wolves by photographer Bjarni Grims.

His last album (released in 2011) is a collaboration with Daniel Bjarnason (with some supervision by Brian Eno as part of a mentor-protégé program). It is called Sólaris and is a fictional soundtrack for the Tarkovsky movie of the same name. I will also be talking about this album soon on this blog.