The Frosted Ambassador

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The Frosted Ambassador album cover
Album Information

Total Tracks: 12   Total Length: 40:00

eMusic Features

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Scene: Athens, Georgia, 1980s-2000

By Andy Battaglia, eMusic Contributor

The idyllic little town of Athens, Ga., really does identify with kudzu and rusty train trestles and a surfeit of weird and endearing Southern-gothic charm—all the hallmarks that came to greet it after myths of its music scene started to spread. That began to happen in the early 1980s, when R.E.M. found an audience beyond crowds of fellow Georgians crammed into beery parties at discarded churches and clubs. When it came out in 1983, the… more »

They Say All Music Guide

The story behind The Frosted Ambassador is a tricky one — one rather unbelievable story has it that the original tape was discovered in a shoe in a second-hand store in Athens, GA. One rather obvious conclusion about the record can be reached, however: it was unquestionably created by some combination of Elephant 6 musicians, and the resemblance between the sketches on the album’s liner and those on Dusk at Cubist Castle points to at least one member of the Olivia Tremor Control as being involved. But regardless of its sources, The Frosted Ambassador is as good an addition as any to the Elephant 6 canon — its mainly instrumental tracks layer tinny beats with a chirpy symphony of toy instruments, sound collages, baroque keys, and highly treated guitars. Most admirably, these tracks manage to avoid the cloyingingly overembellished tones fellow Elephant 6ers like Of Montreal occasionally verge on — The Frosted Ambassador is just as idiosyncratically Elephantine, but with a dreamier impulse that can be highly appealing. – Nitsuh Abebe

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