Interview: Bleeding Heart Narrative

These days, the boundaries of post rock are blurrier than ever. Thanks to the amorphous quality and diversity of bands that come under its banner, the genre’s output has become increasingly tricky to define. Though as Oli Barrett — head honcho of texture traditionalists Bleeding Heart Narrative — rightly suggests, the term has become, for some, a catch-all phrase acknowledging “very intense young men playing a repeating chord pattern and stepping on distortion pedals one at a time over the course of 10 minutes.”

Fair enough. But the cellist-turned-guitarist-turned-bandleader doesn’t get off so easily. In the past, critics have compared his band with the likes of Sigur Rós, Do Make Say Think and múm — all staunch purveyors of lengthy, layered, oft-laborious and largely instrumental rock music. And even he’d concede (“when I was in my teens the likes of Tortoise, Aerial M, Godspeed You Black Emperor were pretty revelatory to me”) that his output often swims in a flood of delay-distortion manipulation.

So, how do this six-piece (based in London) diverge from the been-there-done-that ranks of Mogwai et al? Well, their latest EP, ‘Bison’, released last month is an immersive and transportive experience — adjectives commonly thrown about in discussions of this sort, certainly, but BHN can also boast a warm pop sensibility and bold approach to polyrhythmic arranging that set them apart from the pack. Even better, ‘Bison’ supplants clock-watching track lengths and huge walls of noise with slenderised song structures and daubs of neo-classical repetition.

Bleeding Heart Narrative – Bison by brainlove

Listening to the written-to-be-performed-onstage music of ‘Bison’ — and, indeed, the band’s two earlier releases: ‘All That Was Missing We Never Had In The World’ and ‘Tongue Tangled Hair’ — it’s instantly apparent Barrett’s classical training has won BHN a unique vantage point. “I started playing the cello at a very young age — did all the grades and classical training — and then pretty much stopped around the age of 14 when making loud music with guitars seemed a lot more fun,” he says.

As he ripened, musically speaking, during his twenties, Barrett turned back to his classical beginnings, getting switched on to Sarah Hopkins and Vibracathedral Orchestra, who “do stuff with strings I’d never even considered before.”

“The first BHN album is pretty cello-heavy,” he says. “I was pretty interested in trying to combine more traditional string sounds with other textures/noises — and so I guess this was the focal point when I started BHN, and to some degree it still is.”

University marked a significant step in Barrett’s journey to auteurship. “I was studying a sound art degree a few years back, and the first BHN tracks were basically me trying out different things with different textures, approaches, instrumentation without any thought to actually releasing any of it. After a friend asked me to play a couple of nights he was putting on I had to think about how I could actually play any of this pretty densely layered stuff live. So I got some friends to help out (two of whom — Max Bondi and Ben Gaymer — are still in the band) and from playing live BHN slowly started to form into something a little more focused.”

From there, BHN’s line up has expanded and contracted, with live set ups ranging from small-scale solo appearances to fifteen-piece gallery-space blowouts. Finally, the band cemented as a six piece. “We all play different instruments live and on record as well, though, so we’ve been able to still keep it pretty fluid and mutating as we go.”

But can we call it post rock? “I think for a genre with ‘post’ in the title a lot of the music associated with it has become pretty limited in scope these days, unfortunately. Aside from anything else, though, I’m not too sure how what we do sits under the post rock heading — it seems to mainly come from the fact we have string instruments in our line-up, which would be pre-rock if anything. I don’t really know if we fit under any one genre.”

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