Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a Canadian experimental ensemble (from Montreal) of as many as ten musicians, founded by guitarist Efrim Menuck, who in 1994 recorded the cassette All Lights Fucked On The Holy Amp Drooling.

Their debut album, F♯ A♯ ∞ (Constellation, 1998 - Kranky, 1998), contains only three (long) tracks. It proceeds slowly with The Dead Flag Blues (sixteen and a half minutes), a faint mixture of sonic ephemera that only after ten minutes takes substance in a timid, emotionless jam. Opening with the sound of traffic and a bagpipe theme is the even more exhausting East Hastings (eighteen minutes), which after warming up with a baroque cello rondo and a "western" theme from the guitar, soon spirals into a violent improvised pandemonium, in the style of Amon Duul or Hawkwind. Providence (almost half an hour) seems more like a collection of notes, and notes taken quickly while shopping around at that. The bulk of their music consists of sparse chords from every instrument, left to waver senselessly. Every now and then the drums get beaten wildly, and for a few minutes one can hear a tiny amount of polyphony. Then the noises take over, some of which are electronically manipulated.
The persistent usage of spoken word is perhaps a bit tedious, and the orchestral effort is a bit wasted on these micro-harmonic scores.

The EP Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada (Constellation, 1998 - Kranky, 1999) shows the band breaking free from the fetters of Morricone and Barry Adamson. Moya (one of their best works) begins in a highbrow manner with chamber music for strings, but then soars into a sweet melody with a tumultuous crescendo. Even Blaise Bailey Finnegan III (almost eighteen minutes), after four tiresome minutes of "spoken word," swells into a majestic instrumental crescendo.

The four extended tracks of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (Kranky, 2000) mark further progress towards more lively compositions. Storm is basically a revised version of Moya: a baroque adagio for chamber strings leads to a driving, pounding crescendo that dies out and then returns as a majestic psychedelic progression. This in turn mutates into a martial frenzy that resembles Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies. The ensemble's skills in concocting and assembling subliminal noises shine in Static, an electronic suite that is the antithesis of "ambient" but for several minutes flirts with the format, only to turn into a spoken opera and then into more cello-paced chamber music and then into louder, hard-rocking psychedelic outburst. Sleep is a slow burner that eventually builds up yet another martial crescendo that collapses into yet another cacophony. The band's method suffers from at least two problems. Spoken segments serve no purpose and detract from the overall project. The dual attack of rock'n'roll and free-form noise loses some of its impact because the two formats are never "fused", only appended to one another. Godspeed You! Black Emperor's ambient/noise/psychedelic music is only limited by tedious repetition and a lack of emotional focus.
The band's potential shows only in the last, and more experimental, piece. Antennas To Heaven opens with sampling of a folk song and then offers subtle noise collages. After a long journey through altered states of the mind, a tender melody rises from the ashes of harmony. This is a real moment of genius.

Drummer Aidan Girt also plays in Exhaust (Constellation), a trio with Mike Zabitsky and Gordon Krieger.

A Silver Mt Zion is a side-project that involves three members of GYBE (guitarist Efrim Menuck, violinist Sophie Trudeau and bassist Thierry Amar). They debuted with the album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corners Of Our Rooms (Constellation, 2000), that contains two lengthy suites, both consisting of four movements. Zion offers a stark, subdued, minimal sound, while engaging in the same exercises of tension building and releasing as Godspeed. The focus is on the instrumental interplay and on the chromatic counterpoint. Lonely As The Sound of Lying On The Ground Of An Airplane Going Down is particularly striking in its quasi-spiritual intensity, violin and cello and organ creating an ethereal mood worthy of the best of new-age music. The first movement (Broken Chords Can Sing a Little) opens with slow and sparse piano notes, later disturbed by sustained violin notes and samples of voices. Drums and more petulant strings propel the second movement (Sit In The Middle Of Three Galopping Dogs) to a pounding bacchanal. Much more austere is the crescendo of the third movement (Stumble Then Rise On Some Awkward Morning), with interlocking violins and a gracefully tiptoeing piano that slowly ignite each other. The group has studied the techniques of the baroque adagios and allegros, and bends them to fit the spleen (if not the aesthetic) of post-rock.
The World is Sick is more cerebral and perhaps less enchanting. After celestial overture of floating strings (13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round The Side Of Your Bed) and a five-second movement of silence (Long March Rocket Or Doomed Airliner), piano and strings weave a melancholy atmosphere in Blown-Out Joy From Heaven's Mercied Hole halfway between a baroque adagio and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. The finale (For Wanda) died out somberly, leaving behind only a formless turbulence.

