Bravery in Battle - The House We Live In

A Closer Listen

The House We Live In is a multi-year, multi-media project that includes a book, an album and a series of videos, which will finally be released in its entirely on June 9.  The quickest way to describe it is a post-rock version of Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance with integrated interviews.  The French collective Bravery in Battle has gone all out with this project, enlisting the aid of many of today’s top thinkers, using drones to capture startling imagery and presenting some of the most engaging post-rock we’ve heard all year.

Bill McKibben offers the opening statement on “A Ball of Rock,” music rising around him like consciousness.  “Our species now determines what happens on the face of the planet,” he laments before turning to the words of Oppenheimer: “We have become as Gods, destroyers of worlds.”  Then the music, which has been as gentle and slow-building as greenhouse gases before the advent of humanity, erupts.  The instrumental “Earthlings” is one of the album’s most powerful tracks and contains the film’s most creative visuals.  The globe becomes a lawn, an ocean, a parking lot, while various items jut from its surface.  The guitars surge, the drums pound, and even the glockenspiel seems caffeinated.  And yet the mood is exuberant, offering a vision of a world that can still change, if only its most disruptive species changes its course.

At first, the visuals of “One Partie de ce Monde” are more sedate.  Jean-Claude Ameisen teaches, “Humanity is not the centre of the living world … by damaging the living world, we are damaging ourselves.”  The juxtaposition of an explosion and a waterfall hammer the point home.  In “Parmi des Millions,” visual comparisons are made between the murmurations above and murmurations below, the sky and the sea.  In like fashion, “The Commons” offers a plea from Vandana Shiva on sharing resources as an alternative to exploitation, her words populating the valleys of the song while the densest passages remain instrumental.  “Here Be Giants” presents a simple but effective twist, shifting from images of tall trees to images of tall buildings, no words needed.

Another of the album’s video highlights arrives in “Wetico,” the closest in spirit to “Baraka” and related films, featuring classic sequences of turnstiles, crosswalks, and overlapping highways.  The initially placid images give way to agitation, stillness to speed, until everything seems on the verge of breaking down, relenting at the last possible minute.  It’s no surprise that a later track is titled, “That Human Speed.”  “We can get off that rat race,” prompts John Frances, “and we can walk.”  The track is incredibly positive, affirming the best in humanity, and believing it will rise to its potential.  When the next video “goes backwards,” it’s less an undoing than a resetting.

Two of the album’s best instrumental tracks, “The Parliament of Things” and “It Takes Friends to Weather the Storm,” are absent from the film.  The first overflows with power and passion, while the second subsides to strings before setting up the finale with a final surge.  All the major players return in “Action in Democracy,” offering “grounds for hope.”  Every piece of this project ~ music, visuals and music ~ communicates this same empowering message.  The climate’s problems seem insurmountable, but change is within our grasp.  (Richard Allen)

Available here