bevedog

Hi all. I went to the Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) concert in Denver on Monday night. The band is a Montreal-based group with anarchist politics who play instrumental music that gets classified under the “post-rock” label. I think that means that they use guitars, bass, and drums, but play longer experimental instrumental pieces instead of rock songs. A typical GY!BE piece starts quietly with kind of a drone, and builds over 10 minutes or so into a huge noisy crescendo. I have been listening to them off and on since around the turn of the century and have really wanted to see them live.

I was supposed to go with Steve F., but he wasn’t feeling great. He had a headache and we agreed that going to the concert would not be great with the headache. So I went on my own. I missed him, but I don’t mind going to concerts, movies, whatever by myself. Plus, Steve and Jaybird wanted a concert report, so they gave me the impetus to get this written up quickly and share it with y’all.

While I don’t mind going out solo, I do have a little bit of inertia I have to overcome when driving by myself to Denver. I get near the northern edge of Colorado Springs and think “oh this is such a long drive, why bother?” But this time I figured I was mostly hungry so I got a sandwich rather than waiting until getting to Denver. Once I was fed, I was good to continue.

The Ogden theater is at the far end of the neighborhood where I lived in the 1990s, so I felt quite comfortable when I got to Denver and drove around the neighborhood, finding a place to park about five blocks away.

I got to the theater, through security and ticket check and the opening act started more or less immediately. Concerts seem to be much more on a strict timetable than when I was younger. These days it feels like the opener always starts right at the time printed on the tickets, the headliner starts exactly 30 min after the opener ends.

I didn’t care much for this opening act, which was a guy coaxing a lot of noise out of his guitar with a bunch of effects pedals. GY!BE also make a lot of noise and use a lot of pedals, but they have a lot more melodies and hooks than this guy did. I think it’s cool that the opening act is doing more experimental stuff, but it wasn’t something I could really enjoy in that moment.

I used the time to buy merch and look around the Ogden scouting for a good spot to watch the main show. I found one right on the corner of the first row of the balcony, which was perfect. I knew that the band wouldn’t be interacting with the audience, so I wanted to be able to see the film projections. I could also look down from there on the projectionist which was really interesting (more about that later)

The first two band members to take the stage were a bassist, playing an upright bass with a bow, and the violinist. They started a drone and the other six band members (three guitarists, another bass player, and two drummers) came on one by one and they kicked off their first piece.

The band dosen’t sing, and don’t even have microphones on stage. When I went to dubstep shows with Luke when he was a teen, he pointed out to me that they have elaborate light and video shows because the artist is just one dude in a t-shirt holding a headphone to his ear while twiddling knobs. Similar vibe here, where it’s six people staring at their feet to operate the effects pedals plus two drummers doing drummer stuff. So they have the film projections behind them so the audience has something more dynamic to watch. The films are loops that repeat every 10-30 seconds and are changed out frequently by the projectionist. Sometimes the projectionist would layer multiple projections on top of one another.

I was really impressed with this visual part of the performance, and it inspired me to want to continue shooting photographs. A lot of the same things I’m interested in photographing, like where natural and built environments coexist, and faceless monolithic architecture, were present in the GY!BE film loops. This video from a performance in late 2024 is probably the best one I have seen in showing how it looks from the audience (the sound recording is really good, too).

I had wanted to see GY!BE in person in order to really feel the music at full volume, and I wasn’t disappointed. I had read that GY!BE were louder than most bands, but also that this was old information from when they were playing full volume in small rooms. I didn’t think they were louder than the other bands I have seen recently, but was glad for my earplugs. I thought the Denver audience was extremely reserved; I didn’t expect dancing or a mosh pit, but sometimes I felt like the only person even nodding along. The music really made me want to move, to stim, like shaking my arms and legs, but I mostly stayed pretty still. Peer pressure.

At the end of the show, as kind of a reverse of the start, the various musicians set their pedals and amps so that they would continue to generate sound, and left the stage one by one. While they were doing that, the projectors were showing film of a person standing in front of a flame. I can’t be sure, but I think that the projectionist was advancing the film frame by frame and allowing it to sit in front of the bulb so it would melt and crack–I think this was happening in real time, which I thought was so cool. Here is some video I took so you can see what I mean.

GY!BE’s latest album, “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD,” makes reference to the attempted genocide in Palestine, so I wore my Palestine soccer jersey to the show. None of the hipsters in attendance said anything to me about it, but the young Black man doing security and the old white dude cleaning up after both said they liked it. Make of that what you will.

I stopped by the projectionist’s table to tell him I liked the show and was going to ask about the melting frames. He first looked at me like he was annoyed, but after I said something like “thanks for the fantastic show” he gave me a big smile. I didn’t push it by asking questions, though.

Google found me a coffee shop that was still open after 10pm (Bardo Coffee on S. Bdwy) and it was exactly what I want in a late-night coffee place. A half dozen or so people reading and using laptops and talking quietly, very soft music, and a cool barista. Drank my coffee, headed home, was in my house by midnight.

Great show, easy travel etc., only marred by Steve F. not being able to go.