Vile gets grabbed By The Throat

Although my enthusiasm for music was replaced by theatre after I burst my eardrums listening to very loud Japanese drummers, there are still times when I am distracted from the well-made play by the well-made album. The new Swans album has been taking up many of my late night, alcohol-soaked self-pity sessions (at around two hours, it takes me from the first sip of Cava through to unconsciousness) and, in my research for my forthcoming interview with Swans' main-man Michael Gira, I came across this magic moment from Icelandic TV.

Apart from making me want to move to Iceland - British TV has Jools Holland and his smug dadrock fest, they have drone rock supergroups - it introduced me to Ben Frost. I pride myself on having an ear for this kind of noise, sitting between the electronic, rock and classical zones.

Then I found out Frost was coming to Glasgow. This week. Apparently, there is a new platform for electronic music, PULSE, which is promising to bring Scanner to Glasgow within two years. When I saw Scanner - rocking a team up with David Toop, I think - at The National Review of Live Art, I felt as if I had been downloaded into a satellite channel. 

I've been chasing Frost's music, discovered a free download of his live set at Unsound - that will take care of the last hour of the radio show if I run out of conversation - and have spent hours arguing about the classification of Frost's sound. Although he uses guitars, and is clearly in a similar lineage to the majestic drone rock that blighted my teenage years, the use of dynamics hints at a minimalist heritage and the mesh of sound is only possible through the advances of electronic music.

Frost is performing 2009's By the Throat  in the Old Fruitmarket - I'd usually worry about an artist performing an entire album (that nostalgia wave that The Swans so studiously avoid is best understood by the plethora of once exciting bands churning out their single successful album on a "a very special tour"), but 2009 is recent enough to make it excusable. Plus, Frost makes a big bloody noise, and there is still no market for experimental, avant-garde nostalgia.

Actually, that isn't true. There totally is a market for old school avant-garde action: once time strips away the context of art, it becomes safe enough to hit the mainstream. See tango? Strictly Come Dancing? When tango kicked off, it was seen as so sexily provocative that they made the Pope watch some, to get a ruling on whether Catholics were allowed to do it. In fact, it was so controversial that it was watered down by various teachers, to make it respectable. And less than a century later, it's on prime time TV.

That brings me back to Iceland, where Ben Frost gets on the TV. And Wayne McGregor, whom Frost has composed for. And The Fruitmarket, which is a comfortable and classy venue in which to get drowned in sound...

Ben Frost performs By the Throat

Wednesday 24 October 2012, 8pm

£10/£12

Old Fruitmarket