Godspeed You Black Emperor! HHV Records 10 Items

...like Antennas to HeavenAfter two years of constant touring and near-unanimous critical acclaim, Godspeed You Black Emperor! assembled a collection of new recordings that charted the creative evolution of the band as well as its literal physical movement on the road, criss-crossing North America and Europe. Five expansive full-band compositions are framed by various field recordings, tape manipulations and ensemble pieces in a return to the narrative sonic collage techniques that marked their 1997 debut (F#A#8). Four seamless sides of vinyl unfold a world of aching sadness and beauty, with musical quotes ranging from heartland americana to mitteleuropa folkways, all distilled through the unique sonic filters of Godspeed's pedal-crazy orchestral rock instrumentation. Harrowing guitars, plaintive strings, pulsing basses and explosive drums combine with glockenspiels, horns and tape drones to form an overwhelming palette of sounds, always driven by fierce melodic momentum and intense emotional resonance. GYBE! continued to paint on an impossibly large canvas, with an uncanny blend of world-weariness and naive exuberance that spoke volumes about the conflicts and contradictions permeating our political and cultural life. The tension between humility and hubris conjured an epic scope and a raw hope that such sweeping gestures might survive with some semblance of substance.

THE PLAIN TRUTH==we drifted through it, arguing.every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.we sat down together and wrote it in one room,and then sat down in a different room, recording.NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.the sun setting above beds of ashwhile we sat together, arguing.the old world order barely pretended to care.this new century will be crueler still.war is coming.don't give up.pick a side.hang on.love.

First album in 10 years! 180 gram LP in tipped-on gatefold jacket. Includes 7" vinyl + 12"X 48" pull-out poster!

Godspeed You Black Emperor! - F# A#

Our second vinyl-only release from Godspeed contains two long songs, and sets the bar for the sprawling compositions that would characterise the group in the years to follow. Side A is cut at 45rpm and features "Moya", a broiling cascade of upward scales that repeatedly explodes beyond its own threshold. "BBF3" on Side B clocks in at 18 minutes, and was the band's most lyrical, multi-movement music to date - more elaborated melodic figures wind around an angry spoken-word field recording (infamously culminating in the recital of the speaker's poem - verses lifted straight from Iron Maiden). Both songs were recorded with Dale Morningstar at the old Gas Station studio in Toronto.

GYBE returns with another soundtrack for our times, like only this inimitable and venerable ensemble can forge. As the heretical impudence of the anarcho-punk title implies, Godspeed harnesses some particularly raw power, spittle and grit across two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the band's most soaring, searing melodies ricochet and converge amidst violin and bassline counterpoint. Field recordings and roiling semi-improvised passages frame these fervent epics, and two shorter self-contained 6-minute pieces find the band at its most devastatingly beautiful, haunting and elegiac. Poignant atmospherics, noisedrenched orchestration, drone, hypnotic swingtime crescendos, inexorably-layered towers of distorted clarion sound: State's END encapsulates every beloved facet of the band. Twenty-five years on, this new album is as vital, stirring, timely and implacable as any in Godspeed You! Black Emperor's storied discography. Just as State's END summons the gamut of Godspeed's constituent sonic trademarks, so the album artwork spans the entirety of the band's visual history: the grainy monochromatic photography of recent releases finds its way onto the inner sleeves, while the gatefold cover art harkens back to the iconic graphics of earlier classic records like Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. State's END features illustrations by William Schmiechen, with the front cover taijitu flowers and back cover tear gas canisters rendered in raised thermographic black ink on the double-vinyl album jacket. The illuminated cross from Godspeed's debut F#a#8 also makes a reappearance on the inside gatefold drawing, in recurrent homage to the electrified hilltop landmark crucifix of the band's Montreal hometown. State's END was recorded and mixed in Montreal in October 2020 at the group's homebase studio Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango by Jace Lasek, the veteran awardwinning indie producer (and co-founder of The Besnard Lakes) who works with Godspeed for the first time on this recording. Thanks for listening. OUR Side HAS TO WIN. (R.I.P. D.H.)

The seventh record by Godspeed You! Black Emperor will be released 22 September 2017 on Constellation.

‘Luciferian Towers‘ was recorded during the winter of 2016/2017 at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango, with Greg Norman once again engineering and co-producing (as he did on the band’s previous album ‘Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress‘).

The music on ‘Luciferian Towers‘ took shape over the past two years, amidst GYBE’s collaborative performances with the Holy Body Tattoo dance company’s monumental, and spurred by the commissioning of new compositions memorializing the 100th anniversary of the WWI Battle of Messines, which premiered at a live concert event on the site of the massacre at Heuvelland, Belgium this past June.

‘Luciferian Towers‘ is Godspeed’s third album since the group’s ‘reunion’ in 2011 and their second consecutive single LP-length record (following three double-album releases in 2000, 2002 and 2012).

this, this long-playing record, a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children. eyes up and filled with dreadful joy – we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward. we recorded it all in a burning motorboat.

(context as follows:)

1. UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS – look at that fucking skyline! big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen- the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!

2. BOSSES HANG – labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! kicking at it, but barely hanging on! also – the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! also – more of us than them! also – what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades!

3. FAM / FAMINE – how they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. the loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. with the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. the forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.

4. ANTHEM FOR NO STATE – kanada, emptied of its minerals and dirty oil. emptied of its trees and water. a crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. the ocean doesn’t give a shit because it knows it’s dying too.

finally and in conclusion;
the “luciferian towers” L.P. was informed by the following grand demands:
+ an end to foreign invasions
+ an end to borders
+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex
+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right
+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again

much love to all the other lost and wondering ones,
xoxoxox god’s pee / montréal / 4 juillet, 2017

PERSONNEL
Aidan Girt: Drums
David Bryant: Electric guitar, MG-One
Efrim Manuel Menuck: Electric guitar, organ, OP-1
Karl Lemieux: 16mm film projections
Mauro Pezzente: Electric bass
Michael Moya: Electric guitar
Sophie Trudeau: Violins, organ
Thierry Amar: Contrebasse, electric bass
Timothy Herzog: Drums

GUESTS ON TRACK ONE
Bonnie Kane (saxophone, flute, electronics)
Craig Pederson (trumpet)

Back in 2012, the shadowy, majestic Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor released Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, their first album after a decade-plus hiatus, and it was just as thundering and grand and powerful as everything else they’ve ever done. The band won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize for the album, and they issued a statement about the “tone-deaf” ceremony, but that story should not overwhelm the gut-grabbing power of the album itself. And now they’ve announced that they’ll have another album for us in about a month, which is just excellent news. The new album, Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress, clocks in at an overwhelmingly brief 40 minutes, which is pretty surprising coming from a group whose individual tracks often inch past the 20-minute mark. The album only has four songs, but 10-minute songs are still concise by Godspeed standards. The band recorded the album with Electrical Audio engineer Greg Norman at studios in North Carolina and Montreal.

180g Vinyl!U.X.O. is unexploded ordnance is landmines is cluster bombs. Yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international police state is multinational corporate oligarchy. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting. The new album is just raw, angry, dissonant, epic instrumental rock. Recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago and mixed by Howard Bilerman and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the original Hotel2Tango in Montreal.

7" and print included.