EarthBall – Actual Earth Music – Volume 3 & 4 (Upset The Rhythm) – There is, for what any of this is worth, more EarthBall to write about or dance around or paint underneath or something like that, another of those live albums that comes (at you) in two parts. This is the second Actual Earth Music live album, the second in the series with a volume found on each side of the vinyl – that’s to say Volume three on one side, volume four on the other. Now those of you who have been paying attention to the things frothed on these fractured (sometimes angry) pages will know the high regard the self-proclaimed “avant/noise/rock storm of a band” from Nanaimo, Canada are held in around here. Storm really is the word, although at times their calm before their storms can be equally as breath-taking, they’re always on the edge of storm, of flying us straight into the eye of it. Or is a lava, is it a lava flow, that though did just plant itself, a relentless flow of musical lava that sometimes needs to take a (slightly) different path to get where it needs to be going, nothing is going to get in the way once it does start to flow, it really is that powerful. And I do so admire the way that one of them knows when it needs just a slight change, just a little one, just a subtle move to the left or the right, there really is nothing like the flow of EarthBall and the way they move it all right now.   

Says here: “rooted in total improvisation, free expression, and a deeply psychedelic sensibility, EarthBall operate on pure instinct. They hurtle onwards in a combustion of spontaneous composition, shooting from the hip, as they fall out of the sky ablaze” and yes, that is about right, it does sound, and maybe more importantly, feel totally instinctive, it does sound like the music is leading them as much as they are leading each other, that both parties are in control of each other, that they are of one, it is a storm to get lost in and trust them enough to just go with it all. There is so much personality here especially in terms of the sometimes almost disturbing voice of Isabel Ford (vocals, bass) and her stomping around and owning of it all, that and her interaction with Jeremy Van Wyke when he finds his voice to add to it all. 

Two more live recordings, two more twenty-odd minute slices of full-on intensely live improvisation (and, as we have said before, and for those with long memories, the nearest thing we have ever encountered to the dark intensity of those early performances of the original Huge Baby line up – yes that good, Yes really!). When EarthBall get in that groove or that zone or whatever it is they get into then there really is nothing else like it and these live recordings will once again tell you why this keeps being said on these pages, they play with such a freedom…    

Here’s another #43SecondFilm…

And here’s the details as told by the label…     

Side A captures a thumping performance at Cave12 in Geneva. Frazzled from a white-knuckle alpine descent, the group settles into a hypnotic sprawl, stretching time and form across a colossal 53-minute set (with the first 22 minutes presented on the LP; the full performance appears on the CD edition). The Cave12 recording is a study in tension and release; ruminative, volatile, and barely contained. Drums stumble and surge, saxophone howls cut through the air, and Ford and Van Wyke’s voices briefly pull together the circle twice, before the tumult lapses into a spinning maelstrom.
 
Side B meanwhile presents a scorched excerpt from EarthBall’s crushing performance at Le Guess Who? Festival. As Van Wyke reflects: “Having the most excellent Dwarfs of East Agouza play before us only heightened our intention to bring the noise. Listening back, the thing that strikes me most is how we truly were operating in the ever-elusive but always sought-after ‘group mind’. Ninety-degree changes are super tight. Izzy and I are finishing each other’s sentences. Liam’s horn is cradling our outer and inner space. Kellan’s talk box rains down like the voice of a reawakened spirit, and all this havoc is safely stowed in the rumbling ox-cart of John’s solid drumming”.     

These are two very different sides once again, no two EarthBall encounters are ever quite the same, it might not be that obvious on the surface, once you do let it get inside you, once you do let the band into your life you know that no two recordings or performances  or encounters are ever the same and that you never can have too many encounters or recordings (they are my favourite live band right now and have been for a couple of years or more now, they are rather thrilliant), however many they release, you are always going to need another EarthBall live album – it really is like looking at a Rothko painting and although it might superficially look the same as the last one, it never ever is anywhere near being like the last one, and yes they do really finish each other’s lines, each other’s musical flows, it is so instinctive, so free, remarkably so, it is chemistry. 

Once again it isn’t about noise, it is as much about the tension, the bits between the pure noise, the power of restraint, the knowing way they knit it all together, the way they push each other, the challenge issued by it all, that need to cool down, the way it all keeps rolling forward in that foreboding menacing way it always does, the maximalism of it all, the space afforded to it all, the less is more it so often is, EarthBall’s restraint is their power. yes, they are vital, they excite me like very few bands really do these days, I’m excited by the thought of them being in town this week and that ecstatic expression, and as I’ve maybe said before, EarthBall really do paint their music… (sw)

The album is released on June 26th, you can pre order it now. The April UK tour dates are down there…   

Links: Bandcamp / Instagram / Upset The Rhythm

Tour dates…

17/04 – Cafe OTO, London, UK
18/04 – Cube Cinema, Bristol, UK

19/04 – Blue Moon, Cambridge, UK
20/04 – Cafe OTO, London, UK (w/ Orcutt Shelley Miller) – SOLD OUT
21/04 – Little Bully, Oxford, UK

22/04 – Old Bus Depot, Nottingham, UK

23/04 – Wharf Chambers, Leeds, UK

24/04 – Glad Cafe, Glasgow, UK

25/04 – The Lubber Fiend, Newcastle, UK (w/ Penelope Trappes + Rún)
28/04 – AB, Brussels, Belgium
29/04 – Landmark, Bergen, Norway
30/04 – BLA, Oslo, Norway
28/08 – Krankenhaus Festival, Ravenglass, UK

previously on these pages

ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and somehow, they’ve dialled it all up even further, this is intense, this is a serious album… 

ORGAN THING: Ahead of this week’s release of that beautifully challenging new EarthBall album, the Canadian band have released a video…

ORGAN THING: EarthBall and Chris Corsano kick off a tour at Cafe Oto, London in impressive style – that was intense, that was good, that was avant jazz no wave noise intense, that was serious commitment…

ORGAN: Our best albums of another very musically busy 2025. Who did we rate? Part One, 1 to 10…

ORGAN THING: EarthBall have a new live album, they are probably the best live band out there right now but don’t quote us on that…

ORGAN THING: What’s this? Really, EarthBall? Avant jazz-flavoured no-wave improv noise experiments in the bandstand at East London’s Arnold Circus late on a Friday afternoon? Is this really going to happen?

ORGAN THING: EarthBall’s new album, what can be said about something like this? This being exceptionally intense challengingly rewarding improvisational avant-psychedelic noise from…