Interview: Exploring New Horizons with Bambara

Brooklyn-based noise rock trio Bambara spoke with Afterglow on their origins and cinematic vision as they prepare to release their fourth album, Stray. 

Written by C.S. Harper

Photo courtesy of New Noise Magazine

With the Southern Gothic twist they bring to noise rock, Bambara are at the forefront of new innovations in the genre. The band consists of twin brothers Reid and Blaze Bateh, the frontman/guitarist and drummer, respectively, and their childhood friend, William Brookshire, the group’s bassist. 

Afterglow recently spoke with Bambara to learn more about their path to the rock scene, sonic evolution, and their upcoming album, Stray, which releases February 14th

To start off, tell me a little bit about how you got into the music scene and developed your sound.

Reid: Well, we just kind of started playing together since we were kids — since we were like 12, all three of us. We’ve evolved since then. Obviously, we sound way different than we did back then, but as far as developing our sound, it’s just been a slow evolution over time. It was a natural evolution; there wasn’t really much in the way of pointed decisions in the way we wanted to sound.

Blaze: Yeah, because we started playing in Atlanta, where we grew up, and then we moved to Athens, Georgia, where we went to college. That’s where we formed this iteration of us playing together as Bambara. And then in 2011, we moved to New York all together and got an apartment with a basement so we could sleep there and record and write. And yeah, we’ve been here ever since.

It’s really neat that you’ve built this collaborative relationship since a very early stage in your lives. How has this played out in your collaborative process over the years?

Blaze: I think just because we’ve been writing together for so long, we just take it really seriously. We check each other constantly. If anything seems lazy, we won’t let it pass. Our working relationship has become this really focused experience.

William: And it’s always split three ways, too. Everyone has to be happy with a song, or it doesn’t pass. We’re constantly working with each other and trying to make the best song that we all can agree on.

Blaze: We all share writing responsibilities for parts, too. One of us can write a drum part, one of us can write a guitar part, and we don’t have any egos about who writes the parts.

Listening to your discography, I noticed that your sound transitioned from atmospheric and lo-fi, but — especially on your last album — it was really lush and cinematic. What would you say influenced this evolution of your sound throughout the years?

Reid: Yeah, our first album, Dreamviolence, we just recorded it in our basement in New York with guitar pedals for everything. It was just about as lo-fi as you could probably record something. We’ve always had a cinematic vision for these songs, but as far as instrumentation in all of them, it was more just what we could do at the time. But, we were also a little more interested in harsh noise in the earlier iterations of the band. We still have elements of noise, but it’s not as much in the forefront as it used to be.

Blaze: Yeah, I would love to go back and remix our first album because I think a lot of people hear it, and they’re a little off-put by how lo-fi it sounds. I think if we were able to go back and expand that sonically with some better equipment, that would be fun to listen to.

Going back to the cinematic aspects of your music, you tend to use a lot of imagery in your lyrics. What inspires the vivid stories that you detail in your music?

Reid: You know, it’s really hard to say. I usually save the lyric writing until the very end, and I set aside a block of time when that’s all I’m going to do. I cut off work and just wake up and write and go to sleep. I try to get in the zone, where I’m kind of disassociated from everything in my regular life and let it take me where it wants to take me. I don’t really have any sort of set ideas of what I want to write until it’s actually happening. For this record, I wanted each song to be more of a short story in itself that could overlap with other songs but could stand on its own. With the last record, some of the songs lyrically couldn’t really stand on their own without knowing things from other songs. So, I wanted each one to have its own story.

Blaze: Reid, I know that you have some people from real life that you draw from and expand on.

Reid: Well, yeah, a lot of the details in any of our songs are from either real people that I know in my life, or stories that people have told me, or things that have stuck with me over the years. I try and draw from experiences as much as I can because I feel like that’s where people drop the ball — when they’re trying to make something feel real. If you copy the weight of a story — the details that are actually real — it’s a lot easier, for people to make a connection to it 

“Sing Me to the Street” is a single that stood out to me, because it featured a different sound from your other songs, especially with its female backing vocals. How did this come about?

Blaze: That was one thing with this album: we really wanted to expand our instrumentation a lot. And one thing we’ve always been talking about is having a set group of female vocalists on the album that appear throughout. We really like the interplay of the call and response between the male vocal and the female backing vocals. We contacted our friend, Anina Ivry-Block — she’s in this band, Palberta, which is really awesome — and Drew Citron was the other singer, and she plays in this band, Public Practice. They’re both on Wharf Cat, actually, the label that we’re on. They came and sang on 3 or 4 other songs, and they did a great job.

William: One of them had kind of a recurring vibe, like a Greek choir. They’re kind of like these voices that are haunting all the songs. I think it came out really well, and I’m really happy with how they did.

With the haunting atmosphere you wanted to create on this record, what was it like figuring out the visual aesthetic of your music videos so that they could match that tone?

Blaze: All of these videos, we used the same director, but for “Sing Me to the Street,” we knew we wanted it to have a kind of a woozy, walking around the city in an isolated part of town vibe. So we went to Wall Street at nine or ten o’clock at night on a weekday, and it’s just completely — that specific area is just so desolate at night. So we just walked around and found a lot of stuff there. We knew we wanted to have the room we’re performing in to feel like it was set in a really high floor in one of these skyscrapers to add to the surreal nature.

And then “Heat Lightning,” the song is so driving, and lyrically, it’s about death driving, so we wanted it to feel like this driving, kind of relentless thing. So we found a lot of footage of the road where the car was going. One of our favorite directors is Wong Kar-wai from Hong Kong, and I wanted to have that feeling come across with the use of colors and fades and blurs, so while I was editing, I was just keeping that in mind pretty much the whole time.

Reid: That one is kind of an abstraction of the lyrics where you’re in the car with death. The whole song, death is driving, so it’s kind of like putting in the car with him, but not having to be too literal about everything.

Interesting. You mentioned that you like Wong Kar-wai’s work. Have cinema and pop culture in general influenced your music in other ways?

Blaze: I think definitely. The language we use when we’re writing is always more visual than musical. Our goal is to really build an environment. For the first eight months of this record, we were essentially just building a world, like a set, and then once that finishes, Reid drops in to the set and starts building characters within that world. And that’s kind of just how our writing process is. So it seems like we’re making a movie every time.

Is there anything else you would like to add about this upcoming record?

Blaze: It comes out on Valentine’s Day, so grab it for your loved one!

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.
Listen to Bambara on Spotify and find them on Instagram and Twitter @bambaraband.
Catch Bambara at Barracuda on March 11th.