Disenfranchised Canadian outsiders Godspeed You Black Emperor! appropriate their lengthy moniker from a Japanese motorbike gang, probably via Mitsuo Yanagimachi's documentary Buraku Empororu. The collective was formed in Montreal, Quebec, in 1994 by Efrim Menuck (guitar), Roger Tellier-Craig (guitar), Bruce Caudron (drums), Aidan Girt (drums), Mauro Pezzente (bass), Thierry Amar (bass), Norsola Johnson (cello), Sophie Trudeau (violin), and David Bryant (guitar, tapes). That year's "All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling" was a cassette-only release, with a print run of just 33 copies and, notably featured track titles such as "Revisionist Alternatif Wound To The Haircut Hit Head" and "Perfumed Pink Corpses From The Lips of Ms Dion". Portentous by more than one definition, the collective creates romantically pessimistic music that is pretentiously weighty and full of unspecifiable significance.
Finding the world we live in "lost, violent and obscene", they explore eschatological concerns through atmospheric, apocalyptic rock. Importantly, their music is under-pinned with political intent (although they claim to encompass disparate opinions and standpoints). Unusually for such a politically-motivated band, Godspeed You Black Emperor! forge lyric-free music. Rather, they frame their compositions with field recordings and tape manipulation to create ad hoc narratives: on "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" (from the Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP), an increasingly agitated invective reads "I don't like the way the country's ran, don't you know? The American government, they're sneaky, they're very deceitful, they're liars, they're cheats, they rip-offs". A repeated, manipulated folk sample at the close of "Providence" (from F#A#") asks simply 'Where are we going?"
These monologues foreground the collective's latent anger and despair although whether such rants are intended to be taken as documentary or opinion is unclear. They are astute enough to find contradiction in Radiohead's anti-corporate politics while signed to a subsidiary of EMI Records and, equally, highlight their own short-comings in their decision to create music rather than pursue more direct political action: "I think there are forces of evil in this world", Menuck has stated in esoteric music magazine The Wire. "I think that global capitalism is just one inch away from being everywhere. I think that now is not the time to be frittering away playing in a silly-assed post-rock band." That said, permutations of the collective also create music under a number of different identities including A Silver Mt. Zion, 1-Speed Bike, Exhaust and Fly Pan Am.
