Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Cirque Royal, Brussels, April 29, 2015

An exercise in the electricity of sonic recollection and the futility of remembering.  

On his way home the artist – imagineer Alain Ayers found he had accidentally recorded the entire concert on his mobile phone that was in his pocket throughout.This piece was written while listening to the somewhat poor and yet atmospheric recording in the following days.  

The new members of the Black Emperors biker gang featured in MitsuoYanagimachi's documentary God Speed You! Black Emperor,1976, introduce themselves looking more like teenage 'beats' than a biker gang. Being in the gang is more important than any idea of getting into trouble but a biker gang attracts trouble and its own share of ritual harassment. The cops are never very far away...“they want me to lead a decent life”...one of them reveals to a friend. The young men appear to be rebelling against the impossibly numb economic miracle of post war Japan and of course, their loving families. The gang leaders switch between being reckless to socially generous to handing out discipline. The guitar fuelled soundtrack sits alongside the racing engines of Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki,Yamaha, the motorbike culture that took over the world, here with a hint of Murakami cult narratives and some Ballardian future proof, fuel injected dystopia. Belonging to the group means that you belong to something, you're not a 'dropout', a nothing.

We know the 'post-rock' Montreal group favoured the flm enough to borrow its title and inspiration. Quebec province in the 60s and 70s was in a state of heightened politicisation, looking out and away from the North American dream. René Lévesque's, separatist politics with Parti Québécois had been in the ascendancy and Pierre Trudeau had become cool, as well as troubled, when his wife Margaret ran off for a while to fool around with the Stones. In 1979 they had to atone from one of Keith's most serious drug busts in Toronto, with two free concerts in Oshawa, with the proceeds going to the blind. It was all over the news and Canada came across more like their noisy southern neighbours.

The stage for Godspeed You! Black Emperor is an electric garden - equipment carefully devised into sonic play stations. Instruments are attached to fx boxes that are cabled into other boxes into other equipment into other amps into other decks into other sound systems. But looking at it closely it's not really that complicated, the logic trips into it's sonic potential and without the band it could be seen as a contemporary sound art installation without the self conscious aesthetic, a ragged beauty.

They drift in like slow burning embers, one by one, plugging in and setting in motion a note and a tone, a beat and a slow rhythmic drone. A violin cascading slowly, swaying in a folk medium with a rising drum pulse and guitar notes caressed along a wave-crescendo, rising and falling into improbable riffs, tuning obscurely into melody, repeats and drops. Further. The great invention is no singing, no voice, no lyrics but lyrical agonistic dimensions stream you along and up and beyond. You might catch a thought that it echoes music you heard somewhere, back long ago or will hear in a far off place. Timings and playing with the fateful organism of a crystal orchestra. It's going to find you, wherever you are. It's going to fnd you and it's not going to leave you behind. You won't be abandoned or ripped up. They're going to take you along, you can give it up, give yourself up, give up what you brought along. This is going to be a gathering alright, we're going to be swept up and swept along and it's going to be ok. It's going to be better than ok, it's brilliantly elliptically thrilling, it's brilliantly elliptically staggering and stunning. It doesn't sound like anything you heard before, it sounds like something you always have heard, or been hearing or will be hearing. It is a glorious homage to sound and to being together and gathering together what feels important, for all of us, for all of us that are here and were here and will be here. Rise up children, oh - rise up all sentient trial and tribulation, rise up young people, young men and women, old people, old men and women. 

