11.
Earth – The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull
On a similar tip – records that remind me of people, or records being about more than just the music they contain – [This is] amazing, absolutely amazing, but I don’t really know anything about it. I have a lot more records now than I did a few years ago, and I’m sure I spend less time with each of them than I should. I buy them because I’m drawn to them for whatever reason: a shop I really like, like Honest Jon’s or something, might have recommended it, or a friend – Will Bankhead’s showed me hundreds of amazing records – or a label I like, or something. So I’ll get a record and maybe listen to it quite a bit and get into it, but I might still not know a huge amount about it beyond what it sounds like or how I found it. I don’t really know anything about the trajectory of Earth’s career, or how they ended up making music like this.
I came across Earth initially through Earth II when it got re-pressed, because I’d heard about it being a big influence on Stephen O’Malley and Sunn O))). This record was recommended to me very recently by Arthur Pariah. He spoke about it with such passion, he obviously loved the record and was heavily invested in it. That was enough to make me think I ought to go and get it and listen to it immediately, and I listen to it quite a lot now. Listening to it reminds me of that conversation, and I’m glad that records are able to hold time like that.
[The importance of a physical record] is about access to memory, isn’t it? We have a tendency to talk about memory as something that’s good or bad, and I normally think of my memory as being a bit shit – I’ll forget books as soon as I’ve read them, or watch a film for the sixth time and still not remember the ending. But somehow music doesn’t work like that for me, and records seem to have this power to dig up old, buried memories in a way that digital music doesn’t for me. I haven’t had this record long enough for that to be the case, but I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll stumble across it and it’ll remind me of something I’d forgotten.
