"If I’m not mistaken, Ben Frost and I first talked about the ideas of what would become Steelwound sometime in mid 2002. In the early 00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realised in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at another sound world which would become his focused in the summer of 2002 and into 2003. 

Locking himself away at Johanna’s Beach, a remote southern vantage along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, he was able to record for the first time without a sense of constraint. This opening up of the sound palette brought with it an entirely new harmonic language that had been hinted at, but not realised, on previous recordings. With a simple restriction of instrumentation, the guitar as the palette, Frost unlocked a certain verticality to his working methods that holds light to this day. Steelwound is, by design, a singular record in Ben Frost’s discography. It’s a recording born of particular conditions, but also of particular interests. It was the first time Ben had set himself up with a situation where saturation, volume and density were all something that could be realised in a space and a time, not as a process of post-production. To have sound operating in space is a thing of true beauty and moreover it allows for a certain unpredictability that is central to new discoveries.

Working with a Fender Twin, often with the reverb dialled in at maximum, he found a language of shimmer and saturation, of compression and collision, that set the stage for a prolonged interest in how sound performs and is perceived at volume. It also is the first time that many of the tonal and melodic inflections that have come to be recognised as his compositional language are on display. Steelwound, in my opinion, is a map to the future for Ben. It is a portal, a chance for new understandings to emerge and also to take hold and it’s these learnings that have guided Ben’s work in the subsequent years. Steelwound remains a pulsing beacon in an ocean of noise that has been flickering for two decades now." - Lawrence English