WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada). On NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses.
Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters: “We’re honoring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside,” says Menuck. They later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas—Menuck met first them in 2015 when recording Ada’s final self-titled album at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango, the same studio where WAWBARC convened to make this record.
The album is out September 13th on Constellation. Meanwhile, you can hear the title track here:
There’s been a quite staggering trajectory to the work of BIG|BRAVE: with each release they achieve an even greater level of intensity, which seems to be unsurpassable – until the next album. They’ve come a long way from their minimal ambient / folk beginnings. The instrumentation has remained minimal, but cranked out ear-splitting decibels, they’ve developed a way of creating a lot from comparatively little, and unlike many guitar bands, they’re not afraid of space. There is starkness, there is silence, there is separation between the instruments, and much room to breathe between slow, thunderous beats and crushing chords which collide at the pace of tectonic plates.
Vital was aptly titled, and marked a new peak in the articulation of raw emotional turmoil. It seemed improbable that nature morte could equal it, and yet it did, and went beyond, a desperate, feral edge pushing its emotive force to a higher level.
Coming a mere fourteen months after nature morte, and some substantial touring, how could they possibly sustain that kind of intensity? It seems improbable, but it’s happened. A Chaos Of Flowers is graceful, delicate, even folksy – but also eye-poppingly intense, cranium-splittingly loud, and utterly devastating.
The tracks released ahead of A Chaos Of Flowers hinted that this new album, beyond what seems human, would once again match its predecessor. ‘I Felt a Funeral’, which is also the album’s opening track, has strong folksy vibes… until the sonorous guitar tones enter. There are hints of late Earth about his, the way the resonant tones of pure sustain simply hang in the air. But dissonance builds, and there’s an awkwardness to this scratchy, imperfect beauty. The way Mathieu Ball’s guitar scratches and scrapes and builds to a blustering squall of dense, twisted noise is remarkable, building from nothing to an all-consuming howl. Yet at the same time, there’s restraint: it’s as if he’s pulling on a least to restrain this ferocious monster in his hands.
Currents – and volume – build. You’ve never heard guitar like this before. It brings the crushing weight of the drone of Sunn O))). And the thunderous relentless repetition of early Swans, but delivered with a breathy ethereal sparseness that’s difficult to place. And then there are the vocals. Not since first hearing Cranes in the early 90s have I heard a vocal so otherworldly.
The guitar feedback yearns heavy and hard in the final minutes of ‘not speaking of the ways’, a track which starts heavy and only grows in both weight and intensity. Robin Wattie’s voice is half adrift in a sea of reverb and drifting, almost drowning, in a tidal flow of guitar noise, for which you’d be hard-pressed to find a comparison. I’ve fried, struggled, failed. You can toss Sunn O))), Earth, MWWB around in the bag of references, but none really come especially close to conveying the experience of A Chaos Of Flowers.
The songs are shorter than on recent predecessors, and overall, the mood of A Chaos Of Flowers is different – dare I even say prettier than the last couple of albums. There’s a musicality and gentility about this album which marks something of a shift, and single ‘canon: in canon’ is the perfect evidence of this. One may say that ‘heavy’ is relative in terms of distortion and volume, but there is more to it than that. Many of the songs on A Chaos Of Flowers are delicate, graceful, sparse, with acoustic guitar and slow-twisting feedback dominating the sound of each track. There’s a levity, an accessibility, which is at the heart of every song here. Much of it isn’t overtly heavy… but this is an album which will crush your soul.
If A Chaos Of Flowers is intentionally less noisy than its predecessors, it’s no less big on impact. Raging, ragged chords nag away, until ‘chanson pour mon ombe (song for marie part iii)’ brings bleak, tones which cut to the core and explodes in to the most obliterative noise close to the end: this is the absolute definition of climactic finale.
There’s a rawness, a primitive, elemental quality to their music which has defined their previous albums, and this remains in A Chaos Of Flowers. You arrive at the end feeling weakened, short on breath, emotionally drained. I ask myself, how did I get here, so sapped-feeling? The answer lies in the force of this immense album. A Chaos Of Flowers is devastating in its power, and BIG|BRAVE reached a new summit – once again. The deeper and darker they go, the better they get.
