INTRODUCING - Godspeed You ! Black Emperor

From the depths of Montreal, Canada in the late 1990's a group of musicians with anarchistic leanings formed themselves into a collective and began making music together. They had no overriding concept or style to wrap around what they were doing.  The music that evolved makes experiments with form and progression, they feel as though they are freely structured as they flow in and out of intensity and moods. Though you might think each piece was largely improvised, the final compositions are far more carefully assembled and considered than you might think.

Their name Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a borrowed one , taken from a Japanese documentary of that name about biker gangs from 1976. The term 'post-rock' has been used as a rather lazy label to pin on their music, its not particularly descriptive nor self evident why. But if you break from conventions then you also depart from easy categorisation. So something purposefully vague like 'post rock' gets applied.

What would become the familiar patterning and elements in their music is present from the very first album. There are no songs or song structures, its only ever instrumental pieces. Recordings of ordinary peoples voices fade in or out, becoming absorbed into drone like guitars or violins. This melding could just as easily lead to a riotously wild out of control cacophony or a plangent simple musical guitar phrase that rises to an uplifting and exultant crescendo. Though 'post rock' they continue to use rock instrumentation for its dynamic tonal qualities but woven into an overall composition that could include anything.. They do this without descending into the stilted artifice of the avante garde, pseudo classicism or the pompous self indulgent virtuosic fiddling of 70's Prog Rock. Godspeed are far more human and 'Brechtian' in their approach than that.

The track 'Sleep' from Lift Your Skiny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven

The arc their music takes has great nobility. Its as though you are travelling through the grand sweep of a dramatic landscapes, where grim industrial grinding and grating suddenly reveals itself as the source for a heart stopping elegy, as if you've just stumbled into a beautiful vision by Blake.  I love to don a pair of headphones, pick an album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor to play, and do nothing else other than listen to it for over an hour and be taken on an auditory emotional journey. It can be one of the most rewarding musical adventures to surrender yourself to that I know.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, use album titles in an elliptical poetic manner, populated by capital letters, hash-tags and emphatic exclamation marks. These give little clue to the music held within, or how to interpret it. With each album there's been an increasing feeling of trenchant urgency and brevity, the music developing a harder edged, punchier more driven style. 

Here is a discography with links to You Tube ( my star ratings in brackets )

1997 - F# A#  ( **** )
1998 - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada (***)
2000 - Lift Your Skiny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven (****** )
2002 - Yanqui U X O ( ****** )
2012 - Alleluia! Dont Bend! Ascend! (*****)
2015 - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (****)
2017 - Luciferian Towers (****)
2021 - G_D's Pee AT STATES END! ( released 2nd April 2021 ) 

INTRODUCING - Eliane Radigue

The ensuing days of lockdown do strangely also provide time, space and opportunity to explore and expand horizons. To develop skills and experience in new areas, from personal creativity to what you watch, read or, in this case, listen to. If you want to hear music that possesses a sense of calm steady movement, then the music of Eliane Radigue maybe for you.

New musical encounters, for me, are often made through following up leads and connections from previous discoveries. For example, in 2020 I came across the music of Anna Von Hauswoolf this led to investigating on You Tube the avant garde drone pieces composed by Carl Micheal Von Hauswoolf, her Father. After that you can then pretty much leave the rest to You Tube's algorithm to keep throwing 'music you may like' suggestions at you. A few minutes in will tell you if what is being presented interests you or not. This is how I was led to try out the masterfully minimal music of Eliane Radigue. 

She's a French composer who has been creating her sustained drone based pieces since the 1950's, these began from exploratory compositions that utilised tape loops of feedback. This early experimental phase took a further quantum leap with the use of electronics from 1970. This progressed, technologically speaking, to using the ARP 2500 modular synthesiser, on which her compositions were entirely made for the following twenty five years. 

The orchestrating of these pieces, even when the recording technology improved, must have been incredibly long and arduous. Requiring immense perseverance and patience, just from trying to obtain the best alignment of the tape recorded elements. This frequently would involve starting completely again with the recording, often after many weeks of effort. Not losing your inspiration and confidence during this taxing working method, would have been extremely challenging.

