EarthBall on Improvising Outside Over There for Upset The Rhythm

Transmission 292: Interview with EarthBall

EarthBall is a Canadian quintet operating out of the industrial shadows of Nanaimo, British Columbia. In their strictly improvised output, they address the peculiar energies of a “dirty, weird coal mining town,” engaging with themes of subterranean mythology, psychedelic dissolution, and the friction between silence and noise. Their recordings document a process of “embodied listening,” collapsing the hierarchy of instruments into a single, breathing entity.

Title: Outside Over There
Artist: EarthBall
Release Date: 2025-11-07
Genres: Experimental Music, Free Jazz, Psychedelic Rock
Label: Upset The Rhythm
Description: Earthball interview: Exploring the distorted world of Nanaimo noise, basement jams, and raw psychedelic chaos.

Outside Over There, released via Upset The Rhythm, presents this philosophy through eight tracks of dense, hallucinatory texture. Featuring a surreal intervention from comedian Stewart Lee and mastering by John Dieterich, the album offers a heavy, unpolished reality that mirrors the group’s intense, basement-forged bond.

What were you listening to before you started making music?

[Izzy] Oh, different stuff. When I was growing up, my favorite band was probably Nine Inch Nails and Sonic Youth. Then I got really deeply into industrial music. I don’t know if you can hear that in our music, but it’s there. I’ll let John talk too.

[John] I started playing music at a really young age and always was listening to records that my brother or my parents were listening to. I started off with Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson; they were the first big influences on me when I was super young, like three, four or five. I remember listening to that music and being like, “Oh, wow, I really want to do that.”

Shortly after, I got a violin and then a guitar and just started. Listening to even Grand Funk Railroad or CCR, Jimi Hendrix a lot. The Beatles was very prominent in my household, so I listened to The Beatles a lot. Janis Joplin, a lot of that 60s vibe was happening in my parents’ place.

What was the first record you bought?

[John] The first cassette record I bought was The Police, the album with Every Breath You Take. I forget what record that one is, but I do remember that was the first record I bought. I also remember the first CD I bought was Tool‘s Undertow.

I went through a very short phase of being naughty and stole a few CDs from Woolworths in Ontario. That was pretty funny. Oh, Metallica‘s Ride the Lightning was one. This is when I was like 13. When I was grade 8, grade 9, I was really into metal, thrash metal, Megadeth, Metallica.

I was really into playing guitar, so I loved Hendrix and shredders like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. But as I started taking drugs, my flavours started changing. When I was 14 or 15, I first heard Sonic Youth on mushrooms, and it was Diamond Sea. That changed my life forever. I stopped tuning my guitar in standard tuning, stopped practicing and just wanted to play and improvise.

That was the big moment of my life, taking mushrooms, listening to Diamond Sea and realising that I didn’t want to approach music the way I had been approaching it, that I wanted to go into a more embodied listening and improvising kind of space.

After that experience listening to Sonic Youth for the first time, everything changed for me and I started discovering bands like My Bloody Valentine, Spaceman Three, Stereolab, Tortoise, Neu!, Can and jazz as well like Charles Mingus, Miles Davis (Bitches Brew of course), Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy. As I hit my 20s I was wanting to just learn about as much music as possible: out music, free jazz, art rock, folk, electronic. I started listening to Nurse With Wound, Coil, Han Bennik, Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, Chris Corsano.

In our band, there’s age differences, we range from 24 to almost 47. So there’s all sorts of musical influences in our band.

How did you meet and how did you decide to start a band together? Did you connect right away or did your creative ideas differ at the beginning?

[Izzy] My partner, Jeremy, who’s also in the band, when we started dating, that’s when I started playing music. It wasn’t until I was 20 when I started playing. Jeremy and John had met and were doing projects together. There was a Halloween show coming up and we were asked to do a cover band for Sonic Youth. That was my first band ever. John was drumming in that band.

We started playing Sonic Youth covers. It was super easy, super fun. From there, we jammed a few times before EarthBall started for sure. John and Jeremy had a band with their friend Bill called Eschatons. Eschatons was similar to EarthBall, improvised music. Bill couldn’t make it to a show, so they asked me to fill in. That’s when EarthBall started. So sorry, Bill.