The band expanded to six units and renamed itself Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, and released the sophomore album, Born Into Trouble As Sparks Fly Upward (Constellation, 2001). Less austere and more humane, the sound of these eight compositions represent a significant departure for Menuck. The departure is more visible in the seven-minute sermon Take These Hands And Throw Them In The River and the catchy The Triumph Of Tired Eyes, but also the thick textures of This Gentle Hearts Like Shot Bird's Fallen and Built Then Burnt. The chamber pieces, such as the nine-minute Sisters! Brothers! Small Boats Of Fire Are Falling From The Sky!, Could've Moved Mountains and C'Mon ComeOn, are marginal to the new dynamics of the ensemble, a sort of Penguin Cafe` Orchestra for the post-rock age.

Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor (drummer Aidan Girt and violinist Sophie Trudeau) recorded Sings Reign Rebuilder (oct 1999/jan 2001 - oct 2001), credited to a 13-unit orchestra, the Set Fire To Flames: David Bryant (guitar, tapes), Bruce Cawdron (percussion), Fluffy Erskine (percussion, music box, tapes), Rebecca Foon (cello), Aidan Girt (drums), Genevieve Heistek (viola), Gordon Krieger (bass clarinet), Christof Migone (electronics, banjo), Mike Moya (guitar, tapes), Thea Pratt (French horn), Roger Tellier-Craig (guitar, tapes), Jean-Sebastien Truchy (bass, music box), Sophie Trudeau (violin, glockenspiel, trumpet), Speedy Weaver (guitar). Mostly improvised, and mostly noise-based (including field recordings), the music borders on the most self-indulgent avantgarde conceptual art. The 14-minute Vienna Arcweld is a subdued free-form electronic collage that picks up volume and rhythm in a mechanical crescendo. On the other hand, the ghostly ambient vignette Omaha is almost classical music. Most pieces exhibit the tendency to morph into their opposite. The eleven-minute Shit-heap Gloria of the New Town Planning is a solemn droning piece that undergoes a slow dance-like crescendo. Sampled voices turn into a moving sonata in I Will Be True. The dissonant and droning There Is No Dance in Frequency and Balance plunges into industrial cacophony. Psychedelic trance is explicit in Steal Compass/Drive North/Disappear but implied throughout the album. Alas, the majority of the album is wasted in lazy musical doodling.

Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor played on the albums credited to Molasses, and mainly composed and orchestrated by Scott Chercnoff with help from an army of musicians: You'll Never Be Well No More (Fancy, 1999), a relatively spartan folk album for banjo, guitar, piano and strings, Trilogie - Toil & Peaceful Life (Fancy, 2000), a single (Saint Catherine/ Lisa's Waltz) that was extended to EP-length by adding some filler, and the almost symphonic 26-track double-CD A Slow Messe (Alien8, 2003), half sung and half instrumental, featuring Thalia Zedek on guitar and clarinet, Chris Brokaw on guitar, David Michael Curry on strings and horns, Efrim Menuck on harmonium, Bruce Cawdron on marimba, etc. Despite the agit-prop emphasis, Godspeed's Yanqui UXO (Constellation, 2002) is an album of instrumental music for relaxation, a parade of still images that tells no story, a collection of delicate holograms that have no dramatic content (new age music for aspiring suicide bombers?). Each of the five lengthy instrumental tracks (no processed vocals this time) of this 74-minute disc engages in a process of self-replication that displays little interest in development. There is only one notable exception: Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls, one of the few pieces to match the intensity of Gordon Mumma's nightmarish war requiem, Dresden Interleaf (1965). But the rest is glacial, reflective, restrained, static. Colorless, anemic. Massive black holes that emit a dense, buzzing radiation. Not implacable (like the political premises would entail) but indifferent. Sure, the first part of 09-15-00 is shaken by a sinister crescendo. Sure, Motherfucker= Redeemer begins with a wall of distortions. But they quickly descend into an artistic torpor that resembles narcotic stupor (particularly the second part of 09-15-00). The second part of Motherfucker= Redeemer is rarified and dissonant like a Pierre Boulez piece without the sharp tones and the tempo changes. Previous Godspeed compositions would ebb and flow, and eventually explode via a dramatic sequence of volume shifts: now they simply catalog their own existence.
It is not difficult to imagine how this works. The band meets in the studio with a database of sound effects and arrangements that they want to introduce in the song. The song is shaped not based on a concept of what the song should be but on the database of sounds. In order to fit all the ideas, the song has to stretch over several minutes. There is no "song": there is only a container of sounds.
This is no longer a rock band in search of a sensational effect: this is a chamber ensemble in search of transcendental counterpoint.

