Date: February 9-16, 2013
Venues: The Hunter Lounge, The Tivoli, The Enmore Theatre, The Forum,
Act: Godspeed You! Black Emperor

I’m two gigs into a four-city, five-gig trip following Canadian instrumental post-rock act Godspeed You! Black Emperor around Australia and New Zealand when a thought starts to germinate.

Sitting on the balcony of The Tivoli, staring through wrought iron bars at flickering black and white images [train tunnels fading to a pinprick of light, telegraph poles receding, ever receding, railway pylons gliding out of view] it occurs that much of the visual panoply is about a journey.

It’s pervasive: variations litter Storm, punctuate Albanian, and dominate Moya.

We’re almost always travelling. Yet we rarely see the destination.

We are borne into an unseen, uncertain future because our eyes, via the camera, are fixed firmly on the past we leave behind. Watching the miles of slowly disappearing rail in the wake of the lantern rouge, the tunnnel that diminishes to a pinprick.

Or we gaze to the side at the road not taken, inexorably drawn to a pale, wan sun glimmering hesitantly through a layer of cloud. Or to the slow, painful journey of the solitary traveller trudging through scorching sun along a dusty road.

Is it nostalgia for the old? Are those other, alternate paths better than the unseen future we rush toward?

Or is it merely an oblique reference to the band’s early years spent rehearsing in a loft studio that backed onto a railway line?

These images are the vanguard of a mental war the forebrain wages against the hindbrain as each performance plays out.

The latter occupied with feeling the music — shivering at the wailing crescendoes of violin and screwdrivered guitar, shuddering at the propulsive cadence of the percussion, engrossed in the grand sweep of instrumentation.

The former battling to assemble meaning. Wondering at the Gnostic intent driving a confusing welter of half-glimpsed architectural plans. Grabbing at a word or three as pages of CIA files flit past at almost-subliminal speed. Struggling to reconcile those unending loops of cine-8 against the swirling ebb and flow of sound.

The mere mind is insufficient in the face of the audio-sensory barrage. The task is too great: each short loop might repeat many times over a span of minutes, yet the relentless click-click-click of the projectors outpaces the brain’s ability to string a coherent narrative.

Sydney brings another perspective. From the very back of the venue, The Enmore Theatre’s downward-sloped floor and rows of daisy-chained, cloth-covered chairs lends a cinematic richness to the performance. Rather than catching a band, it feels like watching a silent-era film, with the soundtrack provided by a half-glimpsed rock orchestra.

Perhaps that’s how the Montreal nontet would prefer it.

After all, they shun publicity, granting interviews only sporadically (this interview in The Guardian was a recent rare exception). Explanations are as enigmatic as they are verbose.

When they play there are no hellos. No thank yous. No long-winded explanations, digressions or introductions. They come on, they play for two hours, they leave with little more than a shy half-wave.

In this void interpretation is left to the listener. It’s all what you care to make of it, and Godspeed collectively seems to consider the weave of music and visuals to be sufficient as a signpost. They insist you can “figure it out for yourself, the clues are all there.”

No need to pay attention to the man behind the curtain (even if he’s in front of it).

Yet humans can’t help but strive to personalise music. To identify the bits associated with each player. Craning our necks to see what they’re doing and grasp how the magic trick is done.

Which is why I find myself wedged under the elbow of guitarist Mike Moya (one of three along with Efrim Menuck and David Bryant) at The Hunter Lounge in Wellington.

At the start, the eight bandmembers drift one-by-one onto the tiny stage. Weaving through a semi-circular row of speakers that hulk like Easter Island statues, they arrange themselves in an even-tinier U-shape amongst a space station’s worth of pedal blocks.

For long minutes they tune tunelessly — the droning swell of distortion soon losing any resemblance to its constituent instruments.

At the sound desk, Godspeed’s ninth member fires up a bank of four super-8 cine-reels, and behind the band a single word begins to flicker in pale, grainy white-on-black.

“HOPE”.

The thin sliver of light shifts, flickers, blurs: one pitifully slight word pitched against an overwhelming blackness. Cacophony without surcease, the drone becomes gargantuan in its multi-layered immensity.

The noise dissipates into a heavy, expectant silence. Silence that violinist Sophie Trudeau fills with the opening notes of Mladic (formerly known as Albanian) — initially hesitant and tremulous like a carpenter just starting to cut a plank; gradually thickening into a tension-building, resinous throb.

