98.

Ben Frost
Theory of Machines
(Bedroom Community, 2007)

Not the hyper aggressive, constantly tense minimalist project that Frost put out this year, Theory of Machines remains the masterwork from which that album is framed. The album is a massive slab of industrious noise/drone/electronics that balances the transitions between beauty and doom perfectly. A magnificently high minded album of pure mood.

-Thistle

Ben Frost - Theory of Machines

Ben Frost
Theory of Machines
(2007, Bedroom Community)
8.5/10

Ben Frost constructs and then deconstructs ambient electronics. Theory of Machines’ 5 tracks play as a narrative of teaming beauty and destruction and must be heard as a whole. Isolating single tracks is like reading random chapters out of a book, you loose their relevance without context. Frost’s music is for machinery, for switchboards and factories, for oil consuming retrograde robot soldiers from the future. Yet with all this mechanics of it, Theory of Machines is not an industrial record. Frost’s techniques are rooted in Fenneszian textures, The Wind-Up Bird’s electronic blips and Michael Gira’s pure sonic power. Frost’s robots have pumping, bleeding hearts that flow to the surface after the chaos as in the album closer “Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water” where a beautiful string motif swells to its bursting point. Theory of Machines is power electronics of the most soaringly winning nature. Highly recommended for the adventurous.

-Mr. Thistle

Streaming samples through Frost's Myspace