At the debut performance of an new piece called Adnos 1 a group of music students approached her, they wanted to talk with her about her work in relation to Tibetan Buddhism. Over time Buddhist practice and the dharma appears to have become indistinguishably enmeshed within her musical Zeitgeist. Her musical ear developed still closer attention to the slow minute changes in tonal quality within the electronic thrums, spontaneously happening quite fleetingly in the moment. This increased awareness during the process of composition. also reoccurring later in the listener. The gentle arising and meeting of sounds sonetimes continuing over a period of an hour or more. The effect, should you surrender yourself to it, can be mesmerising. The closest encounter in musical form to a meditative practice.

From 2000 she abandoned her use of the ARP 2500 and started to write music purely for acoustic instruments. Though the medium changed, she still drew upon all she'd learnt attending to sound fluctuations when composing through a synthesiser. You might place her compositions within minimalism, electronica or drone, but each of those designations can never quite captures the essence and effect of what you actually hear. The way these soft tonal ossilations and the gentle melding of rhythmic tones can draw you in. 

Radigue works within a somewhat geeky musical sub-genre, one often dominated by male techheads. Her gender, the individual uniqueness of her approach and the chosen musical form have contributed to her sometimes being underrated or overlooked for a great deal of her 88 years of musically productive life. Composition for Radigue must then be an act of continual resolve, of devoted love, how else could she persist in making music? Today, when 'drone' based music is having this popular contemporary moment in the spotlight, there may be a chance of a long overdue rise in appreciation for Radigue's altogether unique body of work.

A few pieces by Radigue are available for download purchase. The rest you'll find either on CD, Vinyl record or to stream on You Tube or Spotify.

INTRODUCING - Anna Von Hausswolf

Her video's having popped up unbidden onto my You Tube account, I tiptoed into the sonic landscapes of Anna Von Hausswolf. At first I wasn't sure what was going on with all this church organ stuff and dynamic band accompaniments, did I like this?. Where on earth was this coming from?  Was it just too ponderous? It felt like this ought to be pidgeon holed as Gothic but then it definitely is not. Sometimes she sings like Kate Bush and then her voice takes a chilling turn and screeches away with all the guttural power of a Swedish Diamanda Galas. Over time and repeated listens, there is a lot going on here that I find interesting, and have really come to love her work. She is uncatagorisable, though there are a rich plethora of descriptive bandwidths to fit her in - neoclassical dark wave, ambient pop, art pop, ethereal wave, experimental rock, drone. None of which are truly fit for purpose, but can be touched on for brief moments during one single track.

On her first album Singing From The Grave, there are only lyrical hints of the direction she'll later take. Quite carefully constructed songs accompanied by piano with the occasional unconventional arrangement. By Ceremony two years later she's discovered the richness of a church organ and the full Anna Von Hausswolf sound has emerged. This became her breakthrough album, it is dreamlike and suffused with complex imagery, from a world where reality and that of a foreboding folk tale meet. It displays a more diverse range of styles, from the unnerving to the frankly catchy pop tune of Mountains Crave

With each succeeding album things become more darkly sinister, the tracks longer and plunge in much deeper. Certainly by the time you get to Dark Magic's stand out track The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra you can sense an affinity with the grand guignol of Nick Cave's early work with the Bad Seeds, and the aforementioned Diamanda Galas, poking through. Its simply so out there it verges on the edges of sanity. But it is terrific stuff.

After Dark Magic the only place to go was to strip back to the basics. All Thoughts Fly is completely instrumental, no singing, just the organ and electronics. Recorded on an old organ in the sight specific acoustics of its church. The track Sacro Bosco typifies the ambitions of this album. with a brooding atmosphere, full of apprehension and dread. 

She was brought up in a creative environment. Her Father, Carl Micheal Von Hausswolf is well known in Sweden as an avant garde composer. His long layered electronic drone pieces resemble the sounds of industrial machinery as heard through several layers of concrete. At times Anna uses the organ's ability to sustain and layer notes on top of each other to create a third ringing sound that is reminiscent of this aspect in her Father's work. As on this track The Miraculous.

Her videos are often made by her sister Maria Von Hausswolf who is an award winning photographer, filmmaker and performance artist. Visually they are bleak companions that expand on her younger sisters musical psychology. These videos frequently show figures travelling through a forest, a cave or a desolate landscape populated only with overgrown ruins. Its as though we are being taken through a subterranean inner world, through someone else's dream or nightmare. Here nothing makes sense, nothing can be explained, yet it feels all too real.  Anna Von Hausswolf's work is well worth exploring.