British Columbia’s Earth Ball take their vinyl bow on It’s Yours and it proves a thrillingly vibrant demonstration of the power of improvisation and experimentation.

I had the good fortune of catching Earth Ball on their recent UK tour.  The night I was able to get along to was billed as an improv show, which did set some of my more insular alarm bells ringing.  Said bells began to clang even louder, when I arrived at Cafe Oto in Dalston to see chairs arranged at the front (thankfully, there was plenty of standing room behind). But any reservations were soon blown away.

The band played three separate thirty-minute segments, collaborating with different artists in the first two, before everyone came together for the final set.  It was a remarkably immersive experience, as waves of instrumentation were incrementally layered upon one another, the momentum relentlessly ratcheted up, and the disparate strands eventually converging as one to a crescendo verging on industrial intensity, before then steadily deconstructing again to end on a haunting whisper.

And this is a pattern that similarly defines the band’s new album, It’s Yours.  This shouldn’t, perhaps, be surprising as the album’s writing process was also entirely improvisational.  The resonant bass and drums provide the band’s propulsion, their patterns often rooted in jazz, before locking into passages of more methodical, mechanical fervour.  Meanwhile, the saxophone and guitar weave their individual patterns, squalling, skronking, dissonant, and yet somehow organically intertwined, while semi-shouted vocals from the band’s co-vocalists occasionally emerge from the sonic barrage.

Two things struck me as I listened to the album and thought back to how the show evolved.  Firstly, is the importance of restraint when playing in an improvisational setting.  The temptation to let rip at all times must be pretty profound, but the key is of course discipline, knowing when to play, when not to, when to go full bore, and when to offer more subtle accenting.  And in this regard, hats off to Earth Ball’s saxophonist in particular, who perfectly judges his contributions throughout the evolving songs.

The second is around the nature of experimentation itself.  It is in the trying of new things that we discover what works and what doesn’t, and also in the act of trying that we stumble on new ideas and techniques.  And by seeing it live, it brought greater clarity to understanding how the album itself must have developed. Two particular moments are brought vividly to mind.  One, when the bass was played with what looked like a hand-held trident, it created a surge of shuddering, reverberating velocity.  Then two, when the guest pianist reached into the guts of his piano to pluck the strings directly – the resultant sound conjured visions of a big, angry demon being garrotted by a much smaller but considerably meaner one.

While comprising six tracks across its 42-minute run-time, It’s Yours is, perhaps, best understood as a single serpentine movement, one that swings from moments of almost feral discordance to passages of quietly beautiful introspection.  At times, it swirls and seethes in untold directions, and at others, it forges grooves of utterly infectious intensity.  It’s a journey that is definitely worth taking.