A portrait of Braids as a young band
During the economic boom times of Calgary a couple of friends and I developed the idea that living in a city as expensive as ours was in some ways a boon to one’s art in that the only spaces one could afford to inhabit were self-created and intangible. There’s an old Björk quote about her upbringing in Iceland in the ’70s and ’80s during which she said something along the lines of “There was nothing much to do but staying indoors making music and screwing.”
Given the flood of incredible music peeking its head up over the international parapet from Calgary in the last handful of years perhaps for a musical moment or two our city experienced a similar sort of unbridled creativity worthy of the world’s attention. Despite a move en masse to Montreal the development of the music of Braids is one tied intrinsically to this shift in Calgary and with its debut album — at long last! — set for release this month the band is without doubt one of the brightest sets of lights ever lit within the city.
The backstory is a good one: Local band makes good by leaping out of the suburbs charming the pants off of the Calgary Folk Music Festival and Sled Island and then leaping into a musical sea change in which strummed major chords were exchanged for abstract loops and atmospheric swells. During these early Calgary days (trading under the name The Neighbourhood Council) each subsequent show was an intense display of a group of musicians growing by leaps and bounds built on a weekly rehearsal regiment that saw the group practising for as many hours a week that others work full-time jobs.
In all my years as both observer and participant in Calgary’s music scene there’s no moment quite so proud as watching The Neighbourhood Council receive a standing ovation led by Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox following their opening set on a four-band bill at the second Sled Island. Since then it’s been upwards and onwards glowing notices from the blogosphere and The New York Times following close behind.
By releasing Native Speaker this early in the year Braids has surely set out a statement of intent that many will be hard-pressed to improve upon over the next 12 months. As an album Native Speaker slowly reveals its secrets. At turns glacial and frantic sweet-hearted and menacing it’s a musical manifesto laid out in ebbs and flows of enveloping sound.
The four members of Braids are rarely apart and during a group visit home for the holiday season we wandered between coffee shops and chatted on the telephone excitably discussing the past leaps of faith and a surely bright future. Here then in their own words.…
SELF-RECORDING NATIVE SPEAKER :
TAYLOR SMITH (guitar vocals): We started in July 2009 in the garage at my parents’ house. We spent an entire summer tracking drums for five songs. It was the first thing we’d ever recorded and it was a really long learning process. After we moved back to Montreal we set up a really small room as a studio and spent five months recording overdubs every night after school for four to five hours.
AUSTIN TUFTS (percussion vocals): One of the reasons it took so long was that we were balancing school.
RAPHAELLE STANDELL-PRESTON (guitar vocals): And now there’s no more school.
KATIE LEE (keyboards vocals): We actually asked Morgan Greenwood [of Calgary’s Azeda Booth] to produce our record because we look up to him so much. But Morgan said he’d be too afraid to do our record because he didn’t know if the record necessarily needed him — he’d be too afraid to mess it up. After that we realized there’s no one else that we would ask and if Morgan is afraid to do it then we would be afraid to even approach anyone that we don’t really know. So we decided that we wanted to have full control over the recording process and to learn it all ourselves. And if that takes a year — like it did — then we’ll be patient.
TAYLOR: It gave us the opportunity to spend days on a little glitch on somebody’s vocals. We tried to not put any time restriction on getting things done and really wanted to put in the effort and the time to make it exactly what we wanted.
AUSTIN: Taylor didn’t sleep. I have lots of hilarious pictures of him looking really tired.
RAPHAELLE: I wasn’t there for the last part of it because I’d planned to go travelling in Guatemala and I already had my plane ticket and we’d thought the album would have been finished many many times. It was amazing to come back and hear it. It was beautiful. I cried and cried because I was so proud of what they had done and what we had done. I thought it was the most beautiful thing and I missed them the whole time I was gone. I wanted to be back with them.
OPERATING AS A COLLECTIVE
AUSTIN: Just because Raph’s the singer I’m the drummer and Taylor’s the guitar player it’s not as though any part is more important. We couldn’t carry on without any member. We played a show without Raphie before she’d moved out to Montreal and it was the funniest thing ever.
TAYLOR: It was balls.
RAPHIE: It makes me feel funny because I really don’t want that whole front-person setup. That’s not what Braids is about. It’s not about having me at the front and sometimes it’s strange to be given that role because I know that I’m not it . It’s all of us.
TAYLOR: Even the way we set up when we play a show is very much indicative of how the band operates — a semi-circle. We always have a giant black hole in the middle of the stage so Austin isn’t behind anyone.
KATIE: If we could have it our way we would have the audience in the middle and we would play around them. Most people think it’s funny that there’s this void in the middle where the lead singer should be. But I think that being able to connect with each other and having others see that the music we’re making is so collective is the experience that we want others to have.
AUSTIN: I hope that the structure of our band and how we function and write opens people’s eyes in a way to see that collectivity is a very beautiful thing and that we don’t necessarily need some sort of hierarchy to function. We are a completely egalitarian band. Every decision is made evenly.
RAPHIE: That’s the main difference with Braids [and her other projects Indiensoci and Blue Hawaii] for me because I work really quickly really sporadically and I just move about very very quickly. But at the same time I don’t have the ability to preserve any of that — I haven’t recorded an Indiensoci record but I have hundreds of songs that I’ve written and that are in my head. For me I really need other people to make something that people can hear.
TAKING LEAPS OF FAITH
AUSTIN: We all knew that we were leaving our homes behind and we had to grow up and start defending for ourselves. But when we made the decision to leave school the record wasn’t picked up by anybody. It wasn’t even finished.
TAYLOR: Moving to Montreal was an opportunity to start fresh. There wasn’t a cut and dried musical moment when we decided to stop playing the music we did as The Neighbourhood Council but when we left we started to develop a very different way to approach things.
KATIE: When we made the decision to leave school I was in my first semester into architecture [at McGill — where both Taylor and Austin were also enrolled in Philosophy and Jazz respectively] and I was extremely busy. I was torn between what I was doing — at that moment I couldn’t really see the two being cohesive and working together. I went away for a weekend in Toronto to get away from everyone I knew and everything comfortable to me and just self-reflect. I don’t know if the trip was necessary — I just kind of figured it out on the bus. School will always be there. I can always go back.
AUSTIN: It’s so easy to get caught up in things. Your inbox is a constant source of people saying good things about you and you need to get past that. What we’re doing is still really really grassroots.
RAPHIE: I think it always will be. I’m just so grateful that I get to make music with you guys. I don’t even have the right words to say it all.
TAYLOR: Although our record’s on [popular indie music blog] Stereogum or in magazines as a top anticipated record of 2011 we haven’t really done anything yet. And as much as I respect so many artists out there I make music with who I think are the best people to make music with. I’ve got enough pent-up ideas and enough stuff that I want to try with these three people that I don’t need another creative partner for a long time.
