Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons begins and ends with ‘Introduction’ and ‘Coda Maestro in F (Flat) Minor’, both essentially a variation on the same track but with different layerings of phasing organ and glassy guitar leads.

My relationship with many of my beloved records start out this way, the initial response unimpressed or just a plain dislike, but these usually turn into an earworm that keeps burying deep until my obsession/possession fully takes hold. The songs felt too straight compared to Earth 2 and the experimental pieces too cold and threadbare, but how wrong I was. On first listen it sounded too piecemeal for my liking, and I didn’t understand why you would structure an album this way. It wasn’t until around 1999 that I rediscovered the maximal delights of Earth 2 in all their hallucinatory glory.Įarth’s 1996 album Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons was not so immediate. I didn’t buy the album, but played the tape to friends as a weird curiosity. I understood from my own early bedroom explorations into drone and noise guitar improvisations where this was coming from, but fitting this music into the context of genre and tribe was a difficult one at the time. A seething maelstrom of detuned metal-tinged guitars sent a thousand beads of buzzing sound flooding into my teenage skull, a strange familiarity combined with alien fear both drew me in and half repelled me. Side 2, however, was entirely taken up with one long track - ‘Seven Angels’ by Olympia, Washington’s Earth from their (just released) album Earth 2. The free cover mount tape, a Sub Pop sampler, came with the May 1993 issue - side A included relatively standard US grunge of the time, from bands like the noisy guitar pop of Velocity Girl, Pond, Walkabout, Fastbacks and deranged punk rock band Dwarves. The first time I encountered Dylan Carlson’s Earth was through a Sub Pop cassette on Lime Lizard, a short-lived early nineties magazine.

Michael nyman discography rar