GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR
Brighton Dome, Wed 28th
October
If I haven't seen Godspeed live for
something like a decade and a half, I'm not being quite as tardy as
normal. They were, after all, on hiatus for eight of those years.
On that last sighting my analogy for
their sound had been the workings of an American football team.
(Though I'm not even sure if they play American football in Canada.)
The enlarged ensemble divided into two teams; the acoustic and
classical instruments would lull you in, before passing the ball to
the electric section who'd take up and run away with it. (Think for
example of the early track 'East Hastings'.)
Whereas at this gig they had a string
section of one, violinist Sophie Trudeau. (Though a double bass
appeared from time to time.) And instead there's... count 'em... two
drummers, two bassists and no less than three guitarists. These days
tracks more commonly start somewhere between a drone and a wall of
sound, the piece then gradually emerging like a sculptor hammering
away at a block. Tracks were less neatly divided into sections, more
likely to morph and blend, to surge rather than develop. On more
recent recordings the patented sampled vocals were less predominant
and tended to be more incorporated into the music than floating above
it. (Considerably less dominant in the gig, which featured precisely
one vocal sample all evening.)
(In a side-note for music
trainspotters, though the setlist contained only two pre-hiatus tracks it doesn't
seem to have been the long gap which caused the musical change. The
pre-gap album 'Yanqui UXO' (2002) was already
transitional. While the comeback album 'Allelujah! Don't
Bend! Ascend!' (2012) comprised material which they'd
already been playing live pre-hiatus, suggesting they merely picked
up where they'd left off. The actual shift was marked, but by the
promotion of the exclamation mark from the end to the middle of their
name, a bit! like this Though what that's got to do with anything I
couldn't tell you.)
In short, they've dropped the
nouveau-classicism to become more sonically adventurous. Though some
still insist Godspeed are a prog band in disguise as something more
contemporary, there's really very little soloing and a great deal of
ensemble playing. I am not normally at all curious over the mechanics
of music, but was so often unable to conceive how they were conjuring
up their sound I took to closely watching people's fingers. (It
didn't help much.)
With their long-duration tracks
containing dynamic contrasts, describing their sound as 'apocalyptic'
is a little like describing Motorhead as 'loud'. On the other hand,
it would be difficult to write about Motorhead without mentioning
that they're loud... Back in the Eighties, some on the religious
right attempted to negate the threat of nuclear annihilation by
conflating it with the Biblical notion of the Rapture. (As if the
Godly would somehow get saved from the fallout.) We'd cite this as
proof of their rabidness, their nuclear apocalypse sounded to us like
the very definition of a bad idea.
Godspeed picked up on this theme,
the afore-mentioned 'East Hastings' even starting
with a recording of a blood-and-thunder street preacher. But they
were part of a shift towards embracing the notion, towards what some
called 'the ambiguous apocalypse'. This went back to the original
paradox of the word, with its connotations of both annihilation and revelation. You're never sure whether
Godspeed's tumultuous sound is of something collapsing or being built
up, or even if there's that much difference between the two.
Guitarist and quite possibly band
founder Effrim Menuck had this to say about their sound: “We hated… privileging
of individual angst, we wanted to make… a joyous, difficult noise
that acknowledged the current predicament but dismissed it at the
same time. A music about all of us together or not at all... For us
every tune started with the blues but pointed to heaven near the end,
because how could you find heaven without acknowledging the current
blues, right?”
As a chiefly instrumental band known to
have strong political views (for example including
a diagram on an album cover of the connection between the
mainstream music business and the arms industry), Godspeed's output
has led to the strange pursuit of pinning specific tracks to specific
topics. This one's about the Intifada, that one's about the black
bloc, and so on. Yet even were it to turn out a specific track had
been composed about cuts to tax credits or the closure of a local
library, that would really seem to miss the point.
As ever, Godspeed played beneath a film
show. (With projectionist Karl Lemieux even considered an official
band member.) And while this does include images of protests and the
like, it more often shows fragmentary and semi-abstract images of
urban spaces, or simply projections of the filmstrip itself. And
that's almost a clue for how to hear their music – as something
less specific than universal. As Mark Richardson said in Pitchfork: “Godspeed's music works so
brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an
edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that
feels at home in a bedroom.”
Below the film show, the band played in
similarly low lighting to Asian Dub Foundation the previous night.
Prior to the performance, they milled about on stage setting up
equipment, looking like a bunch of laid-back hippies uninterested in
showbiz entrances. Yet during the show they never spoke or even
seemed mindful of the audience, frequently playing facing one another
and with their backs to us. Particularly with the closing howlaround
of feedback, it was sometimes quite hard to work out when you should
be applauding! It led to quite a unique atmosphere, neither like the
formalised interactiveness of a 'gig' or the hushed attentiveness of
a 'recital'. 'Ritual' sounds too pious, too Churchy a term, but is
the closest I can come up with for now.
From Paris...
'THX 1138' WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK BY
ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION
Brighton Dome, Tues 27th
October
(Officially, this one features
PLOT SPOILERS. Though anyone who's ever seen an SF dystopia need not
be too concerned...)
