Notes by Daniel Johnson:

I.    Theory of Machines

Ben Frost, creates space.

First, in these seconds when Theory of Machines’ begins to emerge into sound, what it brings to mind isn’t any instrument, but an environment.  The distant resonances are a little like the end of that old Alvin Lucier tape experiment, I Am Sitting in a Room, in which the re-re-re-recorded sounds of the composer’s stuttering voice are gradually obliterated by the sympathetic vibrations of the acoustic in which he’s speaking—but here we begin with all resonance, all acoustics, and only eventually do we hear something that sounds like an instrument being played by human hands.

And when we finally do, the focus is still never on the material itself.  From the ominous darkness and intensity of these opening moments, one might expect a death metal album to break out in an instant; but no, the tempo never picks up, no hooks or vocals arrive, and when the drums finally kick in, they’re about as fragmented and corroded as they could possibly be and still resemble a groove.  As the music changes, it changes only in texture, color and intensity, so that the sense is not of something being created, altered or even developed, but of something already present being slowly illuminated.

Frost nods toward the dark photographs of fellow Australian Bill Henson as one of the chief influences over this record’s aesthetic, and it’s not hard to see why.  Just in the way that this piece’s unearthed bass and drums, fuzzed-out and grainy as if half-forgotten, recall some of the sadness of an old favorite song, it’s impossible to look at Henson’s pictures without some nostalgia for the agonies of adolescence.  Lux et Nox, Henson’s book of young bodies in dim, almost black, auroral tableaux, demonstrates all the unsettling emotional and erotic directness of Frost’s work—the slow-dawning rock slither of “Stomp,” the next piece, is explicitly dedicated to the Lux et Nox series—as well as his use of negative space as a compositional tool.

Like Henson, also, Frost is a master of landscape.  He “creates space” acoustically and formally, but he is as well a creator of what can only be described as imaginary geographical spaces, through the breadth and depth of these pieces.  Their scale is enormous, exploiting every extreme of pitch, volume and timbre over the course of nearly ten minutes each, recalling the unbounded enormity of the natural world.  The changes in the music sometimes seem as gradual as changes in the weather—and sometimes as violent.

This album is as dark as it is unafraid to punish its listeners, but for all the “machines” of the title, for all the cold restraints of form, this is a hot-blooded music—a human music—hypnagogically raw.

II.    Stomp

“The Swans represented everything that was great about New York City in the 1980’s,” a friend said to me.  “But the weird thing was, whenever I went to hear them, it seemed like everybody I met in the audience was actually an émigré from fascist Spain.”

Let’s not guess how factual that account is.  But it probably tells you most of what you need to know about the Swans:  they were as pure, dirty, primitive, and cutting-edge as the old Downtown scene itself, and their abuse/bondage anthems were terrifyingly authentic.

Astute listeners may already have guessed something of Frost’s intense admiration for Swans leader Michael Gira from the title of the next piece (ahem, “We Love You Michael Gira”), or from the Swans-song sample that is buried, unearthed, and digitally obliterated (“Red Sheet”) twice over the course of this piece.  But Gira & co. are all over this record, in name, in fact, and in spirit.

The record’s claustrophobically layered sound, at once huge and focused, certainly owes something to that legacy.  Frost’s willful misuse of musical equipment is also very Swans, and—well—very punk, very rock ’n’ roll.  Most obviously, guitar is a primary instrument on Theory of Machines, usually emitting a scream or a crunch rather than a conventionally produced tone, and the title of “Stomp” perhaps suggests a standard piece of rock equipment, the “stomp pedal” with which a guitarist can trigger a distortion effect.  While Frost could also be defined as an “electronic musician”, with tools far more technologically sophisticated than the analog contraptions of the Swans era, he’s clearly bored with the sonic perfection that digital equipment can offer, siding instead with the latter-day Jimi Hendrixes who exploit for expressive purposes the thrillingly wrong and ugly noises of mistreated software and samples.

Listeners “should contemplate turning the stereo down,” says Frost, “They should contemplate checking the connection—should my speakers sound like that?” Still, the execution of each piece is assured enough to make the experience bracing without being repellent.  In “Stomp” especially, something violent is being repressed, held in check at every moment, coming forth only in half-formed outbursts before disappearing.  When the music finally capsizes completely, the gentle white-noise hush that follows is like a cleansing breath.

III.    We Love You Michael Gira

A conflict—perhaps the conflict—central to this aesthetic is between the live, animal element and its technological surroundings.  As Frost explains his working process, software designed to control and clarify live sound takes on a life of its own, seeding the voice of a musical instrument with its own idiosyncratic artifacts.

If scenario seems a little sci-fi, maybe that’s not entirely a coincidence.  Frost confides that a primary influence on these pieces was the score for Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (Soderbergh, not Tarkovsky) by rock drummer-cum-film composer Cliff Martinez. Like Frost, Martinez’s score eschews conventional melodies and other such cinematics.  To depict musically the encounters of the human characters and their uncanny, futuristic environment, he instead toggles between warm orchestral chords and stranger, chillier, more electronically manipulated sounds.  In particular, the emotionally hollow interval of an open perfect fifth intrudes again and again—played by some metallic instrument, perhaps steel drums sounding insistently processed and delayed.

A similar pulse extends through this piece, as if to suggest the electronic pulses that permeate our everyday surroundings.  That high-pitched beeping, what is that?  A fax machine?  A delivery van in reverse?  Or is it an EKG, translating the vital signs of a human being into a kind of terrible music?  (The piece was triggered, Frost says, by a truck reversing, and being reminded of an Emergency Room.)  Whatever it is, it’s as inescapable here as technology itself.

