by Tiffany Lee Brown

You’ve probably heard the fuss by now, if not the actual music. A collective of mysterious musicians from Montreal – where they’ve created their own scene including a venue, other cool bands, a record label – compose big, thundering instrumentals. Big, heavenly ones that caress the ear, course through the veins, and carve seductive landscapes before the mind’s eye. Big, heavenly, long instrumentals: like twenty minutes. With no vocals. As if to underscore their radio-unfriendly status, Godspeed You Black Emperor! say unfavourable things about the music industry, the media, and corporate reality. They are labelled ‘enigmatic.’

Then the band’s latest CD hits the Top 100 lists of 2000, in which critics are invited by various magazines to sift through the year’s releases. Our semi-obscure Canadian friends turn up in prominent positions. And is the double CD worth it? Many of us think the artfully orchestral Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven is brilliant, if a bit less spooky than the much-heralded Godspeed! release f#a#(infinity). On Lift Your Skinny Fists, they slam Wagneresque guitar and drum operas into moaning dirges and pretty string drones, all the while folding in found noise. They soar into unabashedly emotional territory, someplace beyond melancholia and way past irony. The results are intoxicating.

All this comes from a group whose original live concept was to play one note for an hour. I recently sat down with co-founder and guitarist Efrim to talk about it.

Signum: How do you guys view the creation process as it begins? How much of that is improvisation, and how you start structuring stuff?

Efrim: When we started off, there were just two of us. Then there were three of us. That’s when we started doing the long pieces; it was all single-note drone stuff. When we started adding people, we started adding chords, but it was still all based on a simple bass riff or a guitar riff, and building on top of that. It was all real simple ’cause as people were joining, it was like: there were new people, so everyone was a lot more restrained in the way they played… It created a situation where people were really listening and paying attention to these single parts…

I remember at the start, people used to ask us, ‘Isn’t it hard, writing with nine people?’ And at the start, it wasn’t, because that was the dynamic. It worked very simply.

Their numbers rose, then diminished to nine established members, after years of playing with up to fifteen musicians at a time. The lineup now includes Efrim, Dave, and Roger on guitars, Norsola on cello, Mauro and Thierry on bass, Bruce and Aidan on drums, and Sophie on violin. (The band and their publicist don't offer last names, though you can find potentially correct surnames from published sources online, should a stalking mood strike.) When it comes to music scenes, some Godspeed! members acknowledge coming from more of a punk rock than an arty or classical background. Perhaps that's why the writing process has grown more difficult as the band have become more established both in their reputation and in their composing habits.

Efrim: It’s become very hard to us to write. The way we write stuff now is we play sort of backwards, and we need to figure out a better way to do it.… People are coming in with all these parts, and sometimes that stuff is scored, sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it’s some notes on a sheet of paper, and sometimes it’s still chords. And then we sorta hack away at it. What’s happening more and more is we’re ending up with these short little parts that get sorta glued together, like the last four or five things we’ve written have all been like that.

We’ve been on this schedule for the last three years where we only write before we go on tour, which isn’t the best time to write. And then we hammer it out on tour. But at the same time, because we’re starting to play larger venues, I think we get shy and it’s not as loose as it once was, and there’s not as much improvisation as there once was. We’re trying to figure out how to get back to that ’cause right now everything’s pretty set for the most part.

Signum: Onstage?

Efrim: Yeah. There’s a complicated system of cues, like someone will nod at someone else, and that person will nod at someone else; the lengths of different parts are unspecified, but what happens in the parts themselves is set. There’s still room in the middle of that because there’s so many of us, there’s still room to sort of go off on a different angle, but it’s still pretty restrained. Does that make any sense?

Signum: That makes perfect sense to me because I’ve been in similar groups. Do you have something in mind for how you’re gonna break that down?

Efrim: No, because then it’s gets all complicated, you get into the personal histories of the people… I know we’re taking a break after this tour, and I think that’ll help a lot… I’m hoping that just by erasing the blackboard, then when we get back together it’ll break us out of the rut where we’ve been for the last year.

Signum: Is it still very invigorating to play?

Efrim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When it’s good, it’s great. And when it’s not good, it’s still pretty good.

 

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Photo: Godspeed You Timelapsed Emperor! (L to R): Norsola [cello] Sophie [violin] Bruce [drums] Efrim [guitar] Mauro [bass] Dave [guitar] Aidan [drums] Thierry [bass] Roger [guitar] Live in Portland, Oregon. Photos by Marshall Serna; illustrated by Mandy Catalano.