Earth Room

Earth Room

Earth Room

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***Earth Room is the self-titled debut of a new band making music in the spirit of electric-era Miles Davis, classic German space rock, and the “fourth world” studio experiments of Jon Hassell. The band is composed of three veterans of adventurous music in NYC: Robbie Lee on woodwinds and electronics, John Thayer on percussion and synthesizers, and Ezra Feinberg on acoustic and electric guitars. In early 2019 Ezra was asked to play a two hour set for a night called “Planetarium” at the Bushwick club Nowadays, where, instead of dancing, one Thursday each month people came to lie on beanbags. Lacking two hours worth of solo material, he asked John and Robbie to join him. The show featured wide-ranging improvisation, deep-color drones, and instrumental freak-outs, and left the bean-bagers beatific. A band was born. The three musicians got together throughout 2019 and pre-pandemic 2020, recording during off hours at Thump Studios where John is the in-house engineer. After the pandemic hit they got to work combing through these sessions, finding the juicy bits, seeing what worked, cutting the fat, peeling the onion, and tying the room together until there were no more overdubs or edits needed. The process occasionally included yoking one jam from one particular day on top of another from a different day, as on the elegiac opener “Bridges of Waves,” in which primitive synthesizers are fused with Robbie and John’s ecstatic drums and flute. The second track, “Within the Field,” is a study in percussive textures, and,...