Hunched over a rat’s nest of gear, guitarist David Bryant strikes a ragged patter of hammered dulcimer. The sonic resemblance to the warning bells of an old railway crossing is marked, and on cue electrified railway pylons begin flickering on the wall behind the band.

Does seeing the latter drive the conclusion about the origin of the former? Before I can conclude anything about causality or intent the music has moved on, the others chasing, then overtaking, Bryant’s energetic dinging. Trudeau’s bowing becomes a tapping action; Thierry Amar likewise on his upright bass. Percussionists Aidan Girt and Tim Herzog add chiming high-hats and snares and you can feel the whole shuddering toward lift-off as the toms finally enter the fray.

The runway needs to be long though. It was always thus for Godspeed.

For those with short attention spans, the wait for payoff can be an ordeal. The flipside: each song willfully explores the band’s lietmotifs, not only through repetition (the friend of tension), but through subtle (and screamingly unsubtle) variation.

The eight on stage hold Mladic’s initial groove for long minutes as they flip through lead lines: here a burst of single-stroked Psycho-like violin, there an arc of jagged guitar. Then with little more than an exchange of nods, the tempo changes. The rock beat transitions into a propulsive Slavic rhythm replete with madly wah-ing guitars and soaring Eastern fiddle.

It’s dark, and made darker by the progression of imagery. CIA files paperclipped with unsmiling mugshots, a corpse lying by a wall, two headscarved elderly ladies staring out at the audience. Weird, swirling patterns of letters: g, and f. A page that flashes two hand-written words: FUCK AMERIKA.

Yet somehow it’s also unrepentantly joyous. I decide it might just be the best rock dervish ever.

Highlights are everywhere. During Moya, watching close-up as Menuck and Moya (for whom the song is named) gently screwdriver their guitars in a weeping counterpoint to Trudeau’s shivering violin.

The climax of World Police and Friendly Fire when an apocalyptic backdrop of belching red flame and glowing oil refinery chimneys illuminates the rictus grin of tall percussionist Aidan Girt as he belts his instruments like some demented underworld denizen forced to play for the pleasure of the lords of hell itself until the song expires in an explosion of eerie de-crescendoing guitars.

Then there’s the new song, Behemoth.

Unlike the tunes from Don’t Bend, Ascend, Behemoth truly is new, written post-reactivation and only debuted live late last year. Now a setlist fixture, the name fits: the piece stretches to a massive forty-four minutes.

It also sounds enormous, heralded as it is by a thumping four-tom beat (at The Tivoli the bass gains towering immensity) and blessed with a grandiose Kashmir-like guitar groove. The centrepiece of the tune, though, is a sprawling 20-minute drone section of misanthropic guitar static and a haunted house five-note violin riff that Trudeau wraps on itself like a Mobius strip.

The weird thing about Behemoth is the blankness of the accompanying film loops. For fully three-quarters of the song, in fact until the closing reprise of that gargantuan opening, we see nothing but drifting black and white blurs. Some time spent observing projectionist Karl Lemieux at The Forum in Melbourne reveals they’re produced by drawing a transparent cone back and forth across the front element.

The empty shell of a building from the cover of Don’t Bend Ascend dominates the song’s close. Does that mean the song is a deliberately hollow affair? It’s an interesting thought: Behemoth certainly feels the most direct song that the group has ever done.

Is Behemoth a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing? Or is it a metaphor for the society we live in, busily eating itself from within? Interpretations abound in the presence of such ambiguity.

One thing is certain: Behemoth really messes with their capacity to delve into the back-catalogue. Even with the “luxury” of a two-hour-long set, Hope Drone and Behemoth consume half the set. With Mladic the other constant, the band is hard-pressed to fit two more songs into the remaining time. In Sydney they manage three: Monheim, Moya, and Chart #3 - World Police + Friendly Fire.

For an act unafraid to challenge with long songs, maybe Behemoth just is too god-damned big.

The final couple of shows feature the return of the disembodied sing-song voice at the finale calling out over and over: “Where are we going? Where are we going?”.

Even though I know the question as posed is meant to be far broader, I also wonder where Godspeed are going. But I know I at least felt enough that I definitely want to find out the answer.

You might say I still have Hope.