[John] I lived in Montreal for 10 years, and went to school for Electroacoustics, Jazz and composition at Concordia University. The week I moved to Vancouver around August 16, 2011, I met Jeremy at the record shop he worked at called Audiopile. Jeremy was always known as the guy who knew everything about records and music. I would go there and ask Jeremy to pick me out 3 or 4 records for me to buy that I didn’t know. That’s how our relationship started and I think I actually said to him, “We are going to become best friends.” Two years later we started jamming for the first time.

We met in Vancouver but we actually both grew up in two small towns an hour away from each other in rural south western Ontario. I lived outside of Goderich and he was outside of Owen Sound in a village called Bognor.

Regarding the first show, that was December 13th, 2019?

[Izzy] 19, yeah.

[John] It was the energy. We played the show in Nanaimo. I loved that night. I had so much fun. I just remember the energy of really letting go with just Izzy and Jeremy felt like something so new. I was so excited about doing a new project. I think we all were. I feel like the three of us were pretty stoked. Izzy came up with the name EarthBall.

After that show, in January, we got together, jammed in your basement and recorded our first… I believe that first recording is the first release we did.

[Izzy] No, I think so. Was that with Kellen as well?

[John] No, that was with Jessica.

[Izzy] Oh, yeah, you’re right. So we have a house in Nanaimo, Jer and I, and Kellen as well, who’s also in EarthBall. The three of us live here now, but we used to have another person named Jess, who lived here, and she was jamming with us at the beginning.

At that point, we were just jamming, it wasn’t really solidified as a band. Once Kellen and Liam joined in, it kind of felt like, okay, this is a thing. It took a couple years. It’s like our COVID jam band.

[John] It was mostly just bass. I live in Vancouver, so I just take the ferry over and bring some recording gear. We set the basement up as a makeshift recording studio jam space. I always would make sure to capture everything that we did. We just listen back and go through it. We started releasing stuff for fun, on our own, on Bandcamp and cassettes. We rarely played shows. We play shows every once in a while, but…

[Izzy] Until a very special one.

[John] Until we opened up for Wolfeyes, that kind of changed the direction and speed and energy of what was going to happen with EarthBall.

You have described Nanaimo as a “dirty, weird coal mining town”. How much of that specific industrial atmosphere ends up in the recording?

[Izzy] Any environment that you’re in will show itself. Even when we’re playing live shows and we’re on tour, we’re very much taking in our surroundings, and it comes out for sure. Nanaimo definitely has a very large influence to me, personally. John, I think you’d say the same thing, even though you don’t live here.

[John] There’s definitely this palpable energy of Nanaimo that pushes our music into a specific space. I can’t imagine EarthBall without Nanaimo, really. If everybody was in Vancouver, it would not be the same.

[Izzy] The thing with Nanaimo is that it was very affordable for a while. So we were able to rent this house with a basement. There’s a lot of space here. That makes a massive difference. Neighbours are not offended by the music because there’s other things to be offended by. We can jam. We jam usually, sometimes we go later than we should, but we haven’t had any problems. We have a really beautiful, strong community of artists here. It makes it easier to live this lifestyle.

[John] Even for me, when I go over to Nanaimo, there is this weird sense of feeling like I’m at home when I go there, even though I’ve never lived there. It has a lot to do with the community and Izzy and Jeremy and Kellen and Liam being there, but just the place itself feels so familiar.

Was the local community supportive?

[Izzy] For sure. Jeremy, we have a couple venues in town. One of them is called Creis Mountain and it’s a house. It’s been a show space for over 15 years now. Cops have only shown up twice, which is amazing. The community there is very, very supportive.

We do really well for out of town bands touring too. They definitely will get their ferry paid for, even if it’s just somebody passing around a bucket. It’s amazing.

The other spot is the Vault Cafe, which is a cafe, but also a venue, in an old bank. That space is also very supportive for artists. The city itself, not so much, but we have a “don’t ask and just do” policy around here. We throw shows at the river, which is in the forest. It’s a little bit of a drive out, but we will bring the generator out there and have a bunch of bands play in the woods. There’s a lot going on here. Our community is strong enough that we just build things and people show up.

