WE ARE WINTER'S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN
WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada).
Mat Ball is an experimental guitar player from Montreal, Canada. He co-founded the group BIG|BRAVE in 2012, which has gone on to release seven acclaimed albums on Southern Lord and Thrill Jockey. He also develops solo guitar music, releasing Amplified Guitar in 2022 (accompanied by a companion book of his own photography), and Amplified Guitar II in 2024. His guitar work both solo and with BIG|BRAVE relies heavily on amplitude and feedback, with an emphasis on minimalism, drone, and deconstruction. Ball shoots the majority of BIG|BRAVE’s press photos and album covers and his photographic work appears in various other contexts.
Jonathan Downs is an experimental guitarist and synth-player born in Bangor, Maine. As founding member of Maine’s post-rock ensemble Ada, with Patch One, Ruby Nienna and Elliot McInnis from 2010 to 2018, Downs contributed a slow-boiling, reverberating guitar voice to the band’s hypnotic sound for three albums - 2012’s Shoreless Sea, 2014’s Rhubarb and 2018’s Ada (the latter of which was recorded in Montreal by future collaborator and bandmate Efrim Menuck). Jonathan also combines dark ambient, jazz guitar, synths and tape reverb in his solo work as Rhubarb. Rhubarb’s first recording, Children Have Their Own Lives [Ambient Tapes 2020 - 2022] was released in November of 2022. Downs also joined Patch One, Alexa Clavette, Bee Daniel, Kelly Rioux, Gelsey Amelia, Izzi Beaulieu, Chel and other artists as an organizer in the aforementioned multidisciplinary art collective, community print shop, experimental, independent gallery and studio space New Fruit from 2016 to 2021.
Efrim Manuel Menuck is co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE), one of post-rock’s most influential and celebrated groups, and of the Hotel2Tango, which evolved through the mid-1990s from a collective rehearsal, performance, and living space into one of Montréal’s leading indie recording studios. Menuck formed agit-prop punk ensemble Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra in 1999, and by the mid-2000s his two primary bands had released 10 albums between them. Alongside ongoing GY!BE recording and touring, Menuck has made a series of acclaimed solo and collaborative albums, starting with Plays High Gospel (2011) and Pissing Stars (2018) under his own name, followed by are SING SINCK, SING (2019) with Kevin Doria (Growing, Hiss Tracts) and more recently “Darling The Dawn” (2023) by the ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT duo with Ariel Engle (La Force), and “NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER” as part of WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN. As a sound engineer, Menuck has recorded various artists since the early 2000s, including Vic Chesnutt, Carla Bozulich, Eric Chenaux, Colin Stetson, British Sea Power, Wolf Parade, and the aforementioned Ada and BIG|BRAVE.
Patch One is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer and visual artist from Portland, Maine. They have been writing and recording analog based music under the name Greef since 2014 and in that time have put out five genre-fluid full length albums on cassette and multiple longform singles. Their most recent cassette release Songs in F (2022) is a split album with Montreal musician Jane Harms. They are currently in the process of recording a new album called Melatonin which will be released in Fall '24. Patch was one of the primary songwriters in the Maine-based art rock group Ada (alongside Jonathan Downs) from its inception in 2010 to its final show in 2018. Ada's final album Ada (2018) was recorded at the Hotel2Tango with Efrim Menuck, thus beginning their friendship and eventual collaboration. As a longtime member of the northeast experimental scene, Patch has participated in and organized for multiple DIY music and art venues, most notably New Fruit, a multidisciplinary queer art space. They have played in a variety of projects including the no-wave trio Diva Cup and the sludge metal band Strainer. Currently they play guitar in the experimental rock outfit Pond 1000 as well as in a new project with Downs and other former collaborators.
Podcasts & Interviews
Kreative Kontrol • Vish Khanna interviews WAWBARC
Contacts & Links
Press enquiries UK & North America:
Lauren Barley at Rarely Unable
Press enquiries EU:
Ed Benndorf at Dense Promotion