Bambara - Birthmarks Reid Bateh was thinking about reincarnation. Old lives, new selves, how we carry the past with us long after the people who defined it leave us. This was not a new age awakening, but a matter-of-fact kind of reincarnation: how some version of us dies with a collapsing relationship, how we hear an ex-lover’s voice where it doesn’t belong. He began reading academic studies on reincarnation as more of a scientific possibility. And then a story began to take shape, a saga spanning decades, full of frontier violence and dive bars and electric chairs and manic zealots and women linked across generations by dreams and snakebites. This would become the narrative arc of Birthmarks, Bambara’s fifth album. In turn, Birthmarks is a sort of reincarnation for the trio — Reid and his twin brother Blaze (drums), alongside childhood friend William Brookshire (bass) — altogether. Five years removed from their last full-length Stray, and three from their 2022 EP Love On My Mind, Birthmarks inevitably arrives with the weight of a new chapter after a lengthy absence. Long ago having established their brand of magnetic darkness — equally formed by the grit of their adopted New York City home and the mysterious corners of the Georgian swamps that raised them — Bambara found themselves in a period of slow, laborious evolution. Birthmarks emerges directly from the band’s favored aesthetics and themes, but captures them with a new sense of sonic adventurousness and thematic subtlety, resulting in a collection of songs that are somehow both the band’s most apocalyptic and most poignant. With a new European record deal with Bella Union, Bambara also had expanded resources. They tapped Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton as producer. After spending a year writing a glut of new material, they arrived in the seaside English town of Ramsgate in June of 2023, fully confident they had a finished record they just needed to knock out with Sutton. But Ramsgate was just the beginning. The Batehs and Brookshire returned to Brooklyn and set about on a year-plus of breaking down and reimagining the recordings — tearing songs down to their roots, rebuilding them with samples and loops culled from the studio sessions, collaborating with Sutton on new edits from across the Atlantic. The music grew more spectral, more sinuous than the feral rock the band had made their name on. Blaze and Sutton cut and manipulated percussion over and over, indulging a new fixation on rhythm. Presented by Hi-Dive. This is a 21+ event