This was never supposed to see the light of day.
If you aren’t a fan or familiar with the work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, then it’s maybe difficult to express just how utterly strange it is to get to hear ALF. It was an album recorded on cassette and there were 33 copies because that was all the Efrim Menuck could afford to make. It was lost. It was gone. The mythos of the album’s scarcity followed the band around, there are interviews in which they express surprise that it hasn’t already appeared online somewhere and for a long time fans either didn’t think they would ever get to hear this or that the album itself might not even exist at all by now. And then, in early 2022, it dropped onto the internet, first leaked on the infamous board /mu/ before being uploaded to youtube by some random 4chan lurker. The band then decided to seize the initiative by releasing the album on their Bandcamp page and by donating all the money to Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East to help fund much-needed water and medical supplies for Palestinians.
How to make sense of this, how to appreciate the infinite strangeness of history where what is thought to be lost can just one day turn up. This album is a rupture point, where the audience is brought face to face with the weird temporalities of art. With music especially, we think of recording as essentially an act of preservation but really advances in technology for both recording and distribution of music just serve to underscore how deeply fragile and contingent it truly is. Things can just be gone one day. You probably don’t even own your copies of the music by your favorite band anymore right -- and so access to it can be revoked by the gigantic platform to which you pay rent. And yet! There is something so genuinely wonderful about the old ways of illicit distribution bringing something like this back to the world. Art doesn’t obey the easy teleological laws of the market, its history is always contested and being contested and that which was lost can be not only remade or recreated but re-found in the most unexpected ways.
However, this brings up an important problem. Did the band want this? Did the band want this music to be widely accessible? How much control should the artist hold over the way in which art is received and understood and how much is even possible now in an era of digital platform distribution? The issue here isn’t money -- GY!BE has always had a deeply anarchish politics committed to internationalism, horizontalism, and democracy (Menuck tells a story about the band having enormous arguments about pay equality when playing festivals) so the normative argument for being anti-piracy just doesn't work. After all, you aren’t taking money from the artist when the vast majority of hegemonic platforms that host music aren’t giving the artist money anyway. Rather, in this case, the issue is a little more complex and a lot more interesting. Efrim described the album on the band’s Bandcamp page as a retirement letter and in the description makes the case that this has no relation to the band that followed.’ So here’s the question: who is this Godspeed You! Black Emperor and how are they to be understood in the light of what GY!BE would later become.
It is tempting to retroactively read this album into their later work, especially given that this is the *first* GY!BE album despite it emerging nearly thirty years late. However, this doesn’t have anything to do with the band and thus destabilizes what the philosopher Galen Strawsen would call the narrativity thesis of identity. The band was this and then became something else with the release of subsequent music and this forms a neat linear process that can easily be turned into a story that you tell about who or what this person or band is. Yet maybe it’s more interesting to reject the narrativity thesis of making sense of artists or even ourselves and instead allow for constant becomings, understanding art as less of a story and rather than articulation and embodiment of certain choices that within them show implicitly all of the choices and possibilities not taken.
This was the thought that came to mind listening to the album-opening, which sees the use of recordings but used in a less naturalistic way than on something like Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, before the urgent thrum of something like ‘Three Three Three’ kicks in, sounding like a punk noise track with its skronking guitar. The symphonic, movement-based GY!BE is not here -- the closest you could consider it would be a series of sketches. ‘I took a look around/all the people/dead/’ runs a lyric on ‘When All The Furnaces Exploded’ which could be seen as a predecessor of ‘Dead Flag Blues’ but becomes more interesting when it doesn’t have to be. What’s thrilling about this album is the way in which it allows for Efrim (because that’s who this version of GY!BE mostly is) to be a little more central, creating a fascinating tension with the obvious discomfort GY!BE have with the idea of a frontman or a star -- ‘it’d be cool if you just disappeared….I don’t know shit…I’m a write-off’ warbles a lyric on ‘Loose All the Idiot Dogs’ as listening, you feel the musician straining against the metaphysics of presence, looking for a becoming that would take multiple other musicians to bring about. At the same time, this is an album that includes “Ditty for Moya”, all lo-fi singing which is immediately undercut by the warped vocals of ‘Buried Ton’ which follows hard on its heels. There’s a kind of restlessness to the album (no wonder Efrim called it a retirement letter of sorts) -- a desperate searching for a way out, or through. What endears me to it is the extent to which this restlessness comes through on music recorded on a four-track with just a few people -- the incredible build of ‘No Job/Dress LIke Shit’ into a weird punk-prog racket that just as you start to think this could be a GY!BE track ends and launches into the album closer, the wonderful titled “Perfumed Pink Corpses From The Lips Of Ms.Celine Dion” another no-wave punk number that ends in gentle applause. I love writing about GY!BE but it should be clear that this isn’t them. What it is, is bursts of possibility, fragments, and ideas of a supremely talented noise musician, a window into a specific moment of time, the concretization of a kind of becoming. This isn’t a prequel to GY!BE proper, or something into which we can read their later evolution but a point in the assemblage, like looking into an alternate kind of history. How fitting for it to arrive out of nowhere then, a reminder that like art, history is a kind of restless possibility.
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