Ahead of the release of their new album A Chaos Of Flowers, out April 19th, BIG|BRAVE have released the striking new single ‘canon : in canon,’ featuring one of the album’s featured performances by acclaimed guitarist and label-mate Marisa Anderson. Vocalist/guitarist Robin Wattie leads the ensemble with a deeply affecting melodic turns and subtly ecstatic vocal effects, while Anderson and guitarist Mathieu Ball billow in plumes of distortion and slow arpeggio beneath drummer Tasy Hudson’s delicate cymbal work.
About the track Robin Wattie comments, "I took a risk and went full R&B and to my great surprise everyone was super down. I took another risk by trying to convey the slow and heavy nature of witnessing yet another sunrise in the throes of deep sadness, grief or depression… and the sense of failure when you’re unable to navigate the outside world that seems to carry on and disregard the severity of these emotional and mental states. Marisa Anderson amplifies the track to a beauty I couldn’t have imagined."
Listen to ‘canon : in canon’ here:
BIG|BRAVE tour dates
May 3 – Duisburg, DE – Stapeltor May 4 – Brussels, BE – Les Nuits Botanique May 5 – Paris, FR – Pointe Ephemere May 6 – Bern, CH – Dachstock May 7 – Schorndorf, DE – Club Manufaktur May 8 – Graz, AT – Orpheum Extra May 9 – Budapest, HU – Durer Kert May 10 – Wien, AT – Chelsea May 11 – Krakow, PL – Kamienna12 May 12 – Warsaw, PL – Hydrozagadka May 14 – Prague Bike, CZ – Jesus May 15 – Berlin, DE – Kantine am Berghain May 16 – Aarhus, DK – VoxHall May 17 – Sonderborg, DK – Mejeriet May 18 – Copenhagen DK – A Colossal Weekend May 20 – Den Haag, NL – Paard May 21 – Antwerp, BE – Bouckenborgh May 22 – Ramsgate, UK – Ramsgate Music Hall May 23 – Brighton, UK – The Green Door Store May 24 – Bristol, UK – Dareshack May 25 – Leeds, UK – The Lending Room May 25 – London, UK – Portals Festival
BIG|BRAVE have announced their new album A Chaos Of Flowers, out 19th April. Along with the album’s announce, the elemental Canadian trio have shared the video for single ‘i felt a funeral’. BIG|BRAVE have also announced an extensive tour in 2024 throughout the UK, and mainland Europe, including sets at Les Nuits Botanique in Brussels and Portals Festival in London.
‘i felt a funeral’ borrows from the poetry of Emily Dickinson, BIG|BRAVE embodying the inner turmoil of her words with a bold mixture of frothing chords, arcs of bending drones, delicate brushwork, and guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie’s resolute voice.
On the creation of the video, guitarist Mathieu Ball notes, “The making of this video employed a similar process as we do when writing music. As we’ve learned to let the flow of ideas take its course, the act of creating works whether with fully formed concepts or an unfinished notion, starting the work itself acts as a sort of guide to where the final outcome may land. We realised that something more visually minimal than what we first imagined was the way to go.”
By using a single-take that loosely follows Wattie’s movements, with moments of imperfection, lost focus, and fluctuations in lighting, “the performer (Robin) and the audience both partake in this visual and aural conversation together creating a more intimate visual space. The audience is led in and out of her intimate space all while being kept at safe distance. Paired with the lyrical content, it can be considered an apt representation of the elements of mental collapse – a simplified visual dance with the inner and outside world.”
Watch ‘i felt a funeral’ here:
BIG|BRAVE’s music has been described as massive minimalism. Their fusillades of textural distortion and feedback emphasise their music’s frayed edges as much as its all-encompassing weight. The potency of the trio’s work is their singular artistry combining elements of traditional folk techniques and a modern deconstruction of guitar music. Gain, feedback, and amplitude are essential to A Chaos Of Flowers, an album that builds on their ferocious 2023 album nature morte.
