Strange Bacteria

I've been listening to Bear in Heaven's new album, I Love You, It's Cool, almost constantly since last week. If you described the music to me, I'd probably think politely that it wasn't my kind of thing, I like acoustic music. And so on. Maybe that's part of the thrill of liking the unexpected so much, getting to meet another side to oneself, the streak that was always there, but hidden and unknown. It's hard to get down what feels distinctive about the music other than to say the usual, or at the least the usual for me: the harmonic movements, the attention to texture and atmospheres. Maybe this patch gets at a part of it. From an interview with Jon Philpot, in Consequence of Sound, in response to a question about how the band's music comes into being.

It was really just kind of see what happens. Each song was written differently. Some songs started as drumbeats; some songs started as vocals or piano or guitars or bass. Each one started off differently, and then we just let them shape-shift into what they were. For me, that’s kind of like my favorite thing about writing music, especially collaboratively, where somebody can kinda say almost something that’s like they don’t understand what they’re saying. They make a suggestion, and then you do something, and it’s interpreted to the best of your ability or understanding what they are trying to say, and these songs just evolve on their own. They grow like these strange bacteria.