Godspeed You! Black EmperorMette Rasmussen is an experimental free-jazz saxophonist from Denmark (now based in Norway). To say she's challenging is an understatement and her set gave no ground. We met Rasmussen on her own terms. Wild tangential phrases and explosive pitch-shifting made it hard to enjoy, but there was something to admire in the bedlam.
The members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor behave like ascetic monks. They don't interact with each other at all, yet each have their place on stage among their instruments and all contribute to something bigger, something they hold sacred and believe in, something profound. They've always been political. Humanists, ultimately, but doggedly left-leaning and radical in their thinking. This doesn't necessarily translate easily on stage, so they use scratched reels of footage to evoke ideas of loss, of passing, of change, of struggle, of banal malice and uncompromising hope. Indeed, the word "Hope" is scratched onto the frames themselves, flickering in sharp contrast to the bombed-out architecture and dark nightmare pastoral landscapes skating passed the lens. Visually, they haven't changed since their last visit, but that doesn't diminish the power. Pressing home the same vital message is important, now more than ever.
Sonically, they didn't reach the same crescendos. The venue itself didn't do them any favours, the hard surfaces and poor mixing warping the lower end into monstrous shapes that clashed with a mashed-up mid-range whose details disintegrated in the milieu. The music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor reflects their ideas of chaos coalescing into harmony and positive force but, as waves of violent distortion began to ebb away, the clarity and catharsis we expected didn't arrive. Climaxes were softer, or perhaps more palatable, but the sound was still thunderous and murky.
They moved through several tracks from their latest, Luciferian Towers (a play both on capitalist temples and the tragic tower-block fires in London) and they are incendiary songs, furious and dense. These were clear standouts that rose above the muck.
