Review: ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2016: GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR Mesmerised The Audience

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Monday 6th March 2016

The Thebarton Theatre was starting to fill with a standing crowd as your correspondent gratefully sank into a balcony chair and a member of the Japanese band Vampillia screamed from the stage as other members of the ensemble wove their way through the audience waving a large flag. This was the warm-up band for Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Who are Vampillia, you ask?

According to their biography, "Members are consist of 3 vocals; the ugliest rock star Psychic Yamanashi whose voice is nothing but annoying. Another vocal is Death voice from wood cutter Mongoloid who is very manly with secret naive heart. Mysterious Opera voice from beastly monster Velladon. They are backed by 3 strings; Punk and Classic, Progressive, also by piano, twin guitars, base, broadcasting. Main drum is skillful Chikada famous of World's end girlfriend, and support drum is Tatsuya Yoshida from Ruins. There are Toyohito Yoshida from BOREDOMS as a guardian god."

I have to say that I agree with every word of this statement but feel the need to add the following. The extraordinary mixture of delicate classical music elements, giving way to thunderous death metal riffs as a screaming vocalist balances himself on a step ladder in the middle of the audience, is something not to be missed. Beneath all the clowning, theatre and irreverence lay a core of great musicianship and intellect. They were very good.

The contrast could not have been clearer when, after the interval, we returned to face an almost darkened stage, the atmosphere disturbed by a low drone.

Two band members entered the stage in the near dark and began, on double bass and violin, to build a shifting, shimmering, midnight lake, cold, and threatening to rise and lap the feet of the listeners.

Other members drift onto the stage, like wraiths in the gloom, and the repetitive, hypnotic insistence of the heavily effected violin and bass start to break and morph into something more complex, more harmonic, as it is joined by other voices.

Are there eight players on stage now? Did I see a ninth or was that a shadow? It is too dark to see anything very clearly as the only illumination seems to come from four film projectors playing the back wall of the stage.

Hope. The word is projected onto the flickering wall looking as though it was hurriedly and angrily scratched into the film by a nail.

Hope. The music builds without hurry, slowly forming into immense objects as blurred images of grey concrete buildings slide down the screens into the darkness below.

Percussion enters. The drums are not punctuating, though, they are illuminating. The sound of the violin is a voice as the guitar joins the mix, slowly but inexorably moving towards a rhythm. A majestic, almost classical theme emerges, rises, peaks and recedes leaving a minimalist murmur. We have moved on.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is an experience rather than a band.

The audience is led on a long and emotionally fluctuating journey that is brutal, merciless and breathtaking. It was an exhausting yet exhilarating ride. There is no contact between the musicians and the audience save the emotional one. There is no lyric, no verbal communication at all.

There is no individual to watch on that darkened stage. No leader or front person on whom to focus, just the flickering, overlapping images projected onto the wall and the shape shifting, enveloping sound. It is a very rare thing to witness such superb musicianship and utterly unheard of for it to be completely free of ego, as this was.

The members of the Godspeed You! Black Emperor collective were playing together, and we were allowed to attend. It was absolutely brilliant.

Listen to their music, here.

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