FEATURING
"NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, released by Constellation in 2024.
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Must music have a meaning? Does it have any other choice? Obviously, music need not be representational; its sounds need not be taken to depict anything, concrete or abstract. But what, then, to make of the fact that music can so readily bring us into a certain feeling or state of mind or situation? Surely, such music must be said to be conveying
something – something ineffable perhaps, but not void of sense.
Even this music, what's playing right now, seems rich in significance, despite its minimal elements. I hear in it an unsteady serenity, a momentary peace, an eerie quiet, the calm before the storm, electricity in the air, bristling, quivering, full of foreboding. And then, the sky begins to rain down.
The opening salvo is a simple motif on guitar, made jagged through layers of distortion and delay. But it is quickly joined by a cascade of supporting artillery: an unrelenting beat pounded out by the bass and the drums, a second guitar doubling the motif in a higher register, a counterpoint from a violin (or is it spiraling out of control?), the beat now hammered out by cymbals, propelling it on even further, and a third guitar, slicing through the burning sky.
At last, the full cannonade arrives, and it's immediately disorienting, as the downbeat shifts below our feet, the two becomes the one and the one becomes the four: one last cataclysm in a whirlwind of chaos.
Can there be any doubt as to what this music is trying to convey? It's hard to hear it as anything but a violent attack, a relentless assault, an inescapable blitz. Sounds howl through the air like missiles, made all the more terrifying by their patent coordination. The song's title describes it bluntly: "raindrops cast in lead". But there's another sound that can be heard, nestled deep within the maelstrom, an uncanny brightness amidst the unending destruction. I hesitate to try to say what it is. Some awful beauty? Some glimmer of hope?
And then, a reprieve; and then, a disorientation of a different kind; and then, a voice – something rarely heard in this band's almost exclusively instrumental oeuvre. And it's not the voice of one of the band's members; it's not even in their, or my, mother tongue. So let me translate:
Raindrops cast in lead Our side illuminated And then extinguished and buried and finished Under the perfect sun Under the body falling from the sky They were martyrs who fell Because on our side they are martyrs since before we were even born Those who tried and were killed for trying Those who died young, angry or old, and never saw the dawn Innocents and children and the tiny bodies who laughed and then fell asleep forever And never saw the beauty of the dawn "The beauty of the dawn" – is that what we were hearing earlier, barely audible beneath the barrage? Is that what we were hearing just before this, breaking through for a moment of interstitial tranquility? Is that what is now again being occluded, as the devastation starts anew? As we move into the song's second figure, a simple back and forth between two chords, between suspension and resolution, between tension and release,...
