by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
When Robin Wattie, singer and guitarist of BIG|BRAVE, talks about her band’s sound, it’s with a knowing smile and slice of self-deprecation. “Boom, Boom, Pause,” Wattie laughs over video call while on break from the band’s all-day rehearsals for their upcoming tour in support of A Chaos of Flowers, their new album out now via Thrill Jockey. “That’s how our music had been described to us.”
While that may be true technically, it’s the unique way in which BIG|BRAVE achieves the Boom, Boom, Pause that has made them one of the most interesting bands in heavy music. No other group pushes the boundaries of feedback and bombast quite like BIG|BRAVE. Part of this is Wattie’s otherworldly voice, which is at once powerful and vulnerable. Equally vital are guitarist Mathieu Ball and drummer Tasy Hudson, both of whose all-or-nothing playing feels specific to the band.
On A Chaos of Flowers, the Montreal-based trio’s mastery of dynamics continues. The band welds its signature formula of orchestral guitar squall and hammerhead rhythms into new forms that are every bit as compelling as their catalogue of mono-chord pummel-fests. An active listen to A Chaos of Flowers reveals a band exploring rich textures, brushed drums, and complex melodies. The music is nearly penitent in its patience. If doom can be delicate, then this is it.
Post-Trash sat down with Wattie and Ball on the eve of their upcoming tour to discuss the making of their most accomplished album to date, the concepts behind their “sibling records,” and why their quiet(er) album still sounds loud.
The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Post-Trash: So, two records in two years. I’ve read you call them “sibling records.” But that’s not the same as a double album, is it?
Mat: Well, we didn't set out to make a sibling record. They were made so close to each other, it would have been impossible for the albums to not have been related in a variety of ways.
PT: Is A Chaos of Flowers a response to nature morte?
Mat: Yeah, totally. And as we were recording nature morte, we were already thinking about this one, thinking one step ahead. But A Chaos of Flowers is not a sequel to nature morte. Maybe a better way to think about it is it’s the antithesis.
PT: The two are in dialectical conversation?
Robin: It is a response, yes, but also, we made a conscious decision to make an album that was quite different from that last one.
Mat: We wanted A Chaos of Flowers to be a departure. It's us trying to not to keep making the same record.
Robin: But because they were made so close together, there are many times where the writing and recording bled together. There’s even one song we recorded for nature morte but ended up on this new one.
PT: Which song was that?
Mat: “A song for Marie.” The super mellow ambient one.
PT: In an alternate universe, where would that have fit on nature morte? Because it fits perfectly on A Chaos of Flowers.
Robin: It would have been the last song. We had to cut it so the album would fit on one vinyl. And it was so cool that the one track we didn’t use ended up working on this album. We didn’t have to remix it or anything. It just fit.
PT: I suppose I buried the lede a little bit. A Chaos of Flowers might be my favorite album y'all’ve made. I find it absolutely compelling. It's so beautiful. And I know, Mat, you were saying that it feels quite different or like a departure. And I think that if you listen to it once, you might have that impression. But to me, it seems to fit perfectly with past albums.
Mat: We set off to make a quiet record and this is what we came up with (laughs).
PT: Speaking of quiet, I’d imagine to attain those oceanic feedback swells, you probably have to play it pretty loud live though, right?
Robin: A good chunk of this album was written in the studio. After we finished, we went back out on tour for the last album. So in the last few months, we realized through practicing and learning the songs that in order to get the tonalities, and the textures the same, we had to play this “quiet” record loud.
PT: You’ve joked in the past that your music can be described as “Boom, Boom, Pause. Boom, Boom, Pause.” This is where I hear one of the major differences in the new album. On A Chaos of Flowers this dynamic is subverted. When a kick drum or floor tom is struck, the sound collapses in on itself, like it’s being sucked through a black hole, then breathes back out. How the hell did you do that?
Robin: That’s some of the genius of Seth Manchester (producer of the band’s albums).
Mat: We used a technique called side-chaining to trigger compression. On “not speaking of the ways” anytime a kick drum is struck, it triggers a vacuum effect. It's something that we can kind of try to do live with different accents, but it won't happen exactly like it does on the record. And it's just fine. We're happy making records that are different from the live experience. But it was a fun studio thing to do.
Robin: We had more fun than ever in the studio with this record.
Mat: We went in intentionally underprepared.
PT: Usually you’re super well-rehearsed before you go to record?
Mat: At first yeah, because studio time is so costly. But as we’ve worked with Seth over time (A Chaos of Flowers is their fifth consecutive album recorded by Manchester at Machines with Magnets), we’ve been collaborating more and more in the studio.
PT: Did you develop your style of creating orchestral feedback with Seth? It almost sounds like you’re bowing the guitar, but I know you’re not because I’ve seen it live.