Mike Mya, a Godspeed founding member and a member of Set Fire To Flames, is also the brain behind Hrsta, a project which released the mediocre L'Eclat Du Ciel Etait Insoutenable (Fancy, 2001). Mya assembled a real band for Hrsta's follow-up, Stem Stem In Electro (Constellation, 2005), influenced by the majestic productions of latter-day Swans (the eight-minute Swallow's Tail and the instrumental closer Une Infinite' De Trous En Forme D'Hommes), and the slightly more melodic and song-oriented Ghosts Will Come And Kiss Our Eyes (Constellation, 2007), highlighted by the atmospheric productions of Tomorrow Winter Comes and Hechicero Del Bosque.

Set Fire To Flames' monumental Telegraphs In Negative / Mouths Trapped In Static (aug 2002 - apr 2003), recorded in a barn, is indulgent at best, but also contains a wealth of ideas for the future of instrumental music. Their specialty is cryptic, undecipherable pieces like Deja Comme Des Trous De Vent Comme Reproduit, and And The Birds Are About To Bust Their Guts With Singing. The clownish eight-minute ticking of Fukt Perkusiv / Something About Bad Drugs, Schizophrenics And Grain Silos is emblematic of their nonsense aesthetic. Sometimes there is little more than sophisticated musique concrete like in Measure De Mesure. Nonetheless, even the non-music exales a delicate existentialist mood, best embodied by closer This Thing Between Us Is A Rickety Bridge Of Impossible Crossing / Bonfires For Nobody. The 15-minute In Prelight Isolate begins as a nebula of miniscule events but they somehow coalesce into strident dissonant dust. The twelve-minute Sleep Maps flows in the opposite direction: a slow and steady disintegration of a dense drone.

The third album by the Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, This Is Our Punk (Constellation, 2003), changed style dramatically, offering psychedelic pagan folk a` la Incredible String Band. The idea is not particularly original, although the results are occasionally fascinating. The four lengthy tracks are perhaps just too much for such a limited objective. The EP Pretty Little Lightning Paw (Constellation, 2004) contains left-overs from the same sessions.

Their fourth album, Horses In The Sky (Constellation, 2005), dresses up their pagan folk music in a more "musical" manner, despite the attempts of Efrim Menuck's lamenting vocals to bog it down into excessive recitation. The requiems that frame this anti-war concept, the 12-minute God Bless our Dead Marines (that oscillates between folk dances and cabaret overtones) and the 14-minute Ring Them Bells (a complex melodrama/kammerspiel), are emblematic of the maturation of the musician, if not of the singer. The dynamic structure of the pieces and the emphasis of the vocals are reminiscent of progressive-rock of the 1970s. In fact, the nine-minute Mountains Made of Steam evokes early Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator. The ten-minute Teddy Roosevelt's Guns sounds like a sober version of Velvet Underground's raga Venus In Furs before decaying into a confused sequence of dissonance and punkish ranting. The fact is that Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra has mutated into a different beast: not a brainy chamber post-rock machine but a simple, emotive soul.

Thierry Amar, Jessica Moss and Gabe Levine also play in Black Ox Orkestar, a klezmer tribute band that released Ver Tanzt (Constellation, 2003).

