I was lucky to get tickets to this one. It was strange, trippy, and unlike anything I’ve seen before. The headliner, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, has a dedicated cult following, and as we approached the door with a big fat SOLD OUT sign across it, we knew we were about to see something special. The group, who’s genre can be best described as post-rock, is hard to categorize completely, as their songs tend to have an almost prophetic and clearly experimental quality to them. Generally consisting of all instrumentals, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is notorious for having songs on an album that meld together, or that can be some 20 minutes in length each. The best way to listen to Godspeed You! Is while staring out a window contemplating the spectrum of the human emotion-you’ve just got to get lost in it.
The opener, Vast Plains, lacks an online presence and was a bit of a mystery going into the show. At 9 o’clock on the dot, one solitary beanie clad man walked onstage, opened this huge green trunk, and the rest was a mesmerizing blur. During the set, the eyes of the audience were drawn to the top of the stage, where there were rotating blue and pink lights in the shape of a plus sign, whirling to the artist’s mix of industrial noise and ambient tunes. Near the end of his set, the artist slowly brought us down by quieting his music and dropping some of the layered complexity in the noise. Eventually, he ended his set with a quiet whir of sound, walking off the stage just as he had come on: without a trace.
When Godspeed You! Black Emperor came on stage, my friend and I were jostled to the back a bit by the cult super-fans I mentioned earlier, so I didn’t have a great view of the set. That being said, the sounds the group produced were beautiful enough to make the grown man next to me cry. The highlight of the set being the song “Pleasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’” (the first song in this video)
Trance-inducing and hypnotic to the core, the two-hour long set felt to me like 15 minutes. The group is vast, consisting of some 8 members, playing everything from drums, guitar, violin, bass, and standup bass. Because of their numbers, the group had the ability to create a rich and layered sound capable of entrancing everyone in the sold-out show. The guitarists played off each other with a calculated and passionate rhythm and drone, while the drums gave us something to hold onto while being lost in what the strings were layering on.
All of this is already an experience in itself, but to add to the tension buildup and trance inducing sound was the projectionist. Because we were pushed to the back at the beginning of the set, I had the opportunity to watch the projectionist, who ran between 5 or so film reels during the night, as he projected calculated scenes to match the drama and emotions of the instrumentals. There was one song, in which the projectionist gave us a scene of deer running in the night, looking around every corner they turned, which layered so much anxiety onto an already anxious and beautiful arrangement. Other scenes he projected included split-screen images and color blurs that covered a huge white backdrop on the stage, as well as coloring the performers themselves. This was one of those shows where the people around you remained silent: no one dared escape the trance by talking.
Because of the nature of the show, photography was frowned upon, so I didn’t get many pictures, but check out the video below of a recorded live performance to get a better idea of what this show was all about.
[Ed. Note: For more information on Godspeed You! Black Emperor, visit here.]
JULIA OLSON | still up in the cosmos yo | SU Student Correspondent