The Evening Redness in the West Tour - Celebrating 20 Years of Hex: Or
Printing in the Infernal Method Website | Spotify | YouTube |
Instagram Over the course of their thirty trips around the sun, Earth
has remained diligent in their commitment to monolithic minimalism.
The sonic vocabulary may have changed—from their early years
churning out seismic drone metal on albums like Earth 2 (1993) to the
dusty Morricone-tinged comeback album Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal
Method (2005) to the meditative rock approach of Primitive and Deadly
(2014)—but the underlying principle of austerity and restraint
remains a constant. With their latest album Full Upon Her Burning
Lips, Earth purges the layers of auxiliary instrumentation that
embellished some of their previous records and deconstructed their
dynamic to the core duo of Dylan Carlson on guitar and bass and
Adrienne Davies on drums and percussion. In the process, they tapped
into the Platonic ideal of Earth—an incarnation of the long running
band bolstered by the authority of purpose, where every note and every
strike on the drum kit carries the weight of the world. Full Upon Her
Burning Lips opens with “Datura’s Crimson Veils”, a
twelve-minute opus that adheres to Earth’s 21st century approach
with Carlson’s sepia-toned Bakersfield Sound guitars lurching across
a barren landscape while Davies punctuates the melodies with death
knell drums. It’s a sound that harkens back to the riff-constructed
vistas of their Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light albums, but
stripped of their ornateness. “It was definitely a very organically
developed record,” Carlson says of the process. “I limited the
number of effects I used. I always like the limiting of materials to
force oneself to employ them more creatively. Previous Earth records
were quite lush sounding, and I wanted a more upfront and drier sound,
using very few studio effects.” In less capable hands, these kinds
of limitations might diminish the aural scope of the compositions, but
Carlson and Davies have always thrived on reductive methods. The
stripped down approach had another advantage. “I really wanted the
drums to be present,” Carlson says. “I felt with previous Earth
records that other instrumentation took up so much of the sonic space
that the drums were kind of pushed to the side.” This tactic helps
highlight Davies’ ability to elevate the drum kit beyond its mere
metronomic functions and allows it to serve as an expressive, nuanced,
and tonally rich component to Earth’s arsenal of sound. In addition
to scaling back on their ranks, Earth altered their previous
trajectory by entering into Full Upon Her Burning Lips without a
conceptual arc to guide the process, relying instead on their
collective subconscious to hone in on the overarching muse as the
songs developed. “In the past I’ve usually had a strong framework
for an album,” Carlson says. “This one developed over the course
of writing and recording. It just felt like ‘Earth’—like just
the two players doing their best work at playing, serving the
music.” The absence of a pre-existing narrative guiding the
compositions meant that the songs were more open and intuitive, often
resulting in more terse musical vignettes like the richly harmonic
“Exaltation of Larks” or the dreamily itinerant “Maidens
Catafalque”. Yet subconscious impulses gradually created their own
subtext for the album. “I wanted this to be a ‘sexy’ record, a
record acknowledging the ‘witchy’ and ‘sensual’ aspects in the
music… sort of a ‘witch’s garden’ kind of theme, with
references to mind altering plants and animals that people have always
held superstitious beliefs towards. A conjuror or root doctor’s
herbarium of songs, as it were.” The ten tracks on Full Upon Her
Burning Lips came together in bits and pieces. Songs like “Cats on
the Briar” and “Mandrake’s Hymn” stemmed from a handful of
musical phrases and repeating patterns concocted in moments of
downtime during their 2017 tour schedule. “Descending Belladonna”
came from a live soundtrack project. Other songs came from rehearsals
in the months leading up to recording or in moments of divine
inspiration in the studio. The record was engineered, mixed, and
mastered by longtime associate Mell Dettmer at Studio Soli. Knowing
their process and their sound, Dettmer helped harness, shape, and
document the songs in a manner that highlights the depth of Earth’s
sparse components, capturing hidden dimensions much like the veiled
images residing in the Magic Eye prints from the ‘90s. For the
patient listener, the cyclical nature of the songs “She Rides an Air
of Malevolence” or “An Unnatural Carousel” reveal new forms with
repeated listens, with the subtle variations between passes creating a
kaleidoscope of auditory activity. “I feel like this is the fullest
expression and purest distillation of what Earth does since I
re-started the band,” Carlson says in reflection of Full Upon Her
Burning Lips. And indeed, anyone that’s followed Earth on their
journey will bask in the unadulterated hums, throbs, and
reverberations conjured by Carlson and Davies. Sargent House is proud
to offer up the album to the world on May 24th, 2019 on 2xLP / CD /
digital formats. Steve Moore (aka STEBMO) is a multi-instrumentalist
hailing from Seattle, WA. Known as a pianist, with a love for
wurlitzers, casiotones and bells, he is also a trombonist and
composer. As a studio musician and sideman, he has a resume that reads
like a cult top-10 list with artists as diverse as songwriter Sufjan
Stevens, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and the band sunnO))). In the
fall of 2005, for the recording of their comeback album Hex, Moore
joined the legendary Seattle band Earth at the behest of producer
Randall Dunn. With their first studio album in nine years, Dylan
Carlson's Earth had begun to explore a new sound -- cleaner guitar
tones and more open, pastoral compositions. Moore's trombone and
keyboard played a crucial role on the album as well as the tours that
were to follow. This sound has evolved over the course of
three albums together, reaching a psychedelic pinnacle on 2008's The
Bee Made Honey In The Lion's Skull, which also featured Bill Frisell.
Southern Lord label-mates sunnO))) asked Moore to join the band for
the recording of their collaborative album Altar, with Japanese band
Boris, in 2006. In addition to touring the US and Europe, he has also
gone on to record two more albums with the band, including the most
recent Dømkirke, a live album from Norway’s Borealis Festival.
Celebrating a sonic palette as diverse as the artists he's worked
with, Steve Moore's self-titled debut album STEBMO is a breath of
much needed fresh air into the jazz pantheon. Produced by long time
collaborator Tucker Martine, the album is alive with a
fresh compositional outlook and the spark created in a one day
session with an all star rhythm section. Matt Chamberlain, having
worked with everyone from Brad Meldauh to Tori Amos, is one of the
most celebrated drummers of our time and he's joined by another heavy
hitter in bassist Todd Sickafoose, trusted musical sidekick for Ani
DiFranco, Jenny Scheinman and many others. To complete their vision,
Moore and Martine enlisted the help of violist Eyvind Kang, providing
masterful string arrangements alongside brooding woodwind treatments
by Doug Wieselman. The resulting nine tracks are a beautiful and
truly original take on instrumental music.
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10/07/2025 Last update