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Montreal metallers Big Brave on doom, despondency and Emily Dickinson: ‘We’re sick as a species’
For their latest album, the heavy trio delved into poetry archives to foreground work by female writers and tell stories of the ‘subjugation of femininity’ across nature and humanity
They brought in three of America’s heaviest-hitting improvisers to texture its palette – the free-jazz saxophonist Patrick Shirioshi and instrumental guitarists Marisa Anderson and Tashi Dorji – while Wattie drew lyrics from 19th and early-20th century poems by women that were freely accessible in the public domain. A Chaos of Flowers opens with an interpretation of the Dickinson poem I felt a Funeral, in My Brain – “there’s no grey area,” Wattie says of its morbid theme – and closes with Moonset, written by Emily Pauline Johnson, who was of Mohawk and English ancestry and became part of a 19th-century travelling company. That freedom is evidenced stirringly on the incandescent Chanson Pour Mon Ombre, featuring her firework drumming and Dorji’s breathtakingly corrosive acoustic guitar, though tidal feedback is still the oxygen of Big Brave’s art.
Or read this on The Guardian