[John] River Fest is special, but also the one you do in the city too. What is it called?

[Izzy] Backyard Fest or yeah, Sunk City. It’s a big one.

[John] It’s organized by the same people who organize Creis Mountain, that house venue. Jeremy and Izzy are a big part of it. They all contribute to organizing the Backyard Fest, which is really quite big. Three days.

[Izzy] But we definitely don’t get much support from our local city government. Classic.

How did the Stuart Lee cameo come about and why did you choose that specific stand up fragment?

[Izzy] I think we were literally just talking between jams in the basement and I can’t remember what made me want to show everybody, but nobody had heard of Stuart Lee and I was like, “Oh my God, there’s these absurdities, amazing.” We literally just held up my phone.

[John] From what I remember, I think you and Jer were excited because Chris Tipton said that Stuart Lee liked EarthBall or something. Maybe.

[Izzy] I think that was later on.

[John] I remember I hadn’t heard who Stuart Lee was. I didn’t know. Izzy was definitely stoked to show. I remember specifically me being like, “I don’t know who this person is.”

[Izzy] So it was just holding up the phone to the mic and then we started just jamming to it and that was that.

[John] Yeah, you were trying to find the clip, but then I think we all just were like, “Well, let’s just jam.” So we had started the jam and then you put it up. Once you got it, you put it in your bass.

[Izzy] Oh, great.

[John] It’s going through your bass pickups. Just because when I’m mixing the record, that’s where it was going.

Is there a thread, a common thread, a topic, a theme behind the album?

[Izzy] To me, I think to each of us there is, but I don’t know if they’re all linked, which is interesting. I remember when we recorded most of that stuff. When was it? January this year or last year?

[John] It was September 2024. And December. So those, it was two sessions basically. A little bit of April of 2023. There’s a song. It’s a bit of a mishmash from a few different sessions.

[Izzy] The Helsinki track, definitely for me, I was obsessing over this article that I had read about Hollow Earth and Helsinki being a spot where there’s a cave system and it is a hole to hell, which actually is like an inverted heaven. It’s a tropical reality in Helsinki. And also this connection with these monks in Tibet that saw UFO and this Russian painter. It’s a crazy story that I was reading that I was obsessed with. I think that kind of started coming out a bit. And then I was just like, “Oh my gosh, we should just dive into this,” but nobody else really got into it except for me. So it was my obsession.

[John] Oh, like listening to it on tour and stuff like that?

[Izzy] Yeah. I was just obsessing over it for about a year, but we never really talk about what, like, I think we’ve tried at some points to look at a piece of music or a artifact, like a record and try and comprehend what it is. But I think we all have different threads and then they all just weave into something that we don’t even know how to describe. It’s just what it is.

[John] The process as far as like making a record is usually having a few sessions where I go over amassing a large amount of material and then I’ll do some mixing and editing and then I’ll email a bunch of the jams. Then we kind of all go through and pick our favorites and start trying to piece together what sort of vibe would be cool for the record or what ones really stand out or work. For the two albums we’ve done with Upset the Rhythm, anyways, it’s been sort of like that. And then we have the live record, which is just us live.

Is there a specific pedal or piece of gear or equipment that acts as sonic glue for this record?

[Izzy] I love that question. Who else is in the band, you mean?

[John] Well, yeah. Justin Patterson was a part of it as well. He’s a hardware. You don’t think it’s hardware? He’s one of our best friends. He was our driver on tour, this most recent tour in Europe. And he’s featured on three tracks on the new record. Even in the previous record, It’s Yours, our friend Alex Moskos is featured on two tracks, I think as well. Sometimes it’s not a piece of gear. It’s almost a person that also can be a contributing piece of glue that helps things come together.

[Izzy] But I think in terms of our setup or our gear, right now the glue seems to be a vocal pitch shifter.

[John] Yes, yes.

[Izzy] Kellen’s talk box. And Jeremy’s no input mixer, I’d say. Those are the extra pieces that have helped us play around in a different space.

Which films, books, or life events shaped your aesthetic more than actual music?