The idea behind Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra's 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons (Constellation, 2008) was ambitious and impressive: four lengthy songs to medidate on a desolate and desperate mood. Unfortunatley, the ambition is not matched by actual artistic skills. Efrim Menuck and his cohorts have proven to be masters of atmospheric and emotional orchestrations, but here they prove to be amateurish when it comes to writing actual songs (with prominent vocals). His tenor is often annoying and the lyrics are disposable. The appropriate comparison is with the most self-indulgent prog-rock suites of the 1970s. 1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound (14:42) rises to the occasion, but it would have been a minor work in the repertory of early Genesis or Van Der Graaf Generator. The meandering 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons (16:46), the incoherent Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues (13:07), and, despite some exciting crescendos, the redundant Blindblindblind (13:17) feel crude and unedited.

Hangedup was a duo by members of Godspeed You Black Emperor (Genevieve Heistek on viola and Eric Craven on drums) that released Hangedup (2000), Kicker In Tow (Constellation, 2002) and Clatter For Control (Constellation, 2005).

Roger Tellier-Craig, a founding member of both Godspeed You Black Emperor and Set Fire To Flames, had his own career as an avantgarde composer.

Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra's Kollaps Tradixionales (2010) continues the trend towards songs instead of instrumentals. These are songs that depend heavily on string arrangements and on improvised counterpoint, like the 15-minute mutating hymn There is a Light that alternates between gentle anaemic gospel-country laments and hard-rocking crescendoes. The mood of their instrumentals has changed dramatically: I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds opens in acid-rock territory and plunges into a ferocious violin-fueled boogie. The band even indulges in a heavy-metal rave-up, I Built Myself a Metal Bird. The lowest point is the 14-minute Piphany Rambler, reminiscent of the worst tedious rambling prog-rock suites. Overall the album fails because no song is cohesive enough to justify its pomp and duration.

Menuck also released a solo album, Plays High Gospel (2011).

Godspeed You Black Emperor reformed in 2010 and recorded Allelujah Don't Bend Ascend (Constellation, 2012), containing two 20-minute pieces: Mladic and We Drift Like Worried Fire. The lineup consisted of: Thierry Amar (bass guitar, double bass, keyboards), Aidan Girt (drums), Efrim Menuck and Mike Moya (electric guitar), Mauro Pezzente (bass) and Sophie Trudeau (violin), plus as guests David Bryant (electric guitar, dulcimer) and Bruce Cawdron (drums, vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel). A hornpipe invocation and then a gargantuan distortion and chirping dissonances forge the cosmic anxiety that opens Mladic which then swells via a sort of Glenn Branca-ian "ascension" (a combination of manic repetition of guitar notes and magniloquent crescendo) and then stabilizes and strengthens thanks to a throbbing rhythm which, coupled with the thrashing distortion, evokes Neu and the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray. The pulse keeps expanding, more brutal and even bombastic, and the guitar riff keeps exploding, more incendiary and even ecstatic, until the whole resembles a whirling drunk gypsy dance. And this quickly acquires the torment of early raga-psychedelic Pink Floyd, and that's when it stops getting more and more intense and it begins to implode. The psychotic intensity that has fueled until this point (two thirds of the way) decays into an agonizing epos that borrows from symphonic prog-rock of the 1970s. The cryptic ending of this spectacular piece is just a march of junk percussion. The 20 minutes are breathless.
By comparison with that cataclysmic emphasis, We Drift Like Worried Fire feels cold and didactic. There is a similar rising tidal wave of minimalist repetition, somewhere between Terry Riley's In C and Michael Nyman's film soundtracks, and a fervent guitar vibrato melody; but this time the choreography seem timid and clumsy, forced on the musicians rather than coming from the heart. Even the last fourth of the piece, the one that coalesces around a powerful crescendo feels like a poor imitation of the oceanic squalls of the opener.
Both pieces denote a shift in focus: the music is not as cinematic as in the past, but violently introverted.
The LP also contains a single with Their Helicopters Sing, that stages a triumphal crescendo of drones and dissonance a` la LaMonte Young, and another droning nightmare, Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable, but way gloomier and uglier. Both are simple in structure but both constitute brainy chamber music for small ensemble. Their only drawback is that neither feels completely finished.
The compositions on this album wildly differ in quality and ambition. Mladic might be their masterpiece, whereas ample portions of We Drift Like Worried Fire are mere filler, and the two shorter droning corollaries should have been either longer or shorter. Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra's Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything (2014) was recorded by the quintet of guitarist and keyboardist Efrim Menuck, bassist Thierry Amar, drummer David Payant, and violinists Jessica Moss and Sophie Trudeau. The four years since the previous album made a huge difference. Far from their original brainy instrumental music, they found a new mission as bards and rockers. Fuck Off Get Free (For the Island of Montreal) (10:22), one of their punk-ish songs, whose instrumental break veers towards heavy metal, emphasizes the rocking part. That persona peaks with the hypnotic, feverish, relentless boogie of Austerity Blues (14:17), detonated by a thundering guitar and organ workout, an orgy that fades out with a five-minute loop of whining voice, whispered choir and harmonica. Even more explosive is the shorter Take Away These Early Grave Blues (6:47). The bard persona blossoms in the poignant and agonizing litany What We Loved Was Not Enough (11:22), which surges with martial waltzing magniloquence amid a chaos of tremolo guitar noise. We are now in folk-rock and Bob Dylan territory, and the band has never been so close to Neil Young's Crazy Horse. The sleepy piano lullaby Little Ones Run (2:29) is all that is left of the original chamber-rock project. Menuck has metamorphed into a pessimistic folksinger and apocalyptic preacher. While all of the songs could have used a little bit of pruning, the band has found a masterful balance between vocal storytelling, emotional instrumental noise and mood development.