Mat: No, that’s something I’ve been developing for the last decade. Placing the headstock on the guitar cabinet creates a feedback loop where the rumbling of the cab shakes the strings. It's just been trial and error over the years because feedback can so quickly become microphonic. And that’s unpleasant feedback. It’s all about finding the right levels, the right distortion pedals played with different pickups. And then there’s a point where it could just get nice, harmonious tones with the feedback.
Robin: (to Mat): It also has to do with the guitar you built with the aluminum neck, right? There was so many fun tricks he did for his solo album that he brought for these last two albums. Sorry for spoilers. He’s so modest and I’m just such a fan.
Mat: It’s been a 20-year process of getting to know the fretboard and at the same time, letting the sound create itself while making it sound like I know what I’m doing. But there’s so much chance to it. And I like playing with that.
PT: Transitioning a little… Robin, there does seem to be a conscious difference in how you're singing on this album than on previous albums.
Robin: Absolutely. One of the fun things about this album is that I get to sing. Because I’m not formerly trained, I am forever figuring out what I can do with my voice, how to properly use your body and not just wreck your vocal cords. Previously, it made sense to project my vocalizations. But when we decided on the quiet record, I wanted to sing, like sing-sing. Especially because there are so many chord changes on this album whereas before there might have been only one or two chords for the whole song.
PT: How were the songs written from a melody perspective?
Robin: It was largely improvisational in the studio. Some ideas I’d have beforehand but I really took this opportunity to see what I could do. I’d be recording improvising melodies and when I stopped I could hear Seth and everybody in the headphones saying, Yes! Yes! Keep going! It was really fun.
PT: Lyrically, many of your lyrics came from 18th and 19th century poetry that’s in the public domain. What was the thinking behind that?
Robin: We actually licensed the Emily Dickinson poem (“I felt a funeral in my brain”) from Harvard. But for most of the songs, I changed words to fit the melodies and based on the feel of how they were coming out of my mouth. So, most of the lyrics are not verbatim to the poems, but the poems are central to the inspiration and meaning of the lyrics.
Mat: (To Robin) It’s not like you were trying to hide that you were borrowing from the poems. They were part of the concept from the beginning.
PT: That’s a great segue to something else I was curious about. I read that the inspiration for the album was a continuation of the themes of your previous album and yet the previous album, at least to my knowledge, didn’t have this recontextualization inherent to its structure. What was the inspiration to use others’ words instead of your own?
Robin: That’s a good question. It came from a happy coincidence with the concept of doing a quiet album that ended up working out even before we started writing the music (for A Chaos of Flowers). At first, I was thinking I could further my research and exploration into what I did with The Body by taking another deep dive into folk music, Appalachia ballads, hymns and blue-collar working songs. (Editor’s note: In 2021, BIG|BRAVE collaborated with the experimental metal band The Body on an album of folk-inspired songs called Leaving None but Small Birds.) But when I was doing that, I quickly realized I just wanted to leave that approach for now.
I turned to poetry because I've loved poetry and it’s something that I think about often even if I don’t consider myself an avid poetry reader. In the research, I realized that I could relate to a lot of what these women and mixed-race women had to say. Their work from the late 1800s and early 1900s had transcended time. It’s this realization that led me to recognize that these albums were siblings not just musically but conceptually, too.
Nature morte explored the cause. It was like a little window into what the fuck was going on today and the experiences that I've witnessed people like me go through. Not just through the lens of people who are queer, people of color or non-binary, but more specifically through the feminine lens and how that linked so heavily to nature. If nature morte was a window into present time, then A Chaos of Flowers is the internalized effects of what’s happening in our own huge universes that exist between our own ears, in our own little, tiny heads. There's a whole world of deep emotions, whether good or bad or whatever, to explore.
Mat: We wonder how the hell we got to where we are now, then you read these poems from over 100 years ago and it’s clear that this is ongoing. That’s how these two records relate to each other.
PT: When I read your interview in the Guardian recently and when I listen to the album I have two competing feelings. What you said in the article—and what you both told me just now, that this shit has been going on forever—makes me profoundly sad and hopeless. Yet when I listen to the music on A Chaos of Flowers I don’t come away with that same hopeless feeling. Do you consider your music positive?
Robin: I’ve noticed that people who create loud, heavy, angry music tend to be quite jovial, happy and realistic in real life. Because there’s this level of catharsis to our music that helps us process these emotions we’re feeling.
Mat: People think the music we make is abrasive because there’s feedback, but to me, we’re making beautiful music. I feel like amongst all the crap that we're dealing with, we're trying to carve out little moments of positivity. I don't want to lose hope even though it's hard. I still think we can still get out there and like, fight and go into protests and make beautiful music. I don’t want to give up on that.
Robin: If there’s no hope, then all this is pointless.
Mat: If we have no hope, that’s when the bad people win. And we don’t want to let that happen.
BIG|BRAVE is currently on tour in Europe and the UK. A Chaos of Flowers is out now on Thrill Jockey.