Unless you’re talking about the likes of No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, Live And Dangerous or Cheap Trick’s At Budokan, most live rock albums are bunk. This isn’t a new or controversial statement – just a biblical fact. Plus, when time, money and space are at such a premium for most normal humans, who can honestly justify another filler release that represents a fulfilled contractual obligation, a stalled-career placeholder or, worst of all, a soon-to-be-sale-bin sacrifice to the bloated Mammon of Record Store Day?
There are, of course, exceptions at the fringes. Sometimes a chance or one-off encounter produces something electric and genuinely worthy of preservation: Oxbow and Peter Brötzmann’s An Eternal Reminder Of Not Today set, for example. There are also bands for whom the live experience is not just a place to thrive, but a centrality. Canadian weirdos Earth Ball are a prime example, existing as they do in a free, ever-fluctuating state of spontaneous composition, torching past releases with the casual, never-look-back attitude of a Cool Sunglasses Guy tossing a cigar into a petrol-soaked warehouse full of corpses.
Theirs is a communal world of befucked psychedelia where drone, free jazz, noise and no-wave all have a part to play, where addle-brained chaos coheres to provide a curious but undeniable clarity. It’s a sparsely-populated place to be sure, but one also inhabited by the ghosts of Liquorball and The Psychic Paramount. While the two sets here might be separated by a year and the span of an ocean, Actual Earth Music makes perfect sense both in and of itself and as part of the band’s formidable discography.
The first half, dragged from a Wolf Eyes support slot, begins with an ecstatic scrabble and builds itself into a tower of living sparks. Sax notes soar and croak while inchoate, trance-state vocals intone tales of everything and nothing. Mid-way through their journey the band hit upon an intense motorik clatter that provides a stable point around which all other whirling elements can orbit. Volume 2, recorded at London’s Cafe OTO, sees the band joined by drummer Chris Corsano and legendary improv artist Steve Beresford. At first pass a calmer, more meditative set, the band’s pulses and whorls are accented by abstract percussive dappling and bright jinks of piano. It might not quite jab you in the eyeball quite as hard as the previous workout, but it is certainly no less transportative.
Placed alongside last year’s excellent It’s Yours LP, it’s interesting to see how nonexistent the divide is between the band’s studio and live work: slipping from one to the other doesn’t even offer a bead curtain’s worth of resistance. Both volumes of Actual Earth Music are thrilling, thoughtful and as bizarrely compulsive as chewing tinfoil – difficult, oddly beautiful experiences that are as ripe for thoughtful examination as pure, in-the-moment abandon.
