Name: WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN
Members: Mathieu Bernard Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Efrim Manuel Menuck, Jonathan Downs (Ada), Patch One (Ada)
Interviewee: Efrim Manuel Menuck
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Musician, guitarist, founder of thee mighty hotel2tango recording studio with Howard Bilerman, Radwan Moumneh and Thierry Amar
Recent release: WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN's NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is out via Constellation.

[Read our BIG|BRAVE interview]

If you enjoyed this Efrim Menuck interview and would like to know more, visit him on Instagram. WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN also have a page on the website of their label, Constellation.

For the thoughts of two of his collaborators, read our Jessica Moss interview, and our Rebecca Foon interview.



It’s 1984 and I’m fourteen years old. I ride the subway with two friends. Downtown to a nuclear disarmament rally. A field somewhere near the university. Up the stairs out the subway and into a poured concrete canyon. Brutal administration towers thrown up in the dirty 1970s. There’s wind that’s been stuck in there for months, it spirals around corners kicking up street dust. From around those sharp corners we can hear a distant band playing on the rally stage, some kanadian thing that was popular then but never made it out of kanada. They’re playing a one-chord white blues choogle, but the way the spiraling wind carries the sound and the way it whips it against the buildings turn that chord into upside-down harmonics. A low roaring beast, a cardboard maelstrom, an orchestra drowning a golden lotus uncurling and exhaling white noise.

I remember standing there with dust my eyes. I remember feeling the world opening itself to me like a wide bright eye blinking terrible possibility and glory, and then I remember how bad the band sounded once we reached the source. Many years later I would home-tape borrowed classical records with all the input levels in the red. Those dusty symphonies would become electric things fat distorted bears romping across distant mountains Mahler’s tantrums made truer. I was a furniture mover and I'd roll around town tired and sweaty those holy cassettes in the tape deck roaring through blown speakers while the engine groaned.

I’m on a roadtrip with my teenage daughter. The dusk is hot and wet, and fat soggy clouds squat above the horizon fit to burst and ready to trumpet. The car’s A.C. is broken so we have the windows open while we tear through the repeating landscapes of end times capital. My daughter has her headphones on and half a smile in profile. Her hands dance lazy semaphore in time to whatever’s in her ears. My own face is a grimace probably, bent into the wind and highway noise while the radio blares. She’s always looked more like her mother and aunt but here we are now, slouched identically, observing the blurred void. All the wrong sounds are coming out of the car speakers, everything crowded and either too sharp or too dull.

When I was a kid the highway ROARED but lately it SCREAMS, as if they pulled the asphalt too tight so that now it rings like a drum, a high-pitched constant, a jagged line of clipped triangles. The first time I heard the highway scream like that was in the united states of america. I was a frightened kid on tour for the first time with the godspeed-band. I remember trying to shrink away from that violent noise I remember the violence of that expanse I remember the sun was a white hole.

A few years ago, on a different highway with my friend k. We’re in a grey ford econoline that once belonged to a small zoo. It drives like a three-legged horse gallops and K is talking about phil lesh’s first three bass notes at the beginning of scarlet begonias (barton hall 5/8/77). The sound of a strange man getting out of the gate eagerly bent forward. Three notes. The final note an upward slide. I think about those bass notes a lot now. I wonder over the nature of the gesture, the intersection of instinct and intent, the benzedrine precision of their tumble and rise. I think about how though I have never heard phil lesh utter a sentence that didn’t make me want to turn away, on one night in 1977 he wrote a singular three-syllable word that almost contains whole bibles to me.

When I was 19 years old I lost my mind twice. I was young and too full of unresolved things. The city was a demon hung with shiny wires, and me beneath the yellow nighttime streetlights high on acid, filthy and torn, starved and nauseous. I did that too much for too many months, I followed that crooked trail towards some dim light until I finally broke. I was sitting in a diner eating eggs with my girlfriend and the entirety of my cognition keeled sideways suddenly, like a tectonic shelf groaned and then shifted underneath a deep black sea at the center of me. I got stuck in that rupture, I wandered through days trying to learn how to see through these new eyes, all my feelings were strangers to me.

I alternated between anxiety and despair. I quit drugs and then lost my mind again. Sitting alone in a park while the summer night fell, I remember feeling like I couldn’t hear anymore, not really, because the drugs had uncurled all my antennae so that I could really hear and see and now the drugs were gone and the world was mute and grey. I was shroud in heavy blankets and I could not feel, I slept but didn’t dream - once there had been machines beneath the sidewalk that were always whispering and now they’d gone cruelly silent.

I pull my daughter and I into a motel beneath a new tangle of high dark clouds . I smoke cigarettes outside while she sleeps, my hair knotted with hungry mosquitos. There’s a melancholy swimming pool in front, the water pump groans while rains fall into the blue illuminated water.

