6 July 2010
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Some random surfing prompted me to read about the acclaimed 1997 post-rock album F-sharp A-sharp Infinity from Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The pressing and inserts (taken from Wikipedia) look fanciful:
After one+ listenings I'm not sure I follow the breathless praise that they got for this, but it's still a solid and unique work. Not without precedent, much sounds like Slint's classic Spiderland (no, I didn't edit the Spiderland entry to add that) of six years earlier and both are children of Glenn Branca. I remember ordering a cassette of GB's Symphony #1 for electric guitars from a mail-order ROIR catalog back when it came out ~1983 and his Symphony #3 on vinyl around the same time. I guess a lot of other musicians did also. Contrast that lineage with the more chaotic and jazzy instrumental meandering of Don Caballero. Found the cassette buried in a drawer:
(The band took their name from a documentary about a Japanese biker gang called Godspeed, You Black Emperor, available at CINEstrike! Films. I'd originally found that site back in Feb 2005 when it was called 5 Minutes To Live.)
- The vinyl and the concert posted by sstrader on 21 May 2016 at 1:59:26 PM
- Rod McKuen posted by sstrader on 22 March 2016 at 8:58:35 PM
- More political transcriptions posted by sstrader on 20 March 2016 at 10:19:06 AM
- Notes on We Don't Care About Music Anyway posted by sstrader on 7 June 2015 at 1:06:34 PM
- Ives Concord Sonata posted by sstrader on 13 February 2015 at 5:13:17 PM