Lyrically, the songs explore the most vulnerable of human experiences, how marginalisations manifest internally and externally, the inner struggles of isolation, and co-existence in nature. A Chaos of Flowers draws on catharsis and beauty as well as the quagmire of disorientation and othering. The album is a monument of simultaneous serenity and disquiet, a subtle maelstrom of internal life.
The release of nature morte, which surpassed even the shattering power of Vital, made the return of Montral’s Big|Braveto Leeds an absolute must-see show. The addition of B E L K to the lineup as the local support only added to the buzz.
Since finding a home on one of my favourite labels in the UK, Human Worth, B E L K have absolutely not sold out or become slicker, maintaining the raw energy that they displayed the first time I caught them at Wharf Chambers alongside USA Nails, Blacklisters, and the sadly-missed Cannibal Animal back in November 2021.
B E L K
The sound is dominated by brutal bowel-shaking bass: perversely, it’s not a criticism when I say it sounds like arse in a gloriously messy way – because it’s precisely how it’s supposed to sound. It’s sometimes hard to tell if they’re in time or in tune amidst the chaotic racket, it’s a snarling, grating shouty racket. When they slow it down, it’s a grinding trudge in the Godflesh vein, while the rest is full-throttle gnarly grindcore, short sharp sub-two minute assaults. Everything creaks, crackles and feeds back. The vocals are almost buried in a mudslide of noise and everything sounds as fucked as the drummer’s cymbal.
Historically, I’ve researched support acts in advance, but more recently, I’ve been more open to the element of surprise, and this has yielded some unexpected revelations, Aicher is one of them. Recorded, I suspect I would have found his dark ambient sound sculptures appealing, but, well, y’know. There’s a fair bit of it around. This means I was taken unawares by the immense power of this set, both in terms of performance and physical power. Instead of the tentative starts common to sets in this field, Aicher is bold, and loud, waving what I assume to be a contact mic to create sounds that echo and explode. He plays in near darkness, enhancing the atmosphere, picking up a bass guitar which yields sounds as strange as it looks. There are thunderous crashes of noise. He unplugs the guitar and plays jack plug against the strings and pickups, and later scrapes guitar neck against the edge of the stage. It’s a mesmerising performance: he seems comfortable lurching around in the shadows, cranking out a billows of sound with lots of low end vibrations which hit a throbbing sweet spot. Over a sustained period, the ear pressure builds and the effect is like swimming…. Then from amidst the odd synthetic beats, the volume rises again. He picks up the bass once again and it doesn’t rumble but it roars, and we’re all rooted to the spot, stunned into silence.
Aicher
The weird bass is back when Big | Brave take to the stage, and we subsequently learn that Aicher – or Liam Andrews as he’s also known. He’s a great fit, adding another layer of depth to the powerhouse drone riff howl that is Big | Brave. On record, they’re immense, but live… it’s hard to convey just how gripping they are, how immersive and all-encompassing the sound. Of the many shows I saw in 2022, theirs here at the Brudenell is a big standout. Sometimes you wonder if a show was really as good as you remember, if it was just the atmosphere, the beer, or whatever. But no, seeing them again hits just as hard: this is a band with a rare intensity – and they play at a punishing volume with a lot of it coming from their towering backline. They’re not quite in Sunn O))) or Dinosaur Jr territory, but for a smaller band, they really do lug some big kit, with three monster stacks all above their own head height dominating the stage.
Big|Brave
And while they have space, the original three play close together in the centre of the stage, and you can see the subtle interactions between them – although the intuitive interplay is the real joy to behold. They are each lost in their own spaces, and we are all lost in those spaces with them. Each player brings something quite different, and it’s almost unfathomable that they should cohere in such a way. Robin Wattie is understated, her shrieking, desperate vocals half-buried beneath her own guitar and that of Mathieu Ball, who’s restless all over, nonstop, while the drumming – slow, hard, methodical, often with both stick striking the same drum at once and hammering an ultra -low BPM akin to Swans circa Greed –goes straight through you.
The lighting is as stark and minimal as the music, with two spots facing the audience providing the primary illumination.
