BIG BRAVE + SLOMATICS

Information

BIG|BRAVE’s music has been described as massive minimalism. With bursts and blends of textural distortion and feedback, their music’s frayed edges and heavy centre is heard throughout. The potency of the band’s work is their singular artistry combining elements of traditional folk techniques and a modern deconstruction of guitar music. Gain, feedback, and amplitude are essential to 2024's A Chaos Of Flowers, an album that builds on their ferocious 2023 album nature morte.

Robin Wattie and Mathieu Ball started writing subtle ambient/minimalistic folk songs together in 2012, with no other goal than simply experimenting with the instruments in their possession. When long-time friend Louis Alexandre Beauregard joined on drums, the goal remained to play as tranquil as possible. After an incident where Wattie’s acoustic guitar broke, and having borrowed a friend’s electric as a replacement, larger amps that Ball had in storage from previous bands started to get incorporated to the outfit. Now with amplitude as a compositional tool, Big Brave never lost interest in the power of minimalism and fragility. It became clear that loud volume would become just as effective as the lowest possible ones and the juxtaposition of both would become something the band draws upon.

We can’t wait to welcome the sonic-tonic that is BIG|BRAVE to Belfast this November. Unmissable.

SLOMATICS

There strides the behemoth. Across 20+ years, Slomatics have developed a singularly identifiable style in the heavy underground. Working since 2004 from their home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, they have crafted seven-going-on-eight full-lengths and countless splits with outfits like Agents of the Morai, Conan, Holly Hunt, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, Yanomamö and many others, fostering a sound that soars at least as much as it crushes.

A science-fiction backdrop casts a duly futuristic theme around which their material is based, and as they offer lumbering tones and massive, willful slogs of doomed riffs, they complement that grooving clarion with a sense of space that is all their own. From 2012-2016, drummer/vocalist/lyricist Marty Harvey and founding guitarists David Majury and Chris Couzens grew ever more expansive across a trilogy of albums telling a single story, and while 2019’s Canyons and their sundry joint outings moved past that narrative, they did not forget the lessons learned in creating a sense of the epic to match the hugeness of their sound.