A new 'Star Wars'
film may be in the offing. At least, I think I read about that
somewhere. So what better time for to revisit its opposite pole,
George Lucas' first film – 'THX 1138' from 1971?
(Which, with maximum irony given his later career turn, even starts
with a parodic excerpt from 'Buck Rogers'.) The
studio were aghast to see they'd invested in something so bleak and
what's worse so arty, and did their best to bury
it. Though even among the critics many reacted with hostility, and
the film really only gained its reputation in retrospect. This was
the highpoint of Lucas as an auteur.
The Seventies were of course not short
of dystopian SF dramas. And plot-wise, it's an unashamed mash-up of
dystopias already mapped, the numbers-not-names of 'We',
the surveillance state and productivism of 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four', the pill-popping of 'Brave New
World', the don't-try-this-at-home porn-fixated public of
'Year of the Sex Olympics'... and probably more.
But despite such blatant borrowing it remains highly resonant.
For one thing, its not a film that
really draws its meaning from plot or dialogue so it doesn't matter
much where it got them from. Present its scenario next to the later
'Logan's Run' (1976) and they'd seem very similar,
though it resembles that film in no meaningful sense whatsoever.
Instead its substance is there on the surface. As Roger Ebert, one of the few contemporary critics to actually get the film, said “the movie's strength is not in its story but in its
unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style.”
Firstly, and most unmissably, there’s
the sheer unadulterated whiteness of everything.
This may even be the film which launched the fad for white as a
signifier of the futuristic. (Though there were the hotel room scenes
in ’2001’.) Whiteness stands for purity and
goodness; in 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)
Heaven was depicted in radiant white, in 'The Man in the
White Suit' (1951) it manages to stand for both the
futuristic and the innocent.
Yet its also a sign of artificiality.
The whiteness gives a hospital antiseptic sheen and a valium calm
which permeate the film. Perhaps best summed up by the android cops
whose modulated voices reiterate “we only want to protect you”,
even to those they're beating.
But what kind of
artificiality? Though set in the entirely artificial environment of
an underground city, it was shot on location (in airports and civic
centres) rather than in built sets. The initial motive for this was
most likely financial. (The film was made for a pittance, with the
repeated dialogue references to budgetary constraints surely an
in-joke.) The viewer soon finds they can tell stage sets from
location footage on sight. Yet here we can't pin what we see to
either real or constructed, instead it occupies some uncanny valley
between the two.
Further, while something like the city
in 'Metropolis' (1927) is grand and distant, here
it's all too credible – even recognisable. If, like most of us,
you're an urban dweller, you pass every day through places which look
something like that. In fact our world now looks more like the film
than when the film was made. No terrible take-over or grand disaster
would have to come along to push us into that place. Its more that
something would need to happen to stop us slipping into it. (The
tag-line of the original poster was “the future is here”.)
And this recognisability is juxtaposed
with a highly elliptical editing style, which makes events
anti-involving. (To the extent that I initially worried the band had
re-edited the film to fit their soundtrack. In fact they had the good
taste to show the original, not Lucas'
adulterated “Director's cut”.) With the low-key
performances and the almost perpetual background chatter, it's shot
almost like a documentary. (It might work very effectively with no
soundtrack at all.)
Further still, the ceaseless borrowing
from other dystopias becomes virulent rather than just derivative –
like we're in the worst of all possible worlds. This was made in the
Cold War era, albeit with the first glimmerings of detente, when it was almost obligatory for dystopias to make explicit which
side of the iron curtain they were targeting. Here the unisex
uniforms, the fetish for productivism and quasi-militaristic work
shifts, the locking-up of dissidents are all familiar tropes of
'anti-communism'.
Yet the continual pill-popping (with
“drug evasion” a crime) and consumer therapy (“Let us be
thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be
happy.”) are recognisable features of dissident 'anti-capitalism'.
(Of course the sides in the Cold War were only ever the two sides of
the same coin. But the movies didn't normally see them that way.)
Similarly THX's work shift, on a production line yet technically
skilled, matches neither the image of blue or white collar work. (In
an ironic reversal to the standard automated utopia, we see people
working like machines to produce robots.)
And this unity of alienating systems is
perhaps best summed up in OHM, a combination of Catholic
confessional, watchful Big Brother and feel-good therapy. Should the
pills not be soporific enough, you can pop into one of OHM's
'unichapel' booths, where the platitudinous advice mixes the
Stakhanovist with Californian feelgood. “Let us be thankful we have
an occupation to fill. Work hard, increase production, prevent
accidents, and be happy.” (I particularly like “fill”.)
When one character comes across the
original OHM icon, the one replicated in all the booths, a monk is
both mystified and appalled to see him praying to it – and demands
he goes and finds a booth. For the power of OHM lies in his
prevalence, the copies more significant than the original.
