Legend has it that Earth’s third album took over a year and a half to record, which — considering the minimal and often purposely skeletal nature of the music therein — begs the question of just what Dylan Carlson and second guitarist Tommy Hansen were up to during the remainder of the sessions. At one stage Sub Pop apparently pulled the plug on the recordings, unhappy about the amount of expensive studio time being sqaundered popping downers and producing ambient drones so lengthy and abstract they were deemed unreleasable by an indie rock label. 

Lest anyone think that our good mentor Copey, or anyone Japanese, invented the concept of ambient metal, it isn’t as widely known as it should be that the genre originated with Earth’s 2nd opus, the 1993 release “Earth 2”. 72 minutes of Brancaesque minimalism characterised by bass frequencies deep enough to cause a minor earthquake and guitars as fuzzy as worn-out Brillo pads, it evoked a powerful sensation of entropy and emasculated immobility. Imagine early Black Sabbath slowed to a funereal Valium crawl, with everything removed except for the bass and guitars, which are subsequently filtered through enough reverb and overdrive to render them barely recognisable as guitars at all.

Whilst it was “Earth 2” that announced Earth’s anomalous presence on a Seattle grunge scene dominated by generic Nirvana wannabes — ironic considering Dylan Carlson and Kurt Cobain were smack buddies for a while before the latter’s suicide — it was their next offering “Phase 3” (subtitled “Thrones And Dominions”) which cemented their reputation among more listeners with more leftfield tastes. 

“Phase 3” is a collection of eight tracks, some of them lengthy and sprawling, others brief vignettes that last little more than two minutes. The opening track, “Harvey” falls into the latter camp, featuring a surprisingly melodic, almost Spacemen 3‑like chord progression that grinds for a brief 156 seconds before disappearing. It’s followed by “Tibetan Quaaludes”, which starts with a brontosaurus riff reminiscent of early Sabbath or even Swans before settling into a heavily reverberated one-note bass pattern that merely repeats and renews itself every time it approaches fadeout. Next is “Lullabye”, a genuine 18th century Celtic lullaby, again slowed to the point of near-stasis and played through an effects-laden Marshall stack. The next two tunes, “Song 4” and “Site Specific Carniverous Occurrence” again consist of metallic, bludgeoning riffs played at 16 rpm through an armoury of volume and distortion pedals, although the sudden appearance of percussion on the latter suggests a brief reprieve from weightless ambience. 

This, however, turns out to be a complete tease as track 6, the brilliantly titled “Phase 3 : Agni Detonating Over The Thar Desert” is the most minimal and abstract piece on the entire album. Consisting merely of a tape loop of a disconnected wah-wah pedal swishing up and down in the left channel, accompanied by a completely seperate loop of a windstorm in the right channel, repeated for twelve and a half minutes before coming to an abrupt halt, it sounds utterly despondent and devoid of hope, eyeing the world from a downed-out state in which the orthodoxies of music are reduced to an iridescent blur. 

It’s followed by the similarly lengthy “Thrones And Dominions”, which is a much gentler piece reminiscent of Terry Riley or Main, although the gradual appearance of ominous, rumbling guitar stormclouds does little to lighten the elegiac atmosphere of the album. The final selection, inexplicably titled “Song 6” even though it is actually Song 8, returns to the beginning with a short, melodic guitar piece which sounds strikingly pleasant to the ears, unexpectedly ending “Phase 3” on a redemptive note, as if the despondency of the previous three tracks was merely a temporary state of cathartic suspension.

For anyone who’s ever enjoyed the likes of Main, early Tangerine Dream or Cluster, any of the so-called “Isolationist” acts like Thomas Koner or Kazuyuki K.Null, I’d recommend this without reservations in spite of the fact that it was superficially marketed as a grunge record by a label that hadn’t any idea of how to promote it.