Manual for Building a Monster

We all have our little youthful frauds. Mine involved a high school rock band and a cassette tape. Truth be told, we could barely tune our instruments, but that didn’t stop me from crafting epic stories about imaginary gigs at city parties and bars. The snowball grew so big that one day, someone—dead serious—asked me, “Hey, do you have any live recordings?”

The initial panic turned into a master plan. I locked myself away to cook up the perfect con: I took our noisy rehearsal tapes, layered them with crowd noise from an Aerosmith live album, and as the cherry on top, recorded myself shouting things like, “Thank you, you’re amazing!” between songs. The trick was so bold, so well executed, that for a while, everyone believed my band was a real onstage phenomenon.

What I didn’t know back then was that my little scam had a legendary precedent. Years earlier, producer Eddie Kramer—a wizard of ’70s rock—had done something strikingly similar with KISS. Detroit was already “Rock City” long before the band shouted it to the world on their Destroyer album, and for an up-and-coming group like KISS, conquering that city was vital. But at that point, KISS wasn’t yet the monster they would become. A little bit of… “magic” was needed. Kramer, inspired by the raw energy of 1972’s Slade Alive!, took recordings from a concert at Cobo Hall, mixed them with studio tracks, added overdubbed vocals and guitar solos, and, of course, cranked the audience noise to the max.

The result was Kiss Alive! (1975), the “holy monster” of live albums—and incidentally, my favorite live record of all time. Years later, the band admitted it wasn’t as “live” as it seemed. Suddenly, my cassette tape didn’t just feel justified—it felt like I was part of a lineage of rock illusionists. Turns out, my idea wasn’t so original after all. Not even close.

And it’s that same fascination with the blurred line between real and fabricated, between stage and studio, that brings me here today, almost twenty years later, to talk about one of my musical heroes: Australian artist Ben Frost. For two decades, this musician has been my compass in the world of experimental electronics. Albums like Theory of Machines, By The Throat, and A U R O R A are pillars in my musical library—a sonic beast blending the surgical precision of digital percussion, the fury of extreme metal guitars, and the abyssal calm of ambient music. Frost never repeats himself. He’s collaborated with giants like Brian Eno, Swans, and Steve Albini, always pushing limits, always uncomfortable, always brilliant. His latest recording, Under Certain Light and Atmospheric Conditions, is no exception.

So, is it a live album? Yes and no. And that’s where its beauty lies. It’s not the snapshot of a single night—it’s a mosaic. Frost becomes a curator of his own chaos, taking fragments—mostly improvised—from various live performances to build something entirely new from scratch. It’s a magic trick, like Kramer’s with KISS, like my humble cassette, but elevated to the level of art. This isn’t an album to relive a show you didn’t attend; it’s a sonic puzzle designed to be a radically new experience. It’s not an echo of the present—it’s an explosion that redefines the future.

The journey begins with Tritium Bath, a track that plunges us straight into a sonic threat, with those metal riffs Frost wields like no one else. But the mix is wild: brutality interlaces with sacred minimalism and ambient textures, creating an experience as terrifying as it is thrilling. Then the tide shifts with Permcat, which flirts with atmospheric techno before dissolving into field recordings that transport you elsewhere. Trancelines is a digital onslaught pushed to the limit—one of the album’s crown jewels—while Chimera, already known in Frost’s catalog, is reconstructed here to sound even more monstrous, darker.

In Black Thread, abstract percussion clears the way for guitar riffs that seem ripped from another dimension. This is where Frost’s genius becomes almost tangible, transcending hearing to become a physical, nearly spiritual jolt. Turning the Prism is another untamable beast, a devastating storm only he seems able to summon and unleash before us.

And just when you think you can’t take any more, the calm arrives. Prism Inversion closes the album with an ethereal mix of ambient and field recordings. It’s the silence after the apocalypse—the moment to breathe.

Frost has done it again. He’s taken us by the hand to lead us through a terrifying, beautiful labyrinth. And in the process, he reminds us that sometimes the most elaborate lies—like my old cassette tape or the legendary Alive!—tell the deepest truths. He’s transformed us, once more.