In 2018, six years after their inception, Montreal’s Big | Brave found themselves at a crossroads. For vocalist/guitarist Robin Wattie, the experience of being a woman in a male-dominated music scene, not to mention mixed race and queer, was starting to take its toll, from the endless arguing with sound techs who thought they knew better than her, to experiences of racism, misogyny and myriad “tiny things that add up”, familiar to so many women in the music scene and beyond.
“I actually thought [2021’s] Vital was going to be our last album, because I was so burnt out,” recalls Robin in remarkably good humour. “I was so tired and so alone. Every tour, every time we wrote, recorded… after, I was fucking spent. I had no one who could even remotely share a bit of an experience like we had. I felt like I had nothing in common with anybody.”
Rather than give in to frustration, Robin had a change of heart, no longer burying her lyrics in metaphor, and addressing more directly “the human condition, the culture and society that we live in that compels people to act certain ways that end up harming people like me. I’ve never just written about someone breaking my heart.”
In the process, Big | Brave have built a dedicated following, from lovers of minimalist yet overwhelming avant noise who’d seen them live with Sunn O))), to those for whom Robin’s starkly moving, heaving-up-through-limbo vocals spoke to them on the most primal of levels.
“We got the attention of other queers and people of colour, people telling me our records had saved their life,” says Robin. “I thought, ‘I’m not alone. I’m not crazy. This is real.’”
A Chaos Of Flowers is the sibling to last year’s Nature Morte album, less crushingly heavy and reliant on riffs juddering like tectonic plates, more infused with Robin’s long-standing love of folk. As she puts it: “Nature Morte is the cause, the observations of the subjugation of femininity and all its pluralities. A Chaos of Flowers is the effects, what that does to your psyche, to your body, to your brain state.”
The new album also found her seeking out and interpreting female poets. She read the work of America’s famed Emily Dickinson, British lesbian poet Renée Vivien who wrote in French, Harlem Renaissance writer Esther Popel and Canada’s E. Pauline Johnson, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and his English wife.
“I was searching for the shared experience of women and people of colour and queers throughout the centuries,” she explains. “I tried really hard to do a good job by them, because their work means so much to me. Just the fact that they existed is huge, and they’re giving something a voice."
“There’s nothing like having a private experience that you feel you can’t relate to others, but then to come across a piece of work and relate to it so much that it is almost as if they took your thoughts out of your own head… it’s crazy!”
A Chaos Of Flowers is out now via Thrill Jockey.
