Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method

Earth - Hex: Or Printing in The Infernal Method
CD Version. LP version below.
Studio album by Earth
Released	September 6 2005
Recorded	March - May 2005 at Aleph Studios in Seattle, Washington, USA
Genre	Drone, Country, Experimental
Length	46:27
Producer	Randall Dunn
Earth chronology
Living in the Gleam of an Unsheathed Sword (2005)	Earth - Hex: Or Printing in The Infernal Method (2005)	Live Hex; in a Large City on the North American Continent (2006)
Alternative Cover

Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method (Often referred to simply as Hex) is the fourth full-length studio album by American drone band Earth. The band's first studio album upon reuniting in 2001 along with their first overall studio album in nearly a decade, Hex is a stark contrast to the abrasive drone doom of the Sub Pop era. Drawing heavily from the Western novel Blood Meridian and numerous range of musical influences to coneptualize a "soundtrack for an imaginary Western". Hex would be released by Southern Lord Records on 23 October 2005 to critical acclaim.

Background

Earth would disband in 1996 following the release of Pentastar: In the Style of Demons as guitarist/bandleader Dylan Carlson would take time away from music to deal with drug and legal issues. In an interview with Self Titled Magazine, Carlson would state that he didn't even own a guitar from 1996 to 2000, stating "I was consumed by other things, you know? I was too busy trying to survive and get my shit get back together. I wasn’t even listening to music.". Earth would reform in 2002 with Adrienne Davies on drums, beginning to play shows again. The theme and sound would be conceptualized for the album roughly a year before the album would be recorded. On 16 October 2004 Earth would sign with Southern Lord Records as they would enter the studio in January 2005.

Marking a new direction the band would follow in years to come, Hex stands in stark contrast to Earth's previous works. While retaining the extremely heavy doom/drone metal song structure of epic riffs over simple repetitive drum beats, the guitar was inflected with country influences that favored a cleaner reverb-heavy tone layered with acoustic instruments over the band's previous predilection for distortion. The press release cited diverse influences such as Ennio Morricone, Billy Gibbons, Neil Young's soundtrack to the movie Dead Man, country musicians Duane Eddy, Merle Haggard, and Roy Buchanan.

In an interview with Terrorizer Magazine, Carlson indicated that he viewed this shift as part of a continuum rather than a categorical change in direction. It's also noted that the album was influenced by Cormac McCarthy, particularly his novel Blood Meridian. Every song title on the album is named after a phrase found in the text of the novel. "There's an arc to each song and an arc to the album, rather than just a collection of songs. There's silence and a sense of space to the music". The subtitle is from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Carlson would speak at length about Hex, stating the following:

“	"I view music as a continuum and there're different faces that it takes. This is not a genre record. I don't do genre. I've always listened to that music, it's the main thing I'm listening to now. You know, they're the guitar players I admire and they also have, for example, the banjo rolls, going back to the open string, the drone...Basically with all the music I like, the drone is always present. Someone might look at my records and say it's schizophrenic, but there's always that element I hear. Maybe it's delusional, but it makes sense to me, I guess. It's like the Hindu gods where they have all these different incarnations but it's still the same force behind it. I don't know if it's because I've got cleaner living or not, but the sound that I hear in my head is cleaner now. There's always some harmonic distortion when you have an amplified sound, I mean if you had a pure electric guitar tone it would be pretty uninspiring, but I just started to want to hear more of the resonance of the wood and the metal of the instrument...Sometimes I think that with Earth, although there's not a lot going on because of the distortion and the saturation, it can be quite tiring. I wanted there to be space [on Hex], so the music breathes. [On Blood Meridian as an influence] That's the one [Blood Meridian] that's the most violent or occult, but all of his books deal with that theme of the West and the frontier and its violence and effects. It's more about capturing that sense of place. As someone born in America, I definitely consider myself a product of the frontier and the history of it has influenced me. This whole vast continent and these "peoples": "Indians", the white man, they were all forced to deal with this place, an environment that was harsh and demanding and it forced people to react to it in a certain way. Like the "hex" sign itself - the Mennonites are normally super God-fearing people, but when they came to American they had to invent these signs to keep evil spirits away. There's this need to protect themselves from this entity that inhabits the landscape...everything was violent and hard, everyone was violent."	”
	— Dylan Carlson, Terrorizer Magazine

Hex would be released on 6 September 2005 via Southern Lord Records, the band's debut with the label. Notably the double LP version would feature an alternate cover along with a bonus track taking up the entirety of Side D. Despite the drastic change in sound, Hex would be praised by both critics and fans alike. Writing for Pitchfork, Austin Gaines described the album as a "surprisingly beautiful instrumental album" that exchanged distorted riffing for "the austere beauty of a telecaster roaming the Western U.S." In Exclaim!, Kevin Hainey praised the album as "an elegant and singular effort filled with sparsely beautiful passages that lead headlong into the void". Within the band's stylistic transformation, Todd DePalma observed in Chronicles of Chaos "a stripped, damn near ossified sound that yields a more conceptual - and by far the heaviest - album of [Earth's] storied lifespan". Other notable publications that would praise Hex would include the likes of Lambgoat (9/10) and Scene Point Blank (8.5/10).

Tracklist

NOTE: Track 10 is exclusive to the vinyl edition.

• 1. Mirage (1:45)
• 2. Land of Some Other Order (7:19)
• 3. The Dire and Ever Circling Wolves (7:34)
• 4. Left in The Desert (1:13)
• 5. Lens of Unrectified Night (7:56)
• 6. An Inquest Concerning Teeth (5:16)
• 7. Raiford (The Felon Wind) (7:21)
• 8. The Dry Lake (3:21)
• 9. Tethered To The Polestar (4:42)
• 10. Untitled (14:47)

Personnel

• Dylan Carlson - Guitar, Banjo, Baritone Guitar
• Adrienne Davies - Drums, Percussion, Wind Chimes
• Steve Moore - Trombone, Tubular Bells
• Dan Tyack - Lap Steel, Pedal Steel
• John Schuller - Bass Guitar
• Randall Dunn - Engineer, Mixing, Producer
• Mell Dettmer - Mastering
• Stephen O'Malley - Layout, Design

External Links

• Discogs
• Bandcamp