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Whether at a festival or an individual concert, some of the best musical experiences are waiting to be found. Maybe it’s the music or maybe it’s the performance that draws you. Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) played earlier this year at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees. I listened in advance and, for reasons I can’t remember, missed their set. But here they are, back again.
GY!BE is a Canadian band that most would agree falls within a genre of post-rock. Or, experimental. But it has to be described in some way. Rather than hooks and choruses and solos at the two thirds mark into a song, it’s more cinematic without a defined pattern but with an emphasis on feeling. Sure, it involves rock instrumentation such as drums, bass and electric guitar, but depending on the vision, other instruments come into play. For GY!BE, this performance included three guitarists, two bassists, two percussionists and a violinist (and other stringed instruments).
It was kind of hard to make out who was playing what, exactly, because their preferred stage lighting borders on dim or ambient. The house lighting provides a subtle reflection of red or blue against reflective instruments, but the lighting element is reserved for a backscreen displaying interpretive film clips. No individual was observed to even seek any audience acclaim throughout the show, though a couple members offered a wave as they left the stage after gradually turning off the electronics in the lengthy outro.
The stage arrangement was similar to a television sitcom, where all the family members sit along one side of the table and the ends to accommodate filming. That feeling of accommodation was similar here, and if they perhaps closed their circle, it’s easy to imagine that’s how they gather to make their music.
This wasn’t a first time GY!BE concert experience for many in the crowd. Even a security guard positioned himself where he could watch the 16mm projections… well before the show began.
The lights dimmed, a slightly modulating drone filled the theater, and… everyone stopped talking. That’s a rarity in live performances, more so when no one is on the stage. After four minutes, two members entered to polite applause and took positions to play violin and contrabass. Accompanying the drone, the projections began with dark splotches and lines racing by vertically as if from an old newsreel that marked the end of the film. That was the visual for “Hope Drone,” a song that gradually worked itself up the musical scale before other musicians joined to add fuzzy bursts of guitar, suggesting the “noise” in the film, percussion and other sounds. This would be a general model of what would follow with each composition (a much more accurate term than “song), a soft slower paced introduction that takes it’s time building to a lengthy, heightened climatic finish, with crashing drums, heavily fuzzed guitars, a more palpable sense of rhythm, striking violin notes and similar. It is a soundtrack after all.
GY!BE is an unusual name, taken from a 1976 Japanese black-and-white documentary which follows the the exploits of a Japanese biker gang, the Black Emperors. The band began in 1994 and has recorded seven albums through music labels (plus live recordings online), including their latest in 2021, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END which includes two 20-minute suites and two shorter pieces. This show included much from that release.
There’s plenty of instrumental, experimental “post-rock” music out there, but it’s rarely identified with politics. GY!BE is that type of animal, known for generally rejecting governing structures in favor of a freer utopian ideal. GY!BE’s song titles give some of this away, such as “Bosses Hang,” “Anthem for No State,” “Our Side Has to Win,” “World Police and Friendly Fire,” or the title of of their last album. So it’s somewhat surprising that much of their music is considered hopeful or optimistic in its overall tone, which it is. As from darkness to light, the progression from the initial somber tones and pacing in their songs rise through many sections to a dramatic catharsis at the end.
This plays superbly into what musically can be considered a “soundtrack” but absent a visual reference. Enter the black and white 16mm films presented throughout each show, where the visuals suggest a story that each audience member gets to interpret as the compositions unfold. The news reel, a WWII airplane silhouette rising and falling through the sky, a bird flying, hands (and the negative image of same) working the soil interspersed with images of industry, pollution and waste, fire juxtaposed with water hoses eventually revealed to be spraying at protesters, and so on.
If you come to a GY!BE concert expecting something different and challenging in the music, you’ll find it. If you find yourself having experienced art when you leave, you have to nod and think, “I’d like to experience that again!”
Setlist: