EARTH - NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM and its Drone Arkestra

"The minimalist drone-riff masters pare away excess and focus on the seismic repetition that made their best work so resonant"

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.

NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM AND ITS DRONE ARKESTRA

The Drone Arkestra is the non-percussive version of the Neptunian Maximalism collective, which aims for a sensitive, ecstatic and soteriological experience of the end of the Anthropocene era, thus marking the advent of the Probocene era, an era of animal intelligence far from the hominin genus where evolved elephants occupy an important place. In direct continuity with the post-serialist and minimalist movements of the 20th century, hybridized by the contributions of spiritual Indian music (Dhrupad) and oriental music, the Drone Arkestra offers music that is at once solar, telluric and aquatic characterized by immanence. specific to drone music. The instrumentarium is intended to be powerful, physical and brilliant, ethereal and dissolved in totality, so that the amplified strings blend together with the saxophone and the synthesizer to such an extent that it is sometimes difficult even for the musicians to know who plays what. This sound mixture is, however, punctuated with tonal counterpoints by the solo sections. The result is an immersive, almost mystical experience of astonishing healing power, illustrated with esoteric and landscape cinematic sound images.