Holy Hell. Last Decem­ber, word started spread­ing about this album, which had been released in label Bed­room Community’s home base of Ice­land. Ben Frost had had a few small releases, and a major spot remix­ing Björk, but the ini­tial feed­back on The­ory of Machines was describ­ing some­thing extra­or­di­nary. Of course, WORD was chomp­ing at the bit to hear this. Its finally hit a world­wide release, and, my god, it’s astound­ing. The open­ing title track is hands down my favorite of the set. The heav­ily effected gui­tar starts things off in a slightly Machine­fab­riek way, then the dirty sub­tle bass line makes it way in, before finally expand­ing to drums…the song fol­lows an arc of quiet restrained beauty to crash­ing chaos by the end. “Stomp” could be viewed as grat­ing, as it incor­po­rates an evolv­ing gui­tar sam­ple (of Michael Gira from Swans…more on that later) and per­cus­sive plod, but it’s par­tic­u­lar brand of build­ing and main­tain­ing ten­sion is what makes it end­lessly lis­ten­able. Like­wise, with “We Love You Michael Gira,” Frost’s ode to Swans, which is anchored by the inces­sant beep­ing of either a truck in reverse or an EKG, both of which pro­vide the song with a relent­less and sus­pense­ful arc. And that arc gets more and more lay­ered and dis­torted as time goes on…the beep­ing turn­ing into a heavy back­beat for the gui­tars and elec­tron­ics as they careen more and more out of con­trol. Just when it reaches the point of pure insan­ity, the song sub­sides… only to be fol­lowed up by the 90 sec­ond track “Coda,” a full-on noise-rock jam, a strange bridge between the first 3 tracks, and the final elec­tronic sym­phony of “For­get­ting You Is Like Breath­ing Water.” A sub­tle piece, it nonethe­less has just enough grit to it to make it less than pretty, and more melan­choly, with esca­lat­ing fre­quen­cies, and a bed of synths that don’t so much try to repli­cate strings, but serve as an elec­tronic answer to strings. The exten­sive liner notes by Daniel John­ston give the lis­tener added insight to the music, with con­ver­sa­tions with Frost and unset­tlingly pho­tog­ra­phy of the artist in var­i­ous states through­out a cold and spooky doctor’s office. I’d be highly sur­prised if this album didn’t make many a year-end list come Decem­ber. Rec­om­mended. Get it at Bent Crayon, Boomkat, or Bleep.

You can hear 4 of the album’s 5 songs at Ben Frost’s Myspace. I encour­age you to brave the Myspace music player to check this music out. Also, Industrial.org is offi­cially host­ing a song from Frost’s School of Emo­tional Engi­neer­ing project, an album I’d really like to get my hands on, based on this ridicu­lously good track:
School of Emo­tional Engi­neer­ing — “Slic­ing The Skin Between My Toes”