Live Review: Earth, Margins, Original Past Life

Masters of those drone frequencies that lull the onlooker into a 1000 yard stare, Original Past Life unwound a hypnotic set that blurred each of their individual songs into one oozing, ebbing molasses of loops and effects. Ostensibly led by Adam Trainer, who manipulated a variety of instruments, it was the drummer who kept the band on their toes, by constantly improvising and searching for sympathetic sounds from his kit.

Taking their seats on a barely illuminated stage, Melbourne quartet Margins gradually constructed a creeping, atmospheric funk that might be described as a kind of night stalker music; not overtly threatening, but decidedly edgy in an understated, minimal sort of way. I half expected to turn 'round and spy a shadowy figure in a hat and trench coat recording my every move. They resisted raising the volume until the closing piece, and even that progressively faded into nothingness.

The recent trend in all things drone-doom/post-rock seems to be to adding more technology and instruments; moogs, bows, percussion etc. Whilst such exotic instruments, samples and jazzy lights can still be transformative additions, Earth cut straight to the animal core of the music by utilising the most rudimentary tool kit – a bass, one standard drum kit, a beautiful crimson guitar, a handful of sparingly-used effects and an elemental approach to songcraft that could be summarised as “we swear to play the riffs, the whole of the riffs and nothing but the riffs”. Strikingly Spartan, it could almost be read as a giant finger to those acts that over-complicate to impress.

Magically enough, simple numbers such as Old Black built a tangibly thick atmosphere, as they mixed new, and in some cases unnamed, material with two-decade-old pieces such as Ouroboros Is Broken. By no means a big man; frontman Dylan Carlson nonetheless shimmered with a masculine intensity, magnetising all eyes as he peppered his set with acerbic asides such as, “$100 for anyone who stabs the person next to them using flash photography”. “I have a medical condition,” he explained. Cranky on the outside, but sweet on the inside, he responded warmly to the charged waves of appreciation that rolled his way and beamed as he shook hands with fans, after closing the show by detuning his bottom E string into reverb oblivion.