7. EarthEarth 2
I was living in a house in Boston with Jeff Caxide [Isis bassist] and we had a lot of musical common ground. I don’t know how he came across Earth 2 but he was like, ‘You’ll probably like this, give it a listen’. I think he’d been listening to it quite a bit on his own but me getting interested in it escalated the number of rotations that record went through in our house, often accompanied by smoking a lot of pot. Lots of lying down, really stoned, listening to Earth 2. The listening experience itself, especially when you listen to it loud, was part of its power. It was very meditative, almost soothing. And the drone aspects kind of heighten those meditative qualities about it. The riffs themselves, partially because of the way that they were recorded and partially because of the lack of drums on the record, are really unusual and there is a feeling of getting lost in this labyrinth which was really intriguing. Even though there were these recognisable refrains, after a while it was really hard to tell where something began and ended. This distended experience of time was really powerful. I liked the idea that listening to something could alter the physical world or at the very least alter your perception of the world and Earth 2 very much did that. It took you out of normal time and really disrupted the temporal flow.
I had this realisation that you can be interested in metal, you can play distorted heavy guitar, you can have chugging riffs, and then you can also bring in these other things – minimalist composition, drone, altered instrumentation, or absence of instrumentation. This reductive thing of just taking metal down to its barest form with just the riff and say just as much or more with that than a lot of bands can with a more conventional approach to playing metal songs.
