The Earthly Frames - Light Reading (2019)

The Earthly Frames is the current exploratory psych/electronic/rock incarnation of Maryland-based musician Gabriel Walsh. For twenty-five years Walsh has been producing experimental pop recordings. He’s played in the bands sad-songers Timesbold, freaky-improvers Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, and Hebrew space-rockers The Solillians, and and created songs with his recording project Your Team Ring,

With The Earthly Frames, we can hear the through-line of layered, warped sounds that Walsh has been honing for a quarter century fusing with a fixation on disjointed, fictional worlds.

For example, the first Earthly Frames release was a USB drive with a one-of-a-kind narrative fragment. Owners of the devices had to choose whether or not to share their particular artifact with the others to complete the story or keep it to themselves – flipping the notion of music file-sharing on its head. The following release came with a card game and short film all set in the world of a billboard salesman who’s having a nervous breakdown.

On Light Reading, The Earthly Frames second full-length, Walsh’s powers of sonic and narrative avant-garde-ism are in their prime. The album follows the format of an imagined reading list. There’s a corresponding song for each obtuse-sounding book. Titles such as “A Doorbell for Finite Beings” or “Dismantling Ubiquitous Monitoring Systems” offer glimpses into a parallel universe with exotic, yet obsolete, technology.

With each track, we hover briefly over the lonely worlds of ghost singers, failed philosophers, and dead ideas. It’s a pile of books no one will ever read – a minority report filed away and forgotten. And yet, with Light Reading, The Earthly Frames remind us that knowledge, the reality that we don’t throw away, is indeed powerful.