Big|Brave
It’s hard to fathom that regular instruments – albeit with a metal bass – can make this noise and they have pretty compact pedal boards considering. The sustain!!! Ball and Andrews grind their headstocks into their amps and shake, twist and bend the becks of their instruments to yield maximum sustain and twisted feedback as minutes pass between chords, and it’s truly something to behold.
Big|Brave
There is no interaction during the set, which is built around nature morte in sequence, to have done so would have torn the atmosphere. And when Wattie does speak, she’s timid, grateful, and against the conventions of expectation, it’s not to thank us and announce an encore, but to thank us and leave.
There is a purity about Big|Brave which is rare: it’s clear that the way they play is not about showmanship but because this is what they feel, but to see a band wring every drop of a note from an instrument while rattling your ribcage is a special experience.
Big|Brave are outstanding in every way: emotive, monolithic, but about so much more than noise. They just keep getting better… and better. And this… this is something else. And it’s special. But fuck it hurts. Live music doesn’t get better than this.
Ky is the new ‘solo’ project of Ky Brooks, best known as vocalist and lyricist of noise-punk trio Lungbutter and a slew of other Montréal-based out-music projects, including 8-person queer punk collective Femmaggots and experimental/improv trio Nag. Ky is a long-standing and shining figure of Montréal’s music underground: they co-founded essential Montréal DIY space La Plante a decade ago, and alongside playing and performing in all sorts of projects and contexts ever since, they’re also a recording and front-of-house sound engineer about town (and on the road with acts like Big|Brave).
‘The Dancer’ is one of the album’s standout electro tracks—in this case melded with the ‘band’ configuration that also features sporadically on Power Is The Pharmacy: guitarist Mat Ball (Big|Brave), bassist Joshua Frank (Gong Gong Gong), and drummer Farley Miller (Shining Wizard) join Ky and the album’s core electronics collaborator Nick Schofield on a song anchored by crisp, phased synth arpeggiation and ghostly pads. As the band kicks in with a wicked little whiplash rhythm, Ky walks a fine line between bemused irony and unadorned sincerity (as their abstemious poems-turned-lyrics so often do) while synth ostinatos and sheets of whitenoise guitar add momentum to the inexorable groove.
The video by Ky’s friend Eric Bent features an animated child learning to move and crawl and walk, through dance: an ode to the primordial immanence of moving to music, and a fitting companion piece to the album’s most danceable track and its lyrical literalism.
Ahead of the release of their sprawling double-album 93696, out March 24th, Liturgy shares new single ‘Before I Knew The Truth’. Bounding with an incalculable momentum, "Before I Knew The Truth" exemplifies the new album’s equilibrium between meticulous composition and unbound ecstasy. Incendiary guitars glitch and fracture throughout, contorting and stuttering at lightning speed as keening vocals reach toward the sublime.
Following the release of 93696, Liturgy will be touring worldwide, including U.S. dates with support from labelmates BIG|BRAVE and sets at Big Ears Festival, Long Play and ArcTanGent. The music of Liturgy is in a constant state of searching. In pursuit of larger truths, be they philosophical or personal, Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix and her band imbue their music with a sense of urgency and ceaseless longing.
93696 is a number derived from the religions of Christianity and Thelema, a numerological representation of heaven, or a new eon for civilization. Hunt-Hendrix composed the album as an exploration of eschatological possibility divided by the four “laws” that govern her own interpretation of heaven, “Haelegen”: Sovereignty, Hierarchy, Emancipation, and Individuation. These laws constitute the four movements of 93696 which act as dramas all their own within the framework of the record. Throughout the movements Hunt- Hendrix invokes the album’s myriad of personal and conceptual themes through the ensemble’s sheer force of sound, her will and intent blossoming from each bombarding gale.
Taken in its entirety, 93696 reflects the awe of the unknowable and celebrates what revelations and mysteries lie ahead.
