Earth Ball return with volumes three and four of their live series, a vehemently vibrant lesson in marshalling the contrasting virtues of discipline and instinct.

Earth Ball are a freeform collective based out of Vancouver Island.  Their music is a relentless, densely textured layering of instrumentation that builds to ecstatic peaks, before deconstructing them all over again.  The paths taken are never linear as skronking saxophones and squalling guitars interplay with jazz fuelled percussion that is not averse to locking into an industrial intensity when the occasion demands.  Nothing ever quite evolves as you would expect it to.

Their most recent album, last year’s outstanding Outside Over There, is perhaps the closest that the band has ever come to deploying traditional song structures, but their roots continue to be nourished by improvisational performance in the live setting.  Reflecting this, the band are complementing their studio output with a series of live recordings that capture this facet of their identity more singularly.  The series began last year with Actual Earth Music: Volume 1 & 2 (from shows in Vancouver and London) and this album represents the third and fourth segments drawn from their 2025 European tour.

Volume 3 was recorded at Cave 12 in Geneva.  It initially slowly unfurls in a web of woozy dissonance and spectral whispers. The sax-fuelled mid-section suddenly emerges as something altogether more melodically infectious, before the band lock into an ominously discordant groove that ultimately dissolves all over again into disembodied vocals and an increasingly skeletal cacophony.

Volume 4 was recorded at Ekku in Utrecht as part of the Le Guess Who? experimental music festival.  The previous night Earth Ball had actually played their largest ever show on the main stage of the festival.  Back in more intimate surrounds, they were keen to infuse their performance with some of the bombast this experience had demanded.  The surging guitar led opening fractures before reassembling into a distinctly menacing tableau of bone-shuddering low end and hauntingly serpentine sax.  The set then regathers itself for a further cathartic eruption that then, in turn, melts away back into a brooding, simmering hush.