When the rains stop the crickets begin to sing in canon. The pitch of their chirps rises and falls according to ambient temperature. There’s a small road over there, and breeze from every stray car makes the pitch of their song fall until the temperature stabilizes again and then the pitch rises anew. A very good song a very old song amen.

Les Rallizes Denudes= there’s a ground buzz on “enter the mirror” on “‘77 live”. It runs and crackles from the beginning to the end. Bad electricity is insistent and good electricity too. At 2:30 you can hear the tape delay’s motor downshift. Electric crickets bent into cold wind. The guitar sounds like white hair growing on a pink lightning bolt. All of us hairy lightning, heartbroken by a violent world. I wrap myself in blankets and listen to my daughter snore in the bed next to mine. And then I am safe and then I am sleeping.

When I was 19 years old I lost my mind two times, and now I’m 54 years old and I'm living through it all again, the sudden cognitive shift and then the slow walking away from the bottom of a crater. Stubbornly afloat and bent towards the uncertain dawn.

We spend the next day on the same loud highway, the same apocalypse landscapes blurred and smearing by, draped in warm sun. We leave the radio off and talk all day. We sleep next to Lake Huron, and I wake up in the middle of the night frightened and confused in the absolute dark. The waves below sound all wrong, they roar when they rise but when they collapse there’s no sustain to their exhalations, they just stop abruptly and fall silent. They sound like cymbals recorded backwards, and I lie there on top of them beneath no moon no stars. I listen to them one million times two million times and then I fall back asleep.

In the morning I walk into that cold water until it reaches my neck. I stare at the point where the water meets the sky I look at trees clustered above the shoreline. The sun ripples along the top of the water like discharged electricity.

Even still light is full of chaos, but we don’t perceive it easily. We only see what it illuminates, even if it’s only illuminating emptiness. Sound comes at us from everywhere, even in silence our bodies make sound. And in each unraveling instant, we rummage through that pile instinctively, we focus and we discern. Somewhere beyond the horizon, from the centre of the impossible vastness of this great lake, there’s a low steady thrum. Somewhere out there an imperial engine is chugging away unseen. It sounds like the part of the movie just before the bad thing happens, it sounds like what impending catastrophe would sound like if it was a one-note symphony. I exit the lake I hug my daughter I catch a short shallow breath I squint into the rolling rising sun.

Many years ago I was a treeplanter once, dumped in the middle of an enormous clearcut just north of Thunder Bay. There was a morning that was cold and grey, I was planting on a piece of land that was a little valley and I had to take a shit. I climbed up the low wooded slope at the edge of my piece of land, dug a hole dropped my pants and squatted while I hung onto a tree trunk. From across the valley I could hear a woman screaming and crying, and while I hung there squatted and shitting I called out to her asking her if she was okay. She stopped crying and then she yelled no and then she yelled leave me alone and I hung there in the echoing silence of the clearcut and then I wiped my ass buried my shit and went back to planting trees.

I had a dull and static childhood. My childhood was marked by intermittent terrors. Hidden in my room I had to develop a heightened ability to echolocate. There was always a fixed amount of rage somewhere in the house, even when it was buried it was present, waiting to spill out and seek a target. I had to learn how to differentiate between those changing states from a distance - the variabilities of footstep cadence and weight, muffled vocal tones, the different ways that drawers sounded depending on how smoothly or roughly they were opened or closed. I was like a tiny weatherman tracking storms from inside a papier-mache turret, and that labor left me with ears that work harder than my eyes.

The first time I caught covid it took away my sense of smell forever and burned out some blood vessels in my right eye. Last year a neck injury damaged some crucial dedicated nerves and now my right thumb and index fingers are eternally numb. Hearing is the last undegraded sense i have. I am an old engine, burning oil and leaking coolant. I am hurtling forward in this world a little unmoored from the present. I am finding myself here again. The deep crater, the new eyes, the liquid instability of perception.

When I was a child I thought that the buzzing of cicadas on a hot summer afternoon was the sound of electricity passing through wires. I’m back home now, wilting in the yard with m while our two-year-old naps in our bed. The cicada above us stops its buzzing, and the city falls silent. One of those profound gaps where all the sounds a city makes fall silent at once so that you can almost hear the clouds whisper. And just like that the cicada starts again and then a distant ambulance and someone down the alley hammering at something with murderous intent.

In 2023 Los Jaivas played a song that they had written 50 years prior. “Mira Ninita”. The original recorded version is a perfect thing, a song built from fragile things discarded and then arranged precisely, a song that sounds like a pile of glass branches tied together with black smoke and rusty wire a song that sounds like the heart of a tree trunk beating through wet soil.

And now here they are the drummer dead the singer dead in a stadium ringed with digital pepsi cola signs. Time changes context changes equipment changes but the song still hangs somehow, still. There on the wind an eternality a hole that rain falls through cities built on ruin the stars burn cold in their dark nests we watch it all we hear it resound we tumble like moths and we exhale we disentangle the engine burns the rain across it hissing we scatter are scattered the end.