The unsung murmurations say rise up and fly or spin or float or dance or dream.Throw out everything you no longer need, you no longer require, you no longer want or that you no longer have time for. Drive on through the night, aflame with the wars of the world, drive on to the high ground, drive up into the high plateaus where you will surely find the light of your life. The place where the pulsing bell, the bell of the soul, the bell of street fighting nightmares will beat out the path to freedom and to beat away the oppression and stigmas and cursed signs from the fake gods, false prophets and slave masters. The metallic void pulses, beating out the evil spirits, driving us on, the highway, the country road, the secret pass, the footpaths, the animal tracks, the moonlit and sunlit ways that are going to redeem you from all of your errors and bad times and disgust and dissatisfaction. Listen, listen to the howling wind, the howling that is also crying, that is screaming that is actually laughing all the time, as we ease ourselves from the stupor, the drug of sleep, the drug of incandescent fear, the drug of time that competes with our possibility to see between black and white and the colours. The drug of stupor that falsely slows the pulse, that dims the rainbow, that switches us off, while everything is becoming switched on fast and so fast that no speed is involved. Slide along the stringed butterfly wind of the collective effortless. Godspeed you! Riptide and tsunami of your miserable doubts, your lacklustre display on not hearing the jazz and the free flow and the drummer who is laying down the rails, constructing the road back home, because it's your home, your true home, your true place of abode, the place you were once, the place you always were, where you are coming home to and it's our home. Do you see yourself, do you recognise yourself there, see yourself here, see ourselves now? Once you were walking by that river, you picked fowers, you smelt the clean air, you crossed the bridge, you took the long walk through the woods, you listened to birds, you saw the animal tracks and I saw the wolves too. Even though you were delightfully lost, you knew everything lay ahead, not in the past, the script was empty, my story unwritten. The bees buzzed, the bats circled in the dusk, the sky displayed all of its hues, ran through the pastel patchwork of evening, slowly into night. You were never lost and the music was your guide and here I am now. Even now the music guides us, the violin sketches out the melody of the present, radiates a flow, draws out the way that things will happen, the past present, the unknown present, the future scape scratching in the pocket of dust, the pocket of shapes that promises a jewelled cave, together, apart, meeting, meeting again and again, the grand arc of reunion. We could pray. It might work. A pocket of desire that is never found to be extinct, and a pocket of flaming fire that stitched destiny into all of its seams. How did we know, how could we ever know and how could we have ever known as it was noted, was told before, was predicted, performed ever after or ever since.We had it all and we now have the way the Black Emperor chords and strokes and beats and pulses the harmonics back to life. You may go round and you may go down but you will also come up again, to surface and to resurface and to surf the light. When it's heavy it is not always so heavy, a finer tone reaches out to sweep you up and on and out, to outer places, of there and here and of outer beyond, of nothing because we know that the nothing is more than something, and the becoming all encompassing. Circularity finds no pleasure in describing its way as a map or a narrative or a geometry that you can count out in time as a religion or a philosophy or an algorithmic zen. Better get ready, better be prepared, better feel the vibrations. Here it comes, zipped along the radiant notations, repeats, repeats, repeats of the beats, stepping it out across the stones, across the stage, across the gateway, across the connecting minds, the synaptic curves on display like a trillion million zillion l.e.d.'s, a mixing desk of mind, what you're hearing, what you're hearing now as they play and as they are playing along with, what you're not thinking about, not saying, not wondering. You're not wondering because you are, and we are you and went through the loop, curled right out into the deep flora and fauna of time together, when we were always together, before we fragmented and as we fought to coalesce in the mud and the slime and the genetic mutations, before we got here, as we were arriving, as we formed ourselves together as a species and a cast iron infallible god fearing universe, that was falling, failing, falling uncontrollably and recklessly into mortal behaviour. When we became human we couldn't stop ourselves, I couldn't stop myself, some other more dynamic, more dangerous, endlessly mysterious, treacherous force was upon us, in us, inside of us, inside all of us, within me. Our bones, our tissues, our limbs, our bodies and brains infected with an unrealistic life energy with no purpose, no goal, no impulse to transcend, only the urge to ascend. Forever and never possible to contain, we sway and we rock ourselves to the end of the night, to the melodies that our earth-mothers hummed and incantations that our fore-fathers whistled and drummed as we wandered our seasons in hell. Stormy days and stormy years followed by centuries of stormy, timeless time.The mind, a stormy sea if ever there was one, in reverb, in echo, in strict time, in loose arrangement and loving harmony all gone wrong, all alright, wrenched into the twinkling of a light beam through invention, all wrought in the twinkling of an eye through imagination, made up, thought out of time and out of timeless time and out of our chaotic sublime. Quiet now, quiet now; don't stop even if you are quietly moving around the circle, arcing from one place to another, listening as she strokes, as he heaves, as they climb the sheer walls of sound+scales, as they shelter, as we also took our shelter, as they wake, as we awoke into some new dawn or other. Feedback, something sweet, even sentimental, dirty ecology of poetics of projection, then film and video, screen-composed, with and for and against the sound, skipping jumping racing harassing, four projectors beaming across the space, four apocalyptic light beams worrying the air in a celebrated zone of uncertainty, a zone of obscurity, a zone of impenetrable joy that cloaks and robes the players across the flying v,  staged with drums at the back, bass, violin, guitar to the right, bass, guitar, guitar to the left, vast length of mixing desk to the right, space ship console straight ahead, projections further out and above. The circles of the Cirque Royal a mothership, see the sky about to fall, see the author of Amelia emerging from her coma, see anything that you are meant to, was going to, are about to and remain fearless, be loving, be courageous. Courage mon amour.  It's not dark yet. Godspeed you!

Behold the mothership that lands in a quartier somewhere near you

© alainayers 12.05.15