Date: January 22, 2013
Venue: Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane
Acts: I Heart Hiroshima

Drummer Susie Patten warns those in the front that she may barf over her kit by the end of the night. She’s not drunk though. It’s nerves, she explains. It shows early on. Cameron Hawes strikes some bum notes on Listen; Patten’s vocals disappear into the ether at one point; Neutron Popsong never quite ignites properly. To me, pre-hiatus I Heart Hiroshima instrumentation never really was ragged, although, live, the trio often worked their butts off to deliver an edge-of-chaos impression.

This feels like the enthusiastic but messy flipside.

Not that the surprisingly (because it’s a “school night”) solid Alhambra crowd gives a damn. They’re overjoyed to have IHH on stage, and cheerfully indulge the three-piece time to find its feet.

It doesn’t take long to right the ship. Maybe it’s the slowdown of pace for River, but Hawes really nails that sequence of notes. They follow up with a great rendition of Old Tree (Somers: we’ve only played this live twice), then a couple of songs later Patten is prefacing Lungs (from memory) with a graphic tale about a long-ago Hip Hop night at The Zoo and an accident involving a vomiting drunk bloke and an industrial fan that led to Jaegerbombs being banned from the venue.

The nerves have evaporated.

The front rows are dancing along joyously and when Patten deliberately omits her chorus lines during Punks, the crowd instinctively fills the gap. The band is stoked. Ocean and Stop That follow, Patten wrestling with a kit that, by this point, is falling apart every 30 seconds. Yet, when the vocal mic falls out of its stand, she simply winds the lead round her neck and sings on with the mic nestled into her shoulder. Somers breaks not one, but two strings. They forge on. It’s hardly studio-perfect. But it is messily perfect. And that’s plenty fine.

It would have been more this year, but after a very active October gig-going feel away in November and December with a very below-par three gigs for that two-month period. I’m blaming both work and some ridiculous movie about a stupid fat Hobbit for that.

In particular, this is the first time in just about forever that I’ve not done a Christmas gig. Both the Darren Hanlon and The Gin Club Christmas bashes were on my to-do list but ultimately fell by the wayside. It’s been ages since I photographed either of those bands too, and I really would like to do so again. This year, I hope.

Busiest month was October with nine gigs in just 31 days. Heathen Skulls and Lawrence English were responsible for that: both toured some fantastic acts that month. Shellac, Benoit Pioulard and Grouper were outstanding. Yet September (with seven gigs) was the only month where I went to two in a single day: an afternoon effort at the Powerhouse to catch Dreamtime and The Moses Gunn Collective followed by a trek to The Waiting Room that night to see Do The Robot launch their fantastic album Midnight Mirage (the vinyl artwork is stunning).

Venue-wise, The Zoo takes pole. I caught 11 gigs there; five of those in that very busy October. The Brisbane Powerhouse comes second with eight, and The Waiting Room third with seven. This is not really a surprise as I prefer smaller gigs and more-intimate venues. Only two at The Troubadour’s successor Black Bear Lodge though, possibly because their event promotion can be a bit patchy.

Tym Guitars actually takes fourth with four gigs. I think that’s a testament to Tim Brennan’s incredible dedication to the local scene, although Useless Children (Melbourne) and Chelsea Wolfe (USA) were the two stand-out gigs I caught there last year.

New venues visited: a long-overdue visit to Sun Distortion Studios (very nice, interesting lighting); The Hideaway (great beer, incredibly good sound, very difficult lighting); Metro Arts (temporary set-up for the Brisbane Festival, some really weird and wanky art sets); Between The Walls (stiflingly hot DIY venue, now closed); and The Bridge Club (a gig specially put on for deaf people, an unusual and very interesting experience).

Venues now defunct: apart from Between The Walls, only Woodland imploded this year and that only due to expiration of lease, if I recall correctly. While others thought Woodland to dark and difficult to photograph, I never found it that much of an issue except once when Whitehorse decided to essentially turn all the lights off. My only problem with Woodland was that the noise levels between acts were always way too loud to carry on a conversation. Loved the wood paneling, adored the air-con, and the Ansel Adams-like landscapes hung behind the stage was a nice touch.

With so many gigs, there are lots of highlights, and a few low-lights.

Both Tortoise and An Horse were disappointments. I suspect I just wasn’t in the mood for Tortoise’s right-angles-to-reality weirdness on the night, so that could have been my problem. However, An Horse’s new material definitely lacks punch.

I attended only one festival this year: The Valley Fiesta. And I only went to that to catch Violent Soho, who were awesome even if they had to play a cut-down set due to pouring rain and didn’