Listen to Liturgy’s 93696 single ‘Before I Knew The Truth’ here:
AA
Liturgy 2023 tour dates:
Mar. 23 – Brooklyn, NY – TV Eye (93696 album release show) Mar. 30 – Knoxville, TN – Big Ears Festival May 7 – Brooklyn, NY – Long Play Festival Jun. 10 – Montreal, QC – Bar Le Ritz PDB * Jun. 11 – Toronto, ON – The Garrison * Jun. 13 – Buffalo, NY – Mohawk * Jun. 14 – Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop * Jun. 15 – Detroit, MI – Sanctuary * Jun. 16 – Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle * Jun. 17 – St Paul, MN – Turf Club * Jun. 18 – Fargo, ND – The Aquarium * Jun. 21 – Calgary, AB – Sled Island Festival * Jun. 23 – Vancouver, BC – Vancouver Jazz Fest * Jun. 24 – Seattle, WA – Substation * Jun. 25 – Portland, OR – Star Theater * Jun. 27 – Sacramento, CA – Cafe Colonial * Jun. 28 – San Francisco, CA – The Independent * Jun. 29 – Los Angeles, CA – Resident * Jun. 30 – Mesa, AZ – The Nile Underground * Jul. 1 – Albuquerque, NM – Sister Bar * Jul. 3 – Austin, TX – The Lost Well * Jul. 4 – Houston, TX – The End * Jul. 5 – New Orleans, LA – Gasa Gasa * Jul. 7 – Atlanta, GA – The Earl * Jul. 8 – Raleigh, NC – The Pour House * Jul. 9 – Philadelphia, PA – Milk Boy * Aug 16-19 – Bristol, UK – ArcTanGent Festival * w/ BIG|BRAVE
Some albums are so, so hard to review, because listening to them leaves you with no words. They stop you in your tracks and you sit, open-mouthed, speechless – thoughtless, incoherent. Blank. It’s not often this happens to me – unless it’s when presented with an album by BIG|BRAVE.
The Canadian trio made a huge impact with Vital, just under two years ago. They’ve been making waves since their 2014 debut, Feral Verdue, but hit a new seismic peak with this shuddering blast of minimalist rock. I’m used to knocking out a review in an evening, but that one took me an absolute age, because I simply ran out of words.
With nature morte, they’ve done it again. The title, in translation, is not dead nature, but instead refers to still life, or an image depicting inanimate objects. It seems fitting, not because it lacks movement, but instead because the spacious playing, slow and deliberate, creates moments where time stands still, frozen, suspended, and I find myself likewise frozen, my breath caught.
The formula may not be radically different from Vital, but the tone most definitely is. The dense, jarring music – and it’s music in the most minimal sense, shuddering chords crashing in, juddering and halting, simultaneous with pulverising percussion and it’s stark and harsh and heavy and suffocating, reminiscent of Greed-era Swans, and its exemplified nowhere more clearly than on the seven-minute opener ‘carvers, farrriers and knaves’. But then it builds into a truly monumental climax a mere three minutes in, and it’s clear that for all of their building tension, nature morte is an album of truly tempestuous release, and this is nowhere more apparent than in Robin Wattie’s vocal delivery. Here, her desperate, often plaintive, lost voice sounds more desperate, more trapped, more anxietised than ever. We’re accustomed to her sounding scared and but ethereal. Here, she sounds like she’s being buried alive and desperate to be heard and to escape before she suffocates under the weight of the music.
Of the six tracks, three extend well beyond nine minutes: epic is indeed the word, but none of the pieces feel overly long. In fact, the opposite is true: these are compositions not so much to get lost in, but submerged as if buried by a sonic landslide. ‘the one who bornes a weary load’ is a shuddering monolith of sound that thunders so hard it feels like the earth is shattering, and Wattie screeches and howls, ragged, anguished as if she’s clawing to dig herself out of a purgatorial hole and to cling for life with broken nails on fingers scraped to bone.
There are moments of softness, of quietness, delicate guitars ripple hauntingly on ‘my hope renders me a fool’ and ‘the fable of subjugation’, alluding to post-rock and even folk – if via latter-day Earth – and these moments are evocative, moving. But building to crescendos of monumental proportion, they’re the calms before the inevitable storms, making it impossible to settle back and drift along with these more delicate passages. Sure enough, around the four-minute mark, ‘the fable of subjugation’ erupts move violently than Vesuvius. The album may end on a light note with the short (sub-four-minute) acoustic song, ‘the ten of swords’, but one feels as though darkness lies ahead – as is fitting for a song which references the tarot card which indicates painful endings, deep wounds, loss, crisis, major disaster (or recovery and regeneration, depending on which way up it is). If you’ve seen the news in recent months, this seems unlikely, and it’s hard to imagine that nature morte offers light at the end of its long, dark, airless tunnel.
