Soundtrack To The End of History Part Two

On GY!BE & Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)

Did we win? Did we make it? Have we all survived?

Those are the first questions that come to mind when listening to the opening of this album. It opens with the first movement entitled “lift your skinny fists like antenna” -- made up of tremulous brass instrumentation, plucked strings, and warm timbre cello notes. There’s something very beautiful and hopeful here, after the relatively uncertain and ambiguous close of the previous album. What I love is the track name and the wonderful ambiguity of that word ‘your’ which can be both an individual and collective mode of address. Antennae are receivers and transmitters too, so here we have the potential for the acquiring of a new signal and the rebroadcasting of it to the wider world. It echoes something that Mark Fisher said about his K Punk blog -- K punk was a signal, a modulation, a frequency for some outside coming inward and it’s one of the things that I think most people resonate with in terms of the work of GY!BE. When the signal is received, when the antenna picks something up, then consciousness itself gets re-wired. Or, to put it in somewhat old fashioned language, consciousness gets raised, alongside those skinny fists. This opening movement: it is a sunrise, new dawn continuing from F#A# - no explosions, no grand moment of climax, but a kind of discipline of form. What’s needed is for victory to be held -- one could easily read this in sonically Leninist terms but the band refuses the idea of a central organization (again, this links back to post-rocks refusal of the metaphysics of presence). This album as a whole demonstrates that GY!BE works against hierarchical and centralised notions of organisation favoured by the rock band historically speaking without utilising an improvisational looseness and total horizontalism.

But as Gathering Storm/Il Pleut à Mourir [+Clatters Like Worry]  begins it becomes clear that the victory and triumph of the opening are not secure. Form becomes reified, something static and ossified. The track is rife with a kind of ominous calm, distinguished by the plucked guitar vs. screwdrivered noise. Additional strings appear humming in the background, cranking up the tension. The movement shifts away from the high point of the opening, now the question seems to be when will it all go wrong? When will it all fall apart? Much of the first half of the album has really clear thematic and sonic links to F sharp, A Sharp, Infinity and that is at its clearest here. What’s been ramped up is an affective paranoia with distortion and tension throughout without any of the catharsis or release of something like The Cowboy from the previous album. +Clatters Like Worry is sludgy, punishing, and something sonically crowded. Really it’s a track that forces the listener to confront the fact that the new world is something fought over, the present is a wreck, and thus the future must be salvaged from the debris and noise of collapse. Hope is not a feeling or emotion but is an active practice in the world, but even so small moments of hope can be drowned. It ends with what sounds like a train crash - history can be run off the rails and the survivors chased down and hunted.

From there we return to the familiar street recordings though with a slight twist. With “'Welcome to ARCO AM/PM...' [ L.A.X.; 5/14/00]” the message is less about the psychoanalytic engagement with the repressed side of mass culture and more about the slow appropriation of this ether space into the network of capitalism itself. No street preachers here, just the corporate monopolies, ‘we discourage any contact with these individuals’ comes the cyberpunk tannoy announcement. For the corporation, the other is both a threat and liability and the solution to it is yet more rampant paranoia 

It’s the final two movements of the second track that close out the first half of the album. In Chart #3 We return to the religious broadcast and, as per usual with this group, it can be read multiple ways. There’s something here about the revolutionary zeal of dedication - it takes a death, says the preacher as in the background elegiac violins swirl -- you will believe you're mad/you will believe you’ve gone insane. But, the preacher says "when you see the face of God, you will die and there will be nothing left of you, except the god-man, the god-woman, the heavenly man, the heavenly women. Once again, GY!BE return to this notion of new kinds of subjectivity -- I don’t for a moment buy their own investment in the religiously inflected language of transcending the self toward the divine but there is something here that seems to be constantly cutting away at the idea of an atomised and singular notion of consciousness. The issue is not what we are, but what we might become.   

From the internalities of the previous track the next, World Police and Friendly Fire (which is my personal favourite movement in the whole album) underscore the degree to which the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity requires a new world and that both external and internal transformations will meet with staunch resistance. Aurally things return back to the plucked strings and paranoiac violins, almost like a countdown. There is a constant build-up, which is almost unbearable before the explosion -- a moment of huge scope, a massive sludgy guitar noise, undercut with glockenspiel and buzzing strings. It’s the soundtrack to war in the police state. We hear a kind of sonic accelerationism, which almost unbearably ends on something disquietly close to a human scream -- it is the music of Edvard Munch, a representation of the absolute nightmare of modernity. 

After that [...+The Buildings They Are Sleeping Now] is almost a relief and the second half does shift in subtle ways away from the direct confrontational outbursts of the first. But in the deep noise of the opening half’s closing moments, the listener is invited to reflect on where things end. Closure is not always so neat and straightforward and the echoes of the traumatic assault of WP&FF linger. Take a deep breath.

After such a dramatic first half the opening movement of Sleep titled Murray Ostril: '...They Don't Sleep Anymore on the Beach...' - seems almost too simple. It’s a recording without any political or theological angst. It’s just nostalgia but doesn’t make the past into something that must be returned to, rather the vision of history becomes the means for us to understand the present and the future at the same time. The past as recalled here is hauntological - “I remember how things used to be/I feel very bad’ says Murray. How much have we lost? This is something that I’ve written about before, but the present is marked by a collapse of the possible. Things that we once had disappeared, sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal necessity and then to speak of them again is, in some way, to be a utopian. The past is gone, and the future is cancelled - sleeping on Coney Island Beach becomes just one more of those things which have been removed from the realm of the possible. 

Unsurprisingly then, the next movement, Monheim thrums with a kind of melancholia. There is thunder in the distance and the whole thing feels deeply mournful. More screwdrivered guitar return and build in intensity over military-style percussion - a funeral dirge that turns into a scream. Yet one thing that is always so impressive about Godspeed is that the group always has the capacity to do something new. Just when it would be easy to see them as wallowing into a hipster miserabilism something like Broken Windows, Locks of Love Pt. III comes in. Starting with chimes, it’s almost delicate, punctuated by surprising drumming patterns it solidifies into a noise that is damn near danceable. It is by far the most optimistic moment on the album and genuinely joyful. Not for nothing in the Pitchfork review of the album does it say that  “Part of you will say: why can't it all be like this?”  There is more to the world than a nightmare - intimate togetherness that marks those struggles for a new kind of collective subject. Once again, their music poses the question of what signals might we pick up when we lift our skinny fists like antennas to the heavens. 

Moya Sings 'Baby-O'... starts with a traditional folk tune, as the group return back to the flotsam and debris of history. Perhaps those street recordings can be seen in the context of GY!BE as Gothic Marxists, recuperating the debris of the past not as something that has to be overcome but something that can reveal a possible future here among us. Yet in this track, the past is swallowed by processed machine noises. Understood this way then, I came to appreciate the movement titled She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field. It’s redolent with bursts of joyful noise, dipping in and out, like sunlight, a kind of ambient happiness.  An instrument of labour dreaming of freedom from labour - what do you dream of asks GY!BE and what could be more utopian, more perfect, than a dream of a rural idyll, a space in which we no longer need to concrete over the world and can, at last, be free to enjoy it. 

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