Call and Response

Today I took a long, early morning train journey. (In fact, right now I am still on it tapping this all out on my phone.) I have my big headphones with me. I’d been saving the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor record for a time when I could give it an attentive, uninterrupted listen.

There are very few bands I would still do this for.

I can’t write directly about the record. I’ve never been good at critiquing music by writing about it. I can say that after the first listen I have mixed feelings about it, but my immediate reaction is that it is, for me, the most compelling album of this latter era of GSY!BE releases. Or rather, it has the most compelling elements tucked away inside it. And I cannot fault the brutal, searing name they gave it: ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’.

I’ve said before that I think releasing music (or any kind of art) is to drop an anchor in time. It doesn’t have to be as literally as what GSY!BE have done with this title (although again - respect). To put anything concrete out into the world at any scale is to drop a marker into the tsunami of being alive. To send up a flare into the storm of history. To cast patterned ruins into the wreckage of time. Whatever dramatic metaphor you prefer. To bear witness. To enable the act of remembering. And also: to enable nostalgia, to risk future embarrassment, to become hopelessly out of date.

And we can navigate by these beacons left drifting in time, dimly illuminating pockets of the past. We can sketch out trajectories, patterns of behaviour, reconstruct fragments of the conversation we’ve all been having with each other.

This thought came to me earlier in the year. I was in the back of a car listening to a shuffle of somebody else’s music collection that spanned many decades. A new (to me) history of popular music, much of which I did not know. But there were still so many familiar cadences tumbling through the melodies, so many tried and tested chord progressions. The average shape of all the songs was the same malleable ball of shared ideas I recognised from my own personal history of music, a construct all of us in our own ways sculpt over time by how we choose to engage with it.

Listening to GSY!BE, the songs ‘BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD’ and then later ‘PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS’ gave me a feeling I haven’t had for quite a long time when listening to music. Sure, there’s the emotional heft of the noise in and of itself, that cathartic wave of despairing hope that GSY!BE do so well. That sense of solace and solidarity at hearing somebody make sounds that punch beyond words into the sublime, this language beyond language we all share but cannot wholly capture in thought.

More than that: it gave me an overwhelming urge to reply. To get to work. I have never met GSY!BE. I don’t know their names, don’t know how many of them are in the band these days. They have no idea who I am or probably who 65daysofstatic are. But it doesn’t mean we aren’t in conversation with each other. I think all music is in conversation with other, at all scales and all times. A discourse throughout history.

Many music critics, researchers and anthropologists have covered this idea from a historical materialist perspective. Examined histories of music from all angles, the genres, movements, cultural appropriation, colonialism, nostalgia, technological developments, commodification and so on, teasing meaning and understanding out of this centuries-old conversation.

All I can say from my own perspective as just one more small voice (like we all are if we choose to be) is that it is invigorating to recognise a strand that you feel you want to contribute to. To hear somebody yell ‘THIS IS HOW WE EXIST AND HOW THE WORLD SOUNDS TO US!’ and for it to resonate in a way that makes you want to yell back ‘YES! I SEE YOU! I EXIST TOO! HERE IS MY CONFUSED NOISE! HOPE IT HELPS!’

When I was younger I heard music that yelled this at me everywhere, all the time. Less so now. I cannot say if it is because I am older, or because I have been making music for twenty five years, or because the music I listen to these days rarely sounds like the music I actually produce, or because the nature of how people make, share and present music has changed so radically over the last couple of decades. Presumably some combination of all this.

Regardless, it’s a reassuring feeling. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold onto it long enough to channel it somewhere useful.