After paving a distorted pathway in the early ’90s with three albums on Sub Pop Records, the band Earth — bearing a name chosen in homage to Black Sabbath’s original moniker — marked their emergence from an extended period of recovery with the 2005 release of Hex; Or Printing the Infernal Method. The album saw Earth join Boris, Saint Vitus, and Sunn O))) as experimental, doom-laden labelmates on Southern Lord, with their droning metal crediting the grittiness of Merle Haggard, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Ennio Morricone’s film scores, including The Battle of Algiers, Cinema Paradiso, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Twenty years later, on November 5, 2025, Earth returned to form in Rhode Island for the first time in a decade with a sold-out performance of Hex in its entirety at Machines with Magnets (400 Main St., Pawtucket). But for all who anticipated a concert, first a physics lecture broke out.
Having contributed piano, organ, trombone, and tubular bells to earlier Earth recordings, Steve Moore — who records solo as Stebmo — took the floor with his Wurlitzer electric piano and handheld Casio SK-1 portable synthesizer to open the night with renditions of jazz legends, Alice Coltrane, her husband John Coltrane, and Bobby Hutcherson. Between his own “Art Forms” and “Happy Ending,” Moore’s performance of the avant-garde detoured into discourse.
“Our hearts beat around one or two beats per second, sometimes slower than that if you’re very good at relaxing,” Moore explained, using the heart rate as a familiar point of orientation before expanding into the mathematics that explain musical frequencies. “This is where most of the music that exists in the world is sitting, right around this tempo, right around this rhythm.”
Moving to the mind, Moore mused over how electroencephalograms, or EEGs, reveal resonant oscillations, or brainwaves, that measure across a wider range of speeds than the heart. With their higher end roughly equating to where the pitch of sound begins, or a “very, very low note,” he compared such oscillations with the point at which a series of single photographs become an animation. Moore turned to his trombone to demonstrate the phenomenon of energy being contained in any instrument, making it a resonant physical body capable of altering others.
Similar to how people believe they “see” light, when in reality they apprehend the reflection of light off something else, Moore placed the properties of music in a category between the mystical and the mathematical. Tracing the harmonic series, or natural modes, as resonant with the biological division of cells and the long-standing logic of Moore’s Law, a principle established in 1965 by engineer Gordon Moore (no relation), that led to decades of computing advances, Moore spoke to the power held within the powers of two as a bridge toward beauty and wonder.
Within the oscillations that create musical notes, he argued, are the underpinnings of human empathy, echoed in the head and the heart alike, and an ability through those notes to see oneself and experience an “otherness” in tandem, allowing for music as a universal language.
Invisible to the eye, but auditorially experienced, Moore’s introductions to the physics of sound seemed to be in service of establishing an anticipatory logic for appreciating the force of Earth.
Earth set up in silence, allowing for Moore’s antecedent monologue to speak its own volumes before embarking upon their 80-minute foray through Hex, from “Mirage” through to “Tethered to the Polestar.” The overhead rotation of a disco ball in the shape of a skull reflected a scatter of light flickering over a red pall cast onto blank walls as the instrumental repetitions, digressions, and returns of Earth set a slow, steady pulse with the night passing through an unspoken peace.
Before concluding, Earth introduced a new track, “Scalphunter’s Blues,” with the promise of a tenth studio album on the horizon — to be recorded in March 2026 with a planned release date in October. Whether inspired or confounded by the underlying physics at play, as the amps were turned off and the lights came on, the audience of 200 left the venue with a new paradigm for understanding the oscillations of Earth, their reverberations and echoes sensed even if unseen.