Earth Tongues - Phases (Neither Nor, 2026) Sculpting Silence 2

By Stef Gijssels

This ensemble will always carry a deeply personal connotation for me. In 2015, they released their first album, Rune, at a time when I was hospitalised for two weeks, waking at irregular hours. Despite the dire circumstances, listening to Earth Tongues at four in the morning, alone in the darkness, was a strange and deeply soothing experience.

There was something about the ensemble’s careful, almost cautious little sounds—the tiny sonic points that gradually accumulated into a landscape that absorbed, captivated, and ultimately elevated you—that created a uniquely powerful listening experience. It is difficult to explain how important it became for me to return to this music again and again, and how much it taught me about the value of life, the value of art, and the value of improvised music.

When everything collapses around you—and inside you—you begin to realise that whatever remains, however small or fragmented, can still be enough to create something meaningful. You learn to cherish the smallest isolated event - "at least I still have this", to pay attention to what might otherwise go unnoticed, and to welcome the spontaneous connections with and between people who can, together, create beauty out of those tiny fragments of luck.

And in many ways, that is what this music does. Little sounds, little fragments, little pieces surrounded by silence, which, when brought together, can still constitute something beautiful, something meaningful, something valuable. It gave me hope against all odds, and with it a profound insight: to cherish every moment. Life is not necessarily a long story with a clear plot. Perhaps it is instead a collection of small, random events—fragments that, taken together, become a life, and that are all worth living.

The trio, so many years later are still Joe Moffett on trumpet, Dan Peck on tuba, and Carlo Costa on percussion. 

Like their previous albums, their sound is deeply organic, drawing on the textures and rhythms of the natural world: the drip of water, pebbles falling, animals growling, birds twittering. Each of the three long tracks has its own distinct character, while the music gradually evolves from pointillist blips into increasingly stretched-out tones in the final piece. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, these scattered sonic fragments begin to coalesce. The subtlety of this shift is deliberate, shaped by carefully considered compositional ideas and structures.

Silence is an essential part of their music—the white space between colours, an open realm of possibility waiting to be filled. What makes their work so compelling is the extraordinary value they give to each individual sound, with an intense attention to precision, texture, and timbral quality. When you enter their music attentively, it seems to slow down rational thought itself, allowing you to surrender to the sound and, for a while, simply be the music.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.