...which takes us to one way in which
the film is genuinely original. Dystopias come stamped with a face,
like Stalin's mug being stuck up all over the Soviet Empire. Or if
not a human face then a malevolently sentient super-computer. Like
OHM there may be no actual Big Brother in 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four'. He may be a mere totem of power, a scarecrow
of dissent concocted by the regime. Yet the traitorous O'Brien
becomes Winston Smith's antagonist. Here, it looks at first that
THX's antagonist will be surveillance chief SEN. He maliciously
usurps his position to disrupt THX's forbidden love affair with LUH.
But rather than agent of power he turns out to be something of a wild
card, even a wacko, and they're soon locked up - and even escape -
together.
Because the real antagonist, the real
puppeteer... well, though reviews of the film often tend to terms
like 'oppressive' or 'totalitarian' there's no real sign there
is one. Perhaps, with everyone playing their part
in production, there doesn't need to be. In perhaps the most
dystopian notion of all its a society not held in place but locked in
stasis, the daily cycle repeating on rotation, alienated workers
producing their own alienation - not an autocracy but a feedback
loop. (It seems they don't keep to this in the novelisation. But then
novelising this film was probably a category error to start with.)
And this is captured in one of the
film's most striking points, the 'white limbo' sequence. This
essentially ups the ante to unleash whiteness beyond whiteness.
Dissidents and non-conformists aren't placed behind bars but stuck in
this white void. There’s no walls or bars holding you in, just the
sense there’s nowhere else to go, that over there is just more of
being here. In the end, THX simply calls bluff on this – he stands
up and starts walking.
This sequence supports a common reading
of the film – that its an allegory for Plato's Cave. Much like Lucas, Plato never
bothered explaining just how people came to be chained up in that
cave, only that they'd been there since childhood. And of course
there can't be a reference to their captors, since
their captive state equates to our reality.
Plato's Cave could also explain one of
the more bizarre moments of the film. Its established that people
here watch hologram TV. On walking out of white limbo, THX runs into
one of these hologram stars who helpfully points the way out –
straight out the screen. They turn and see where they have just
walked now shows a screen-shaped black rectangle. It's not just a
metafictional moment, like Jodorowsky's 'Holy Mountain'
(1973) its a wake-up call to its audience. Alongside Plato we might
want to quote Blake: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees
all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
The film has proved a gift for
samplers. Wikipedia lists eleven examples, with a particular favourite being
the medicine cabinet which asks “what's wrong?” when opened. But
for a soundtrack... the logical choice would seem cold electronica,
the sound of white. Yet significantly Lalo Shifrin's original
soundtrack didn't go for that. While with 'Clockwork
Orange', released the same year, Giorgio Moroder did
put its ultraviolence to cold electronica. For the film already
looks cool electronica enough, and the creatively
counter-intuitive choice of a world-flavoured muscly rock soundtrack
becomes effective.
In fact it works almost too well, for
it fits too neatly with flaws already present in the film. For,
despite its undoubted strengths, flaws run right through it. Much
like Julia in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', its LUH who
instigates the forbidden love affair with THX. But, perhaps typically
for a Seventies film, she's a mere plot enabler. The effects of her
actions fall primarily on him and she's soon fridged. (Well in this
case embroyed.) All of which underlines the way that heterosexual
desire is equated to 'normal living', like the couple unit is our
natural state. This is then laced with the whiff of homophobia, when
SEN tries to creepily insert himself as THX's new room-mate. (“It
will be good for both of us... we'll be happy.”)
And compounded with this... apologies
for the jargon... heteronormativeness is a hippyish form of
techno-fear. (Though of course, much like the sides in the Cold War,
there way never really much to distinguish hippyness from
heteronormativity in the first place.) On one level the film is
simply about the way technology is de-individualising, and so we must
escape it's artificial clutches and get back into the garden. Plato's
Cave becomes the hippy notion “it's all in your head, man”, the
all-enveloping city nothing more than an illusion you can choose to
un-see.
It sounds a strange paradox, a film in
which we're inescapably becoming components of our own machines, and
one in which we can leave Babylon behind to live out our lives under
the sun. But that is the paradox of the film, and perhaps the paradox
of its era too. As said over 'Quatermass IV': “It’s difficult to capture
in retrospect just how contrapedal Seventies culture was. And how
science fiction, which had always held to a view of the future which
was bifurcated verging on bipolar, was the ideal arena to capture
that.”
All of which becomes most apparent in
the ending. After there'd been no previous indication private
transport even existed, THX gets into a car. And what follows is a
classic movie getaway scene. And what could be more all-American than
a man behind the wheel of a car, going where he wants to go? And
the... there's no other word for it... driving beat played to this
sequence emphasises the he-man heroicness, kept up even after the end
credits like he'd punched his way out of the film.
It's true that even here there's some
masterful moments. Not least the point where his pursuers give up on
him after their operation goes over-budget, not one of the standard
scenes in action films. And Lucas has the sense to freeze-frame the
final shot, leaving things on an open note. But really, you wonder if
everything shouldn't have ended when the hologram showed him the
black rectangle and they stepped through it.
The critical reader... or for that
matter anybody who managed to read this to the end, might comment it
doesn't focus enough on the live soundtrack. They're right, of
course. But in my defence I have written about Asian Dub Foundation before. And
besides, here's a taster of the soundtrack in action...
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