Godspeed's line-up on Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress (Constellation, 2015) consisted of the core trio of Efrim Menuck (guitar), Thierry Amar (bass) and Sophie Trudeau (violin) plus Mike Moya (second guitar), Mauro Pezzente (bass), David Bryant (keyboards) and drummers Aidan Girt and Timothy Herzog; basically a double power-trio plus keyboards. The structure of this album replicates the structure of the previous album: two lengthy pieces separated by two short drone pieces. The difference is that the ensemble has completely dispensed with the vocals. Peasantry or 'Light! Inside of Light!' (10:27) merges elements of Led Zeppelin's slow-burning blues-rock, Eastern Europe's folk dances, and symphonic guitar jamming a` la Bardo Pond or TV On The Radio to ignite an operatic leitmotiv. It is one of their most straightforward emotional pieces yet. But then the listener is taken into the obscure depths of Lambs' Breath (9:55), where crackling guitar noise disappears sucked into a fluctuating spacetime warp until only a fleeble drone is left. This leads seemlessly into the dark eerie Asunder, Sweet (6:15), which works like the overture for Piss Crowns Are Trebled (14:27), a lengthy threnody that soars and implodes in typical post-rock mode; but the pomp sounds artificial (and, again, derivative of folk singalongs). Inferior to Allelujah, this album sounds like a cheaper imitation (although the music was composed and tested live even before Allelujah was recorded). And for the first time it feels like the major project is Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra, not Godspeed You Black Emperor.

Godspeed's Luciferian Towers (2017) delivers some of their most user-friendly music yet. The cinematic droning of violins and guitars of Undoing A Luciferian Towers (7:47) soars into a wall of noise punctuated and perhaps driven by a psychedelic trumpet with a coda that sounds like the instrumental rendition of a folk singalong. The three-movement Bosses Hang (14:45) begins by turning a guitar riff that is a bit too reminiscent of Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man into a symphonic ode reminiscent of Joe Cocker's rendition of the Beatles' With a Little Help from my Friends. It then delves into a rather aimless jam that sounds like an extended version of the break in the Doors' Light My Fire. As a post-modern experiment in covering rock classics, it's intriguing, but plenty of cover bands do these things during their live shows. The violin intones a mournful neoclassical aria to jumpstart the three-movement Anthem For No State (14:38) but the rest is a tedious slow build-up that feels like a parody of their style. Basically, Luciferian Towers is an album built around Bosses Hang, which is itself a bit overlong.