There’s still an aching beauty which permeates every second of the album, but it’s also ribcage-crushingly heavy and imparts a relentless pain and anguish that’s impossible to escape.
It’s hard to breathe listening to this. The weight lies heavy. For any expectations they may have set with Vital – and the bar was set hight to a point it was hard to imagine anything could even come close – nature morte smashes and obliterates them all.
Following the announcement of their monolithic new album nature morte, out February 24th, Canadian trio BIG|BRAVE has announced an extensive European tour for spring 2023. The tour includes performances at Roadburn Festival, Donaufestival and Desertfest, among others. The trio’s first nature morte single "carvers, farriers and knaves" captures the album’s striking balance between expansive atmospherics and direct emotional drive, guitar and vocals twisting atop thundering drums to create one of the most bracing and relentless pieces in the band’s ouvre.
BIG|BRAVE are an elemental trio who harness an earthen heaviness composed of distorted and textural drones, austere bombast, and Wattie’s heart-rending voice. Like recent collaborators The Body, BIG|BRAVE is at the forefront of reconfiguring the landscape of heavy music. The trio brandish sparseness and density like weapons, cast tense atmospheres with languid tempos and mutate feedback into eruptions of enveloping tempests. nature morte sharpens BIG|BRAVE’s ferocity and expansive sound into emotional elegies for the disenfranchised, wringing abstracted textures and pure fervence into songs of unfathomable mass.
Those dates in full:
BIG|BRAVE spring 2023 EU tour dates:
Apr. 9 – Hamburg, DE – Hafenklang Apr. 10 – Copenhagen, DK – Loppen Apr. 11 – Malmö, SE – Plan B Apr. 12 – Oslo, NO Blå Apr. 14 – Helsinki, FI – Kuudes Linja Apr. 15 – Tallinn, EE – Sveta Baar Apr. 16 – Riga, LV – Noass Apr. 18 – Vilnius, LI – XI20 Apr. 19 – Warsaw, PL – Voodoo Apr. 20 – Poznań, PL – Dom Tramwajarza Apr. 21 – Berlin, DE – Urban Spree Apr. 23 – Tilburg, NL – Roadburn Festival Apr. 26 – Nurnberg, DE – KANTINE (beim Künstlerhaus) Apr. 27 – Dresden, DE – Ostpol Apr. 28 – Krems, AT – Donaufestival Apr. 29 – Zagreb, HR – Kset Apr. 30 – Bologna, IT – Circolo Dev May 2 – Piediripa, IT (MC) Dong May 4 – Busto Arsizio, IT – Circolo Gagarin May 5 – Bulle, CH – Ebullition May 7 – London, UK – Desertfest May 9 – Manchester, UK – Soup Kitchen May 10 – Glasgow, UK – Stereo May 11 – Newcastle, UK – The Lubber Fiend May 12 – Liverpool, UK – IWF Substation May 13 – Norwich, UK – Voodoo Daddy May 14 – Birmingham, UK – The Castle & Falcon May 15 – Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club May 16 – Bristol, UK – Dareshack May 17 – Brighton, UK – The Hope & Ruin May 18 – Brussels, BE – Ancienne Belgique
The first track to surface is the thunderous song “Needle Cast,” which features BIG|BRAVE guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie. Wattie’s striking, shimmering vocals pair perfectly with Anderson’s multi-faceted instrumental approach. Anderson comments: “I’m extremely honoured to have been able to collaborate with Robin Wattie on this track. I’m a massive fan of BIG|BRAVE especially Robin’s emotive vocals and infectious melodies. Immediately after composing this track I was envisioning her dynamic vocals within the piece. The performance she recorded went beyond what I had imagined. Robin also created the amazing artwork that accompanies the music." All proceeds from “Needle Cast” will go directly to The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.
Aural Aggravation 