There are shows that are about the music. There are shows that are about the personalities, the showmanship. Then there are shows that are about something bigger, something outside the concert space. The performance of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the enigmatic Montreal post-rock ensemble, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood on Wednesday, June 25, was one of these.
The band is touring its latest album No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, a searing, chastening – and occasionally uplifting – work protesting the war in Gaza.
The show comes at the end of a week in which: the Spanish Prime Minister joined the growing pool of world leaders accusing Israel of genocide; Israel has opened an investigation into war crimes committed by its forces against Palestinians queuing for food supplies; tensions and violence continue to flare in the West Bank; and – most importantly – as of today, more than 56,000 people have been killed, including 83 Israeli hostages.*
The show opens in almost total darkness. The band filters out onto stage one by one, opening, as always, with the improvised ‘Hope Drone’. A twitching message, written in cursive, flickers all too briefly on a screen behind the band: “hope”.
Pioneer Works is a gorgeously renovated warehouse used for concerts and art exhibitions. It is worth visiting, if only to wander through the wooded courtyard and listen to graying dads reminisce around the firepit about shows of days passed.
Inside, the only thing reminding listeners that they are here, in the real world, and not floating through the post-industrial landscapes projected onto the back screen, is the light pollution ghosting in from the clouds over the New York Bay.
As we watch peopleless sepia landscapes, leafless trees, Montreal (or possibly anywhere) on an overcast day, the music undulates through throbbing détente, anxious crescendo and full-throated, at times ecstatic, release.
One terrifying, gasping chord follows another.
You can’t quite tell where the sounds are coming from. There are guitars, bass, violin (sadly lost in louder moments), someone at the back hitting drums that you feel more than you hear. There is what appears, from my vantage point, to be a beard playing a miniature guitar. You can only tell some of them are there from the silhouettes thrown across images of burning forests.
GY!BE are a band with a cult following. Reddit bubbles with amateur conspiracies and obsessions. YouTube playlists catalogue minute variations in live-only pieces. In the queue for the bathroom two men, who seemed to know each other only vaguely, recognize one another and embrace. Lost for words, one shrugs and says ‘Godspeed’: nothing more needed.
To the uninitiated, post-rock – GY!BE being probably the genre’s most influential example – might be a confusing label: think rock simultaneously stripped down and made sophisticated. Their second album, ‘Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven’, has only four named tracks but lasts nearly an hour and a half, telling you much you need to know about the band’s approach to writing and playing music.
Their structure – a collective rather than a traditional ‘band’ with its implicit hierarchies – can be heard in the organized chaos of their performance. They embody their anti-capitalist message.
The sleeve notes for the record (reprinted below) make clear what they are going for. It can be tempting to think that this, and the album’s title and message of ‘hope’, is a little trite, a little on the nose. But the music, the thing that really matters, will change your mind.
During the show it is easy to let the mind float to the stuttered grinding of broken machinery, the screeching-to-a-halt of trains refracting into your dreams, the static of a television screen. This music, after all, is meant to soundtrack late capitalism.
But listen closer and you will hear none of this: it is all subtlety and tension, amorphous darkness. Major chords are used sparingly – and only then to throw the rest of it into darker relief. The music is not of this world – or if it is then it is, then it is of the end of it.
It seems to me that this message of ‘hope’ is directed not at us, but to the bandmembers themselves: to remind them to keep going.
I’m not sure there really is a lesson here, anything GY!BE wants us to take home with us through the darkness. But if there is, I think it’s that – despite all the war and destruction and inexorable suffering, despite the echoless futility of daily life – a lot can be magicked up out of a very little. All you need is a darkened room, some tensioned steel and polyester, and a little bit of rage.
*Likely to be a significant underestimate; thousands of bodies are thought to be buried under rubble.
Sleeve note:
THE PLAIN TRUTH==
we drifted through it, arguing.
every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
we sat down together and wrote it in one room,
and then sat down in a different room, recording.
NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?
and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.
the sun setting above beds of ash
while we sat together, arguing.
the old world order barely pretended to care.
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE
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