HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version – Earth
Lying 100 kilometres (60 miles) away from the state of Washington’s most populous city Seattle, Olympia is the cultural centre of the southern Puget Sound region. From its isolated depths in 1989 came a revolutionary rumble of droning bass and minimalism. Taking their name from BLACK SABBATH’s former alias, lead by guitarist Dylan Carlson alongside Slim Moon and Greg Babior, EARTH was born and the trio became heralded as pioneers of drone metal. Their early work was characterized by walls of distortion, ambient droning, minimalism and lengthy, repetitive song structures, with the band’s debut 1993 album Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version becoming a seminal work.
EARTH were initially active between 1989 and 1997, in which they released three of their most influential albums; Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version, Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions (1995) and Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons (1996), the latter being a more rock orientated album than the previous two. Carlson was a close friend of NIRVANA frontman Kurt Cobain during this time, and assisted in purchasing the shotgun that Cobain stated was for protection before turning it on himself six days later.
After the release Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons, EARTH went on hiatus, because of Carlson’s personal problems range from heroin addiction, incarceration, rehabilitation and the grieving of Cobain’s death. When the band remerged in 2003, their sound had almost completely changed, still drone based, slow-paced, and lengthy with the distortion dialled down and elements of country, jazz rock, and folk being incorporated.
Taking it back to those early days of the band, Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version – or simply Earth 2 – was released by Sub Pop on 5th February 1993. Inspired by minimalist movement and composers such as La Monte Young alongside metal bands such as SLAYER, KING CRIMSON and AC/DC, Carlson went into music with the philosophy of hearing a cool riff and riding it for twenty minutes at half speed. In an interview for Red Bull Music Academy, Carlson stated; “When I would hear a song and there’d be a cool riff or a cool part of the song I was always like, ‘Oh, what would it be like if they stayed on that instead of moving on to the next part?’ Then I read about minimalism and stuff like that. I was like, ‘Oh, what if we take a Slayer-style riff and play it for 20 minutes at half speed?’ I guess you could say that was my one good idea.”
Alongside the recent invention of compact CDs (feel old yet?) with a run time of 74 minutes, the band were encouraged to fill up a CD with a song in three parts. However, EARTH were limited in the fact that recording tape would only allow for 30 minutes to be recorded at a time. In the same interview for Red Bull Music Academy, Carlson stated that they had to “sort of splice it or fade it in and fade up, stuff like that” to achieve the longer recording.
The band were signed to infamous grunge label Sub Pop at the time which is a mismatch considering the music the band were producing. Carlson explains: “What we did was not grunge and not part of that whole thing. A lot of people I think that bought the records saying Sub Pop expecting something were disappointed.”, one perk out of this scenario that Carlson noted was that “I wore a MORBID ANGEL t-shirt on the back of the album and so metal fans were sort of the first to really embrace what we were doing.” (taken from the aforementioned Red Bull Music Academy interview).
Carlson called EARTH’s creation ambient metal at the time, and the reviews for it were more than positive. The album was hailed as a “milestone” by Terrorizer Magazine’s Dayal Patterson, and AllMusic‘s John Bush called the album a “glacial, monolithic exercise”, stating the album “virtually created the drone and ambient metal sub-genres”. With Alan Licht in his minimalist classic lists stating:
“Unlike a lot of more recent noise underground stuff, which (to me) is relatively factorable, this is technically boggling drone music – the sustain is achieved not just with distortion but through overdubbing, and there’s clean guitars in there too – even on headphones it’s hard to tell what the fuck they’re really doing. On this album, Earth set up a drone and place a few choice metal riffs against it over the course of forty minutes, at which point they just let the drone chord ring for another half hour… Hard to remember how completely unfashionable this was in the heyday of grunge…”
With rave reviews like this, it certainly marks Earth 2 out as a seminal moment in metal history. Going against the grain of grunge and exploring sounds that had only been in the distant peripherals of metal. Carlson, Moon and Babior created something truly groundbreaking at the time, because of this landmark moment the likes of SUNN O))), BURNING WITCH, OM, KHANATE and CORRUPTED amongst a slew of other modern bands, all incorporated EARTH’s initial idea into their own music. As a result ambient and drone metal thrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s and still does to this day, continually evolving into bigger, more monolithic music.
In the words of critic Ned Raggett, EARTH proved “that there’s no such thing as too loud, trudging, or doom-laden” and that it is “ambient music completely and totally suffused with threat and fuzz”. To commemorate the 30th anniversary Sub Pop will be repressing the original vinyl of Earth 2 Special Low Frequency Version, and will also be releasing a companion record of remixes titled Earth 2.23 Special Lower Frequency Mix.
Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version was originally released on February 5 1993 via Sub Pop Records.
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