If Organum hadda been a buncha drunks who could tell good jokes and knew how to dress, they might well have turned out like Son Of Earth. While Jackman’s crew followed AMM’s lead into bleak, essentially personality-less zones of electro-acoustic improvisation, Son Of Earth took minimal sound art into a new world of glam, a form of garage band art praxis that involved hovering down beers while digging Gil Wolman LPs or cruising to the car park with Brian Gysin’s tape experiments on repeat and then going home to dig the hell out of David Bowie’s appearance in Labyrinth. There was a band dynamic there that was as smart as it was stoopid and this trio always made for interesting, irreverent and genuinely deep performances. People moved away, members got involved in other projects and it seemed like besides a scattering of good CD-Rs and an LP or two the definitive Son Of Earth experience was gonna be gifted, ultimately, to the select band of friends and followers that caught them ‘in action’ over the years. Then Improvements appears, the very title flagging up the fact that these guys have decided to dust down their legacy and finally get together the studio album they always threatened to release. Over six tracks there’s the classic unidentifiable scraping sound that lurks somewhere on all their discs, the weird almost-drones generated by who knows what, the feel of the immediate specifics of the environment put to work in the first way that makes sense… but there’s an injection of their selves too, their good-time, smartass selves. A track like “Muttering Triumph” is as weird as it’s funny, funny-weird, with what sounds like a three-way goof-off vocal that The Fugs might’ve extended into a smut-fest going way beyond a joke and into the zone of spontaneous poetics and body soundings even while it still sounds like they’re just trying to talk funny to each other. And the whole record keeps that feel, a feel of accidental grandeur, of avant garage, with minimal zone-out tracks where barely anything happens yet that ‘anything’ seems to capture so precisely the interaction of the three players – Matt Krefting, Aaron Rosenblum and John Shaw – that it may as well be Crosby, Stills and fucking Young. And when was the last time you listened to a ‘drone’ record with that kind of personality? LP comes wrapped in a letterpressed obi-strip with a 16-page art book by Rick Myers.

These guys have been busy with a bunch of uniformly great side-projects – Ensemble Economique, RV Paintings et al – but it’s great to see them back with the mothership for this major new release. Here the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay are joined by a host of collaborators for an album that drifts with alla the allusive logic of dreams through a series of spectral drone works and environmental improvisations. The opening “In Our Way” is stunning, conjuring the ghost of Skip Spence from the kind of tape and electronic fuckery that could almost be Dome. Later tracks have an improvisatory feel that is equal parts ghostly gamelan orchestra, Maya Deren soundtrack and SME circa Karyobin with breathy reed sounds and melodica over fourth world jungle environs and great ascensions of devotional keyboard drone. Indeed, there’s a spontaneous orchestral quality to the music that lends it a particular grandeur, building on the kind of phantom scale that Pyle first formulated on the Ensemble Economique sides, with a scope and a sonic palette that is well beyond your average F/X jamming droner. Modern devotional music never sounded so widescreen. Recommended.