This is the first music “review” I’ve written, not only for the site but ever.
I’d meant to listen to Godspeed You! Black Emperor for years, though I don’t remember why. Ever since the salad days at Vancouver Film School back in ’09 their name has floated on the periphery of my musical consciousness. It took my brother passing away, and the subsequent ambivalent grief from that, to sit down and focus on listening.
That’s another thing: I feel that the act of listening to music is something that I did with tremendous seriousness in my youth and then it fell by the wayside as I got older. When was the last time you sat down, closed your eyes, and gave a piece of music your undivided attention? I used to do that all the time. In Japan it was easy, facilitated by a three-hour daily train commute. But since coming back to Canada, music has been relegated to the “score”— the background noise that accompanies my occasional car drives or to alleviate the tedium of a chore.
I think there’s as much value in the total absorption of a musician’s work as there is in the close reading of a piece of literature. It enriches and expands the mind. And I simply haven’t done enough of it.
I never knew what post-rock was until now, which is funny because the genre accurately describes what we were doing with our band RŸCHŬZ. Nor did I know that GY!BE was Canadian. But the rising crescendos this group brings their sorrowful soundscapes to are tremendous, inspiring, and glorious. They’re like the bridge/coda of Muse’s Knights of Cydonia though stretched to breaking over longer periods of time. I can see GY!BE as an acquired taste, and their discography has certainly helped me process this lingering sadness.
2025.01.12