Double LP
30 years of Earth 2, remastered as a 'special low frequency version' to mark the moment! Slower! Heavier! More restraint! Because Earth were coming from a metal context, the nuance of their slo-mo death rattle groan occasionally eluded sufficient understanding, fitting into no specific category, appropriate context yet to be established. Three decades down the line, it appears visionary, operating at the intersection of doom, drone, ambient and noise in a mostly unparalleled way. The devil - and there's always a devil - is of course in their detail. There's some true Monet shit at play here: that which is happening at a distance not quite the same as what's happening up close. Earth 2 is perhaps one of the primo examples of what i've described elsewhere as 'infinite horizon' sound, an ever-ascending sonic plain of implied detonations that never quite go off. The bomb not quite dropped, hanging on implication and possibility instead, a kind of cold war metal stand-off. Tone and texture is obviously key to such things, and listening back now, i wouldn't bet against this record having had at least some bearing on the work of Kali Malone, Liz Harris, Tim Hecker et al. Few supposedly 'metal' records reach so broadly beyond their own genre. 30 years later, by contrast, Earth 2 still sounds limitless to me.
