Sometimes your past comes back to haunt you: “All Lights Fucked Up on the Hairy Amp Drooling ” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor on #neuguitars #blog #GodspeedYou!BlackEmperor
▶︎ all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling | Godspeed You! Black Emperor (bandcamp.com)
https://mega.nz/folder/xv4EjL6a#j3A53LqQIU0ty2S1Agzuvw
https://archive.org/details/gybealfothad
SIDE A
drifting intro open / shot thru tubes / threethreethree / when all the furnaces exploded / beep / hush / son of a diplomat, daughter of a politician / glencairn 14 / $13.13 / loose the idiot dogs / diminishing shine / random luvly moncton blue(s) / dadmomdaddy
SIDE B
333 frames per second / revisionist alternatif wounds to the hairkut hit head / ditty for moya / buried ton / and the hairy guts shine / hoarding / deterior 23 / all angels gone / deterior 17 / deterior three / devil’s in the church / no job / dress like shit / perfumed pink corpses from the lips of ms. celine dion
Let’s face it. Godspeed You! Black Emperor can even be unpleasant, with the aura of worship that has surrounded and justified them since time immemorial. But like every cult they too have their Holy Grail, their “urklang”, the sound, the moment from which everything was born, many years ago. The subject of such dedication and immaculate enthusiasm is a cassette, recorded in 1993, a 70-minute, 27-track collage made by 23-year-old novice college student, Efrim Manuel Menuck, which emerged online after a quarter of a century of anxious speculation by their fans.
“I always expected it would appear on the internet one day, and I always had this internalized thing of ‘Maybe I should get ahead of that and just put it out,'” Efrim Manuel Menuck said a few weeks later from his Montreal home, just before starting a tour with Godspeed. “But I don’t want to negotiate with that logic. I don’t want to have to do something because I ‘have’ to. Who wants to make choices or decisions based on purely external factors? “
Released in 1994 in two editions totaling 33 cassettes, the legendary tape had become a real obsession for Godspeed fans, to the point that several counterfeit versions have often appeared online, only amplifying the intrigue and mystery attached to it. The tape became a sort of Holy Grail, a hauntological obsession, to which the true believers of the band have often appealed, insistently asking for an official publication.
“I’ve worked hard at demystifying what the cassette was, and what the context of it was. People got hung up on what they thought was the more interesting story, the mystery of the thing, “continues Menuck” There’s nothing mysterious. It’s of its time, and it is what it is. “
On February 14, Valentine’s Day, the official recording surfaced on Bancamp, pledging all sales proceeds for the CJPME campaign to provide medical oxygen to the Gaza Strip. The 27 tracks, a kaleidoscope of slow gray riffs, fast punk, sharp instrumentals and manipulated samples, have been condensed into four oblique pieces. “No relation to the band that followed,” wrote Menuck, in an unsuccessful attempt to mark a difference between this old solo project and the drones and sonic tides that Godspeed would eventually deliver. A recording in pure DIY style, true low-fi, almost embarrassing in its primordial innocence. What had been defined as “a retirement letter”, a project carried out in 1993 in total poverty of means: a TASCAM Portastudio, a Hagstrom III guitar, a Yorkville amplifier and a handcrafted Roland Space Echo, actually became the embryo that led to the birth of Godspeed and their music. A year after making the tape and distributing the first dozen copies, one of the recipients asked Menuck to open a show in Montreal, prompting him to put together a band. Soon another invitation to play came, in New Brunswick, where Menuck sold another 20 tapes. More concerts followed, other members joined the band, more music was thought and created. When Godspeed began planning their debut LP, 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞, a rib, a riff devised during the late night jams that became All Lights, was extracted creating the opening theme for “The Dead Flag Blues”. Now we can all listen to it. The veil has been torn open and “All Lights Fucked Up on the Hairy Amp Drooling” is no longer that mystery we have been wondering about for so long.
“I was with a group of people, and we had engagement with each other. We were figuring out how to engage with the world together,” ends Menuck “That was a big missing piece in my life, and none of it would have happened if I hadn’t made this goofy little cassette.”
NeuGuitars 