Performed by Ben Frost with Greg Fox, Shahzad Ismaily and Thor Harris and largely written in Eastern DR Congo, A U R O R A aims directly, through its monolithic construction, at blinding luminescent alchemy; not with benign heavenly beauty but through decimating magnetic force. Nothing more than a brief burst of energy and light, it comes and goes violently, mirroring those same short but energetic lives in its crushing noise and jarring flickers of piercing drone. But while I'm not sure I'm as enthralled with this album as I was by the other one by him I've heard, By the Throat, it's definitely up there in the same league.

It's indeed a monster: mechanized and powerful, A U R O R A takes the booming sound of dance music and twists it into something evil. It’s the lifeless, senseless and powerless sound of the teeth of its namesake, just caught up in the larger actions of the bodymass behind it, uncaring.Fact incorporates a print magazine, exhibition programme, production studio and audiovisual channel.

It’s that sort of industrial album, unlike the catchy metal of say, Ministry or Nine Inch Nails; Aurora actually feels like it was made in a menacing factory with Frost overseeing his mad production. Not that that's a bad thing, by any means; I'm liking A U R O R A quite a bit overall, although I think it's going to take a few more listens to fully sink in. On “Secant,” one of the best tracks of the bunch, Frost delves into a pulsing, hissing form of industrial that’s only a few shades more abstract than any of the highlights from The Downward Spiral. With the fog parting on the horizon and the sun rising urgently in the East, the album splinters into full-blown technicolour on the glitchy introspection of “Sola Fide” and closing, techno-tinged highlight, “A Single Point of Light” – a triumphant ten minutes of intent-drenched transmutation and steady disintegration. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said the scientist would be his dream collaborator: “It would be about getting some face time with the guy who literally synthesized life—he made life.Frost and his contemporaries have toyed with the definition of a “song,” but these tracks might take it too far. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Final track “A Single Point of Blinding Light” might be the most appropriately titled track released this year.

Firmly rooted in Dark Ambient, Noise and Industrial musics, past albums like By The Throat and Theory Of Machines have all been punishing but breathtaking affairs, focusing strongly on both physical pain and psychological trauma. He cast himself as a kind of endurance artist on the cover of his 2007 album Theory of Machines and, in 2013, directed his own theatrical adaption of Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory. It should be noted that while plunging into opening track “Flex” I was on a flight from Houston to Dallas and, as the plane was taking off, it was hard to tell what sounds came from Frost and what sounds came from the plane. In particular this gives the whole record a tremendous feeling of scale, the gargantuan echo of the production casting earlier, more minimalist and claustrophobic excursions into sharp relief. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.Both 'Secant' and of course 'Venter' - which has already been covered at great length and with great hype elsewhere - are exercises in delay and release, where a initial darkness is blown wide open by a cascading, euphoric crescendo.

Its mastery was in the deployment of minimal resources for maximal gains: the economy of sound used by Frost lent the record a nightmarish tension and almost comic isolation, howling wolves over creeping sub-bass; a claustrophobic step-by-step recreation of a hospital ventilator.Diphenyl Oxalate" is a grindcore band playing through a chemical fire, while "Venter" hurtles towards you in slow motion, sucking in syncopated percussion and tubular bells along the way. The Teeth Behind the Kisses is a ghost in the machine, silently lurking and threatening although it’s barely there.