EARTH BALL (CAN) + DUO KALASH (PSE) & STEWART (US, Irreversible Entanglements/David Murray 4tet)

Earth Ball (can) A Dreamscape of Improvised Psychosis

Heavyweight psychedelic weirdo improvisers Earth Ball are back with their third and most monstrous record to date: Outside Over There, released on Upset The Rhythm. Born from the haunted basements of Nanaimo and Vancouver Island, the quintet thrives on spontaneity, shaping improvisation into jagged dreamscapes and ecstatic eruptions.

Recorded live-off-the-floor in 2024 in Jeremy, Izzy, and Kellen’s basement, and mixed by drummer John Brennan, Outside Over There is an album that feels both summoned and inevitable. Each track lands with uncanny purpose, as if uncovered rather than written. The opener, 100%, features a cameo from comedian and English icon Stewart Lee, who lent his blessing for the band to use a fragment of his stand-up. The album was mastered by John Dieterich (Deerhoof), with liner text contributed by longtime comrade John Olson (Wolf Eyes).

Olson describes the album in his unmistakable style:

“This eight-track odyssey unfolds like a dreamscape, where whispered incantations brush against the shadowy fringes of the cosmos, and wild, Cézanne-inspired rock anthems erupt like geysers of color in the midst of a western warm and wet rain storm... culminating in the sprawling eleven-minute masterpiece, ‘And The Music Shall Untune The Sky,’ aptly dubbed the Earth Crusher.”

Earth Ball’s trajectory has been relentless. Their 2024 LP It’s Yours was praised by The Quietus as “fully aggressive and fully life-affirming,” while their live double set Actual Earth Music Vol. 1 & 2 (2025) captured blistering performances: a support slot with Wolf Eyes at the Fox Cabaret, and a Café OTO residency featuring Chris Corsano and Steve Beresford. Their work has been lauded by The Wire and The Quietus alike, confirming them as one of Canada’s most vital experimental exports.

The band’s reach has stretched far beyond their west coast roots: in June 2025, Earth Ball closed Montreal’s Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival alongside Wolf Eyes and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Raven Chacon, and this November they appear at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, with a European tour spanning the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Outside of Earth Ball, each member carries their own torch: Jeremy Van Wyck (Mongst, Crotch, Psychedelic Dirt) remains a cornerstone of Vancouver’s no wave underground; John Brennan collaborates widely, with projects including Endlings (with Raven Chacon and John Dieterich), Plan Your Future (with Greg Saunier of Deerhoof), and new albums with Chris Corsano and Dieterich. This cross-pollination fuels Earth Ball’s sound — a collective improvisation haunted by ghosts, yet alive with electricity.

Outside Over There is not simply another album — it is a ritual, a gathering of sound at the forest’s edge, where feedback, saxophone screams, and ecstatic vocals dissolve the boundary between chaos and clarity. Earth Ball invite you into their circle, to share in the joyful terror of spontaneous creation.

<a href="https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/its-yours">It’s Yours by Earth Ball</a>

DUO KALASH (PSE) & STEWART (US, Irreversible Entangelments/David Murray 4tet)

DIRAR KALASH is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of compositional and improvisational contexts. His performative and compositional approaches to instruments, techniques, and aesthetics are highly political as they challenge dichotomies, hierarchies, and binary logics of new/old and west/east as tools of cultural imperialism and hegemony. The methods he uses are based upon his research into the intersections and relationships of music and sound with other contexts such as language, architecture, mathematics, visual arts and further social and human sciences. His regular solo and collaborative performances include but are not limited to audio-visual performances, free jazz groups, electro-acoustic ensembles, analoge electronics (“experimental / noise”), and solo piano and oud projects.
https://albayan.bandcamp.com

LUKE STEWART has emerged as one of the most exciting young bassists on the improvised music scene on the east coast. Based in Washington, DC, he plays regularly in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and has toured in Europe. He has gained considerable exposure playing with the James Brandon Lewis Trio and he also leads or co-leads his own projects including Ancestral Duo with Jamal Moore and Heart of the Ghost with Ian McColm and Jarrett Gilgore. As a solo artist, he has composed a series of improvisational structures for upright bass and amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore new sounds. He has also been integral to the literary jazz group Heroes Are Gang Leaders. He is as well part of Irreversible Entanglements jazz band.
https://lukestewart.bandcamp.com

DIRAR KALASH (oud), LUKE STEWART (bass)