Godspeed You! Black Emperor live at HISTORY

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band that I discovered when I was a sophomore at the University of Waterloo. The professor of one of my Computer Science courses, Prabhakar Ragde, hosted office hours for students to ask questions in a one-on-one or small group setting, and he would announce these sessions by posting to the class newsgroup. He ended each of these weekly messages with a line like, “This week, I will be playing [name of album] by [name of musical artist].” I have a memory of attending his office hours with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven playing in the background, and I’ve been a fan of the band ever since.

This week, I had the pleasure of seeing GY!BE play at HISTORY in Toronto. Their latest album just came out about a month ago. I’ve listened to it enough that I recognized the pieces that they played, but not so many times that I wasn’t surprised by the way their compositions flowed into each other. If you haven’t heard their music, I would describe them as masters of crescendo: they introduce riffs and motifs in quiet sections with a single instrument, and then build layers of sound on top until the entire band is rocking hard with a beat that makes me want to jump up and down. It’s almost unbearable how loud and intense it gets, and then peters out, and they start over again, quietly, with a different melody.

This was my second time seeing them play, and I really believe that they’re a band best experienced live. There’s an energy to their performance that is somehow lacking in their recordings. As much as I love their music, sometimes I find that their album production leans too heavily on distortion, and the sound of the instruments doesn’t come through the fuzz. For example, in 2017, I eagerly anticipated the release of Luciferian Towers, because I had seen this video of their live performance of “Anthem for No State,” and loved it. (They often play new pieces in concert before making the studio recording, and they’re cool with fans capturing and releasing live footage.) But when I heard the album version of this track, I remember being disappointed, especially since the violin melody is low in the mix and echo-y, and doesn’t have the same emotional oomph, in my opinion. I wish that the band would make professionally-recorded live recordings, as that would probably become my favourite way of enjoying their work.

On a side note, I decided to attend the concert wearing my AirPods Pro in adaptive mode. This has the effect of reducing the volume of sound that reaches your ears, while still maintaining the quality of the music. I think it helps to minimize the discomfort that I can feel in my ears when the music is super loud. Further, because GY!BE uses a lot of distortion, I kind of got the sense that the AirPods were filtering out some of that noise, and that I could hear the individual instruments more clearly.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience, and GY!BE have cemented their status as one of my all-time favourite bands.