Memories In The Patina: The Tactile Creativity Of Braids
The band reflect on touch, studio work, and their beautiful new album...
Summer in Montreal is a magical time. We brave six months of cold, snow, ice, slush, more snow and somehow, once again we all emerge from our dormant indoor states into the beautiful warmth of summer.
It's mid-April at the time of writing, so we aren't quite in the clear yet, but Spring is in the air and the days are warm enough that I cleared the residual ice pile from my back patio and set up my barbecue. It's days like this when you notice the passing of the years, the seasonal markers that remind us that time is, indeed, chugging along.
Regardless of what the calendar says, this is how I mark the start of spring; the first day when I can put charcoal in the BBQ and crack a beer on the back patio.
This year when I did my annual patio set up, I was struck by how beaten up my beloved barbecue had become. Dents and scratches, and little patches of rust forming around the handle that had been smashed in one year because of a rather memorable tumble off the third-storey balcony of my old apartment.
Now I have to admit, I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I take pride in having well maintained possessions, so my initial instinct was to pull out my phone and look up buying a new barbecue. However, I couldn't bring myself to replace this one. I found solace and comfort in its scars. The layer of caked-on drippings that wouldn't come off, no matter how much I tried, and the custom wood handle that my friends had found for me on a roadtrip through Texas, which had now developed a beautiful patina.
This old cooker is full of stories and experiences that I get to remember every time I use it. This got me thinking about how much life and spirit a physical item can have embedded in its form. We all have these special possessions that we carry around with us, or have kept for years and years, regardless of their seemingly worn out appearance. They are the things that our friends and parents notice and comment on how we should really part with them, or replace them, or clean them, and yet for some reason we cannot.
Like I mentioned, I am a bit of a perfectionist, so this has been an interesting moment of reckoning for me. I realised that I had formed emotional attachments to my favourite possessions, not just because of the utility they perform or their contents, but because of the experiences that I've had while using them, listening to them, or reading them.
My dog-eared copy of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, with sand in between the pages and coffee stains on its pages brings me a wave of comfort and nostalgia when I pick it up. I'm instantly brought back to the moments when I have read it. Laying on a beach with my toes in the sand, or eating breakfast in the morning sun, using my coffee cup to hold my page open.
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Another interesting observation was that it's not only our own memories and experiences that we can feel in physical possessions. To a lesser and more abstract degree, we can sense the memories of its past owners or others that have enjoyed the object in times prior.
This is why there is an intangible vibe or spirit in used instruments. When you sit down behind a 150 year old piano, or a drum kit from the '50s, if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the notes that were played on it years ago.
We recently bought a Fender Rhodes for our studio and it just so happens that it was the festival backline Rhodes for the Montreal Jazz Festival; this meant that Stevie Wonder and Chick Corea have played legendary concerts on it. There is an undeniable power when you sit behind those keys and think about that fact.
It sounds funny to put in writing, but Braids had a tour van that we nicknamed Vaniel Day-Lewis. We put almost 300,000 km on it over five years of touring and we all formed a very special relationship to this metal beast. The coffee stains on the floor mats that wouldn't come out, the dent in the rear bumper from when Raph reversed into a tree in Arizona while recording Deep in the Iris, the In n' Out burger bumper sticker, the hazy headlights that had been permanently stained with bug guts.
At the end of the day, these are the things I remember most fondly and they make me smile. To relinquish control, to accept that things will wear out, to admire the patina that forms on our most frequently used items, is at once challenging and liberating. It's a fine line between neglecting our objects and gently taking our hands off the controls enough to allow them to live their own lives. I see an interesting and rather important lesson to be learned from this acceptance.
Like most things in life, it's best to not try and control too much, but rather to go with flow and enjoy the bumps along the way. That way, when you look back on your life, you will see a history told by scratches, dents and patinas.
- Austin Tufts
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'Shadow Offering' is out on June 19th - *Clash review.*
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