CLYDE PETERSEN
EVEN HELL HAS ITS HEROES
SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 16, 2021
OPENING RECEPTION - SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 18 - 5-9pm
Artist, Filmmaker, Animator, and Musician, Clyde Petersen worked with Earth for five years, managing their tours, selling merch, organizing events and support. He found himself engulfed and mesmerized by the perseverance of the band, the work of being on tour, and most importantly, the music.
As a storyteller with a unique experience as collaborator and observer with the band, Clyde knew that he wanted to make a film that not only reflected their style of experimentation and patience but highlighted the scenery that surrounded them in the Pacific Northwest. This multi-year endeavor of creating his experimental music documentary, shot entirely on Super8 mm film, brought them to the Columbia Gorge, Rattlesnake Lake, the Wayside Chapel on Highway 2, and various locations on the West Coast. Clyde views Earth as a study in perseverance and patience and has created this exhibition of twenty-one images of the band for exhibition at J. Rinehart Gallery.
In conjunction with the show, an exhibition catalog will be published with an essay written by Corey Brewer and write up about the project by Clyde Petersen.
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Despite Seattle’s sprawling geographic imprint on the land, its art and music community has always felt very small-town at heart. This has always been one of my favorite qualities about the city. Seattle, for the most part, goes to sleep at 10pm. You can roam entire neighborhoods and not see a soul. You can barely get a slice of pizza after 9pm in the most active neighborhoods. But out there in the night, artists and musicians are working, practicing, writing. This city has always been ours until the morning commute.
And so it was that my very first meeting with the band Earth took place well after dark, late one evening in 2007 at the new Krispy Kreme donut shop in SoDo. They fueled up on coffee and donuts for their midnight practice session at a nearby art-framing shop where guitarist Dylan Carlson worked. We had a mutual bandmate, keyboardist and trombone player Steve Moore. I was in need of work, having abandoned a job managing a band who had just decided to hire my ex-girlfriend. Things were dramatic and unpleasant in a way that small-town music scenes can be. I was looking for a change. They were looking for a manager to help get organized before their new album, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, was released.
We were all night owls and we all liked sugar, so it seemed to be a good fit. They scratched their phone number on the back of a donut receipt and just like that, I had a new job. I had the receipt hung on the wall of my certainly illegal, $500 a month, only slightly finished basement bedroom in Ballard for years after, and the feeling that my life was about to change.
At the time, Earth didn’t have email, cell phones, or home computers. They had a landline with an answering machine, which they used to screen their calls. This was truly annoying to many people that worked with them, particularly bookers, record labels, and press agents. But I lived just one neighborhood away and would drive over with a list of questions if needed. I enjoyed rambling on their answering machine until one of them picked up the phone. We seemed to both enjoy the analog lifestyle.
The core members of Earth, Dylan Carlson and Adrienne Davies, passed the time in a small apartment in Greenwood, reading books, watching history programs on tv, working various service-industry jobs, and doting on an army of cats, collectively too numerous to count at times, but each wonderful and unique.
I didn’t know much about the metal scene. I had spent the early 00s enmeshed in what could be described as indie and folk and punk scenes and all of their various intersections. I could write a dissertation on folk-punk in the southeastern United States from 2000–2006, but I couldn’t tell you the name of more than one Metallica album. I actively fled the pit when Metallica took the stage at Lollapalooza ‘96 at the Gorge. In many ways, my life with Earth was my introduction to metal and drone. We shared common ground, because unlike many metalheads, the members of Earth came from jazz, experimental, country, Deadhead, and rock backgrounds. We talked about Willie, Waylon, Davis, Jerry, Coltrane (both Alice and John), Dylan, Erik Satie and English folk ballads.
Personally, I have found no other experiences in life that can offer what an Earth performance brings, and I know I am not alone in this feeling. Founded in 1989 by guitarist Dylan Carlson, Earth is a recognized as a pioneer of drone metal. Hypnotically slow, instrumental, repetitious, lengthy, a typical Earth song begins at ten minutes in length. A typical Earth performance, six songs or so, will often surpass two hours of music, with legendary stories of them playing for three to four hours at time. The band has included over thirty members throughout the years, rotating around guitarist Dylan Carlson and drummer Adrienne Davies.
I worked with Earth for five years. Managing, tour managing, selling merch at shows, emailing, calling, connecting, organizing, supporting. In those years, Earth traveled all over the world. I wish I could say I was there to film it, but often I was home, working on the next tour, album plans, press release, poster: The office work needed to happen to keep the machine going.
A few lucky times, I joined them on the road or flew out to a festival with them. Those times were extraordinary, full of long nights, late shows, exhausting drives. Somehow time seemed to slow around the band. Drives that should have taken five hours lasted for eight. It was a vortex, a mystery of cigarettes and complaints and jokes and hilarious van prattle. And yet mid-show I would always find myself so lost in their music. Every ounce of stress would leave my body. A sea of humans held onto a single note that Dylan stretched out for miles, while Adrienne played more air than drums really. Attending an Earth show and enjoying the long spaces in between notes often felt like the only way a human could slow down in this expanding world of immediacy. And so it was that I began to understand their cult following.
After five years with Earth, it was time to move on. I began making animated feature films and Earth’s popularity had grown. It was more than I could handle with my small-town manager experience. As Nick Cave once told me backstage, “You’ve got to get them into the soundtrack business.” And I honestly had no idea how to do that.
But I knew for many years that I wanted to make a film with Earth that not only reflected their style of experimentation and patience, but highlighted the scenery that surrounded them in the Northwest. For the past four years I have been making an experimental music documentary with the band, dragging them to the Columbia Gorge, Rattlesnake Lake, the Wayside Chapel on Highway 2, and various locations on the West Coast.
What you find in this exhibition are stills from the movie, which will be released in 2021. The entire movie is shot on Super 8mm film. I was so fortunate to work with northwest photographer Jody Poorwill, who developed a system of enlarging these single-frame images from the original eight-millimeter film to the large prints you see here today. Jody has photographed Earth throughout the years and was the perfect collaborator for this project.
Earth cellist Lori Goldston often says, “Seattle is a city where you need to show up. The people who show up are remembered.” The people that show up create this scene. There are plenty who stay at home, deterred by rain, terribly slow or non-existent mass transit, and general depression. This is the reality of living in the Northwest. Earth has been showing up for over 30 years. Grossly unacknowledged and underappreciated in Seattle, and far more popular overseas, Earth is a study in perseverance and patience. It is with this understanding and experience that I present to you, twenty-one images of the band Earth.
I invite you to find some of their music and enjoy it while you take in these images.
-Clyde Petersen, 2021
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Clyde Petersen (they/he) is a transgender Northwest artist, working in film, animation, music, installation, and fabulous spectacle. He has been the recipient of the Artist Innovators Award through Artist Trust, the 2016 Neddy Award at Cornish, the Stranger Genius Award, Amazon Artist Residency, the NEFA Touring Artists Grant, and project grants from 4Culture, Office of Arts and Culture and Artist Trust throughout the years. His work has been featured in museums, galleries, DIY spaces and film festivals around the world. In 2019, Clyde founded The Fellow Ship Artist Residency, a paid residency for queer and BIPOC artists to spend a week on Guemes Island in the Salish Sea. He lives in a wooden boat on land on Guemes Island, works on films, and runs the residency space.