Earth Ball are an improvisational collective, hailing from Vancouver Island, whose experimental, noise fuelled maelstroms are all enveloping.

Actual Earth Music: Volume 1 & 2 is the follow-up to the band’s debut studio album from 2024, It’s Yours, and comprises two live sets – the first in Vancouver in 2023 and the other last year at Cafe Oto in Dalston.  The latter features guest appearances from pianist Steve Beresford and free jazz percussionist Chris Corsano.

Both sets capture the band at their frenzied, inventive best.  Waves of instrumentation are incrementally layered upon one another, the intensity relentlessly ratcheted up.  The rhythm section’s propulsion is often rooted initially in jazz, before locking into passages of more methodical, mechanical vehemence.  Meanwhile, the saxophone and guitar weave their serpentine individual patterns, squalling, skronking, dissonant, and yet somehow organically intertwined, while semi-shouted, almost disembodied, vocals occasionally emerge from the sonic barrage.

The disparate strands inexorably converge as one to an ecstatic crescendo, before then steadily deconstructing again to end on a haunting whisper.  Those eruptions, when each element of the band locks into a single overriding groove, land with a fierce potency that would be the envy of many hardcore bands.  I had the good fortune to catch the London show and this album vividly captures the unique marriage of fervour and precision that defined that utterly immersive performance.