[Izzy] Just that article that I keep talking about for me. The one about aliens and Helsinki and Tibet and hollow earth. I’ll link it to you. It’s an amazing article. It’s under a paywall, unfortunately, but it’s very, very interesting. But no, I would say there’s not much of like for the album. I don’t think we really talked about it or thought about it too much. We just jam. Every time I try to think about bringing in a theme, it fucks me right up. If I don’t think about it, they just come out. But if I think about something, it just doesn’t work.

[John] For me, from where I sit, like when I’m in Vancouver, listening back to the recordings and going through everything, I recently was talking to Izzy’s parents. I was talking about how for me, it always impresses me so much about how when Izzy takes in all this information, like she’s talking about these stories and does all this research, and there’s all this amazing information in Izzy’s brain. And then somehow when we’re improvising, it all comes out in these beautiful, exciting, weird narratives.

I don’t really understand it when I’m in the moment, in the basement, improvising. I can feel the sense of her energy, and it really propels the jams forward in this amazing way. I get really inspired by being in the space with Izzy and Jeremy when they’re singing. But I can’t quite grasp what’s happening. But when I go back and I start mixing and treating and editing stuff, and then I’m hearing what Izzy or Jeremy’s narratives that kind of come out of nowhere for me, everything just makes so much sense.

And it’s like then these themes from all of the life experience that Izzy and Jeremy have just sort of start to make sense. Then when picking jams or thinking about jams that work, everything kind of just falls into place or different themes will reference other tracks or other parts of the song. For me, when I’m listening back to some of these recordings, I almost feel as a listener for the first time, which is really fun. Discovering what themes are coming out and coming up. It’s one of my favourite processes, for sure.

One other thing too when you ask if any events or books etc. influenced the making of the record, psychedelics do play a big role in the band. We often record and play using MDMA, LSD or Psilocybin (mushrooms). It is a part of what our process is and it inevitably influences our music.

Are you already working on your material?

[John] We were able to get a lot of multitrack recordings from the tour. They’re all really well recorded. Right now I’m going through and mixing a bunch of these things. We’re going to talk about probably the next actual Earth Music Volumes 3 and Volumes 4. I think that most likely would be the next thing that gets released. But then we still are on a mountain of other material that can be definitely made into more records.

We’ve also talked to a friend of mine who’s an amazing artist and plays in many great projects. But one of them is PLF, Peter Kooten from Vienna. He has this label called Ventile. He approached us about doing a split record with his project PLF. So we were discussing in the van just briefly on tour about maybe approaching that split slightly differently than the way we usually approach doing EarthBall records. That’s a possible thing that might get released at some point.

You were also in Europe, right?

[Izzy] We just were there for about just under a month. We played Lugasu Festival in Utrecht. And then we played a bunch of places in France and Switzerland. And we played in Brescia, Italy as well.

[John] It was great.

Do you notice a specific energy between European and North American audiences?

[Izzy] The European, it’s such a different experience touring in Europe. It’s just I don’t know if it’s scarcity ideologies over here in North America, but Canada is so funny to tour. It’s challenging, but beautiful. You have to drive like 11 hours to get to the next city to play. There’s only like 10 viable places to play in Canada. If you’re going across Canada, it’s quite a journey. It’s harder here for some reason, even though there’s a lot of space, there’s not that many people. It was really amazing touring around in Europe and playing to more people than we are used to over here. It felt really good.

[John] And the hospitality is next level. I’m not saying every place in Canada doesn’t have good hospitality. When we played Swanee Festival in Montreal, Kiva, who’s the curator there is so amazing. We could stay as long as we wanted at the festival and she would cook food for everybody. She had a little crew of people making food, making sure everybody’s comfortable. But that’s kind of exceptional in a way here, I found anyways.

But when we were over in Europe, no matter what venue or where we were playing, there was just always this gratitude to have us there. We had so many meals with so many of the organizers and the volunteers. We show up and then now we have this extended family and we all have dinner together. It was such a beautiful experience to tour in Europe, just for the hospitality of meeting new people who are organizing the show.

[Izzy] I was just going to say in Canada, when we tour, we sleep on floors and get blood poisoning. It’s gross.

Photos courtesy of EarthBall

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others