Words by David C. Obenour
Amidst all of the anxiousness and uncertainty of modern existence, BIG|BRAVE continue to create new sonics for us to explore and find connection. Dredging up dense tones of drone and distortion with Robin Wattie’s vocals drifting above, in grief or in hope reaches deep to tug on primal feelings. Anger, fear, sadness, and faith all still exist though disconnected from their near-ancestral origins and bewildered further by unrelenting information and progress devouring progress. This is music that connects to that disconnect. With Mathieu Ball and touring bassist, Liam Andrews joining in the studio for the first time, drums are omitted as guitar and bass blur attack and intent. Sonics that give space and sound for catharsis to those willing to enter.
Off Shelf: Can you talk about the album title and the picture for the cover? What you like about them both as a companion, initial impression on this music?
Robin Wattie: The title In Grief or In Hope felt right because those two things can exist simultaneously. The cover image has a similar ambiguity to it, it’s beautiful, but there’s also something unsettling or difficult to place about it. We liked that neither the title nor the image tells you exactly what to feel. They leave some space for the music to exist in.
Mathieu Ball: The initial feeling of the music was pretty similar – something stripped down and exposed. It didn’t feel like a record that needed to explain itself.
OS: When concepting In Grief or In Hope, what did you feel you wanted to explore this time? How did that evolve as you continued the writing and recording?
RW: We wanted to see what would happen if we removed some of the things we had come to rely on. This was the first record we made entirely without percussion, so there was a lot of uncertainty around it. Initially it felt like a limitation, but eventually that limitation became the thing that opened the music up.
MB: It became less about trying to replace what wasn’t there and more about seeing what the guitars themselves could do rhythmically, physically and emotionally.
OS: Listening to it, I feel like I’m keenly aware of the spatial presence to your sound. Through recording and production, do you think about the space you want a listener occupying?
MB: Absolutely. Space is a huge part of how we think about sound. When too much is happening, so much has the potential to be lost. It requires a more attentive type of listening which I think can be very rewarding if given the chance.
RW: There’s also something important about leaving enough space for the listener to have their own experience of it. We don’t want to dictate too much.
OS: Can you talk about the decision of bringing Liam [Andrews, bass] into the studio for this recording? How do you think his presence helped to evolve your sound?
RW: Liam brought a different physicality and perspective into the room. Because the record was already working outside some of our usual structures, having another person interacting with that material helped us hear it differently.
MB: He also wasn’t there to simply fill a conventional role. His tone became another element in the sound and allowed us to push certain textures and dynamics further.
OS: Working with such blasted apart distortion, can you talk about the interplay of the bass and guitar? Do the instruments take on a different role at all with how you use them?
MB: Definitely. When everything is heavily distorted, the traditional distinction between bass and guitar starts to disappear. They become more like different frequencies or physical surfaces occupying the same space.
RW: It also means that the relationship between them becomes really important. Sometimes the bass is providing the weight and the guitar is cutting through it, and sometimes they almost merge into one giant sound.
OS: Circling back to the distortion you’re using, can you talk about how you balance that? What sounds are you wanting to control and what are you improvising within?
MB: There’s actually a lot of control underneath the apparent chaos. The distortion is very intentional, but we’re interested in pushing it to the point where it starts behaving unpredictably. You establish certain parameters and then allow the sound to surprise you within them.
RW: A lot of the dynamics come from that tension between control and instability. We want the sound to feel like it could fall apart, without actually falling apart.
OS: Do you tend to write or think of songs first without these levels of distortion?
MB: Not really. The sound is part of the writing. We don’t generally write a clean version of something and then decide how to distort it afterwards. The texture, amplification and physicality of the instruments are part of the composition from the beginning.
OS: How has playing the songs live continued their evolution? Do any feel markedly different to you from one setting to the other?
RW: They’ve definitely changed. The studio versions are very carefully constructed, but playing them live introduces another kind of instability and physicality. The songs breathe differently depending on the room, the audience and how we’re feeling that night.
MB: Some of them have become heavier live, others more fragile. We’re interested in that difference rather than trying to reproduce the record exactly.
OS: Your tenth album on, what do you feel has remained constant in your music?
MB: Probably the obsession with sound itself. Ten records in, we’re still mostly interested in figuring out how to make something feel physically and emotionally interesting. Everything else can change. That part hasn’t.