Earth Grid

The droning, stolidly guitar-based post-punk of albums like Pass and Slow and Indivisible gave little hint of the musical directions that Asa Osbourne would pursue as Zomes, a moniker under which he has been releasing albums of meditative, increasingly minimal instrumental music since 2008. Earth Grid is the second Zomes release and contains fifteen barely there instrumentals all consisting of muffled drum machine rhythms and simple chord progressions played on what sounds like a blown-out Farfisa organ. Yet Earth Grid’s lo-fi simplicity is deceptive; in the course of its brief run time Osbourne’s compositions manage to attain the kind of unexpected sublimity reserved for works that achieve formal perfection through their very simplicity; think of Satie’s skeletal Gymnopedies or the elemental expanses of Rothko’s near featureless canvases. Though primitively recorded and intentionally repetitive, the mysterious Earth Grid will reveal itself as a masterpiece in miniature to fans receptive to its fine-drawn beauty.