Frost uses a sort of studio legerdemain to disguise the introduction of this sound and of assorted other musical events.  The piece begins with a bass drone passed from ear to ear, followed by the entry of a distant, unidentifiable harmonic cloud, and finally the Solaris-esque ticking and beeping.  Unless we’re paying especially close attention, by the time the ratcheting, scraping noise that pierces the stasis of the “EKG” section reveals itself to be a half-obliterated drumbeat, we’ve probably failed to notice that the pulse has already dropped an octave and taken on a far gentler, more comforting “piano” tone, on a bed of unmistakably live violins.

The brutal rock Coda, after this careful balancing act, comes as a welcome catharsis.  As the title of “We Love You…” suggests, this piece offers the full-throated Swans homage that “Stomp” held in check:  Frost’s band- School of Emotional Engineering, pulls off a full-scale climax with every instrument snarling and groaning and violently present.

IV.    Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water

The title comes from the song “Dynamite” by Stina Nordenstam, and it pretty well encapsulates this piece’s sense of loss and resignation.  Musically, Frost might borrow the darkness of a Nordenstam song, or its delicacy, but in this piece at least, the resemblance ends there.  Unlike the formal balance of popular songwriting, with its alternation of verse, chorus, verse—or of most classical composition, with its discrete subsections—the structures of Frost’s music are gradual and continuous.  It might be said that a given piece of music “tells a story” or “makes a case”; Ben rejects narrative and argument in favor of ceremony.  His models are the music of composers like Arvo Pärt or Henryck Górecki, whose own inspiration is drawn from ancient modes of worship, and whose most famous compositions replace the traditional rhetoric or drama of musical form with something more like a litany.

What this means in practical terms is that the music develops according to simple procedures, unfolding slowly but in many layers.  The minimalist harmonic movement of “Forgetting You…,” a Jacob’s-ladder of slowly rising scale against scale, is coupled with a glacial progression from icy synths to naked, tremulous acoustic instruments.  The throbbing interference between pure, glacial synths is gradually overtaken by bona fide chamber music, the acoustic suddenly intimate enough to reveal tremulous bowing and delicate vibrato.  The “beat” dissolves too, those slowly ticking drums that seems to hold the music back as much as they propel it.

In the music of Pärt, whose stated intention is to gesture towards infinity, the effect is often a distorted sense of time.  So it is here.  This movement is the longest piece on the record, and would be incredibly long for a piece of rock music, but it manages to seem longer still without ever becoming dull.  It finds a perspective outside of time—as if collapsing a lifetime into just eleven minutes, or expanding a single moment’s emotional awakening out to symphonic length.

This is Ben Frost’s “Theory of Machines”:  that music can be expressive without melody, without drama, without adornment of any kind; with only the simple, slow, inexorable progress of an elaborate formal mechanism.

1. -Notes © 2006 Daniel Johnson
   

CREDITS:

   

Writtenperformed by Ben Frost.

Additional programming and other psycho-acoustic wonders executed by Lawrence English.

Recorded in various locations including The Playhouse Bondi – Australia and Greenhouse Studios Reykjavik – Iceland.

Gongs and Ambient Percussion Performed by Sigtryggur Baldursson. String ‘section’ performed by Russell Fawcus.

Stomp contains sample from Red Sheet. Written by Michael Gira Swans ©1991 Young God Records Young God Publishing  

(ASCAP) Used with permission. Written by Ben Frost Daniel Rejmer Sean Albers. Performed by School of Emotional Engineering. Recorded by Daniel Rejmer at Sing Sing Studios and Abercorn Studios Melbourne – Australia.

Written by Ben Frost. Performed by Ben Frost, Hildur Ingveldardóttir, Guðnadóttir, Sigtryggur Baldursson.

The title Forgetting You...  is a borrowed sentiment from Dynamite by Stina Nordenstam.

Recorded and mixed by Valgeir Sigurðsson Ben Frost.

Additional Vinyl Edition Credits:

Artwork adapted for Vinyl by Sturla Mio Þórisson

Vinyl mastering bt Lupo at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin

Theory of Machines was assembled and mixed by Ben Frost & Valgeir Sigurðsson in Greenhouse Studios Reykjavik – Iceland.

Mastered By Valgeir Sigurðsson

All works written by Ben Frost ©2006 – copyright control except Coda ©2006 Ben Frost, Daniel Rejmer, Sean Albers. – all    copyright control.

School of Emotional Engineering is Ben Frost, Daniel Rejmer, Jova Andy,Hazel Russell Fawcus. They appear courtesy of themselves.

Artwork directed by Ben Frost Jette Jonkers. Photographed by Charlie Strand at Dýraspítalinn Reykjavik – Iceland and    was partly inspired by Victor Boullet’s Oblivion.

Artwork designed by dave Ladd – dL76.com

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.    

Ben Frost uses software by Ableton and Native Instruments

No man is an island. This recording was a process that was, at various points influenced in direction, procedure, and realisation by the following    individuals: Daniel Rejmer, Darrin Verhagen, Jette and Árora Jonkers, Lawrence English, Nico Muhly, Scott Horscoft, Sruli Recht, Valgeir Sigurðsson.

I simply could not do what I do without my family and my friends – thank you all, for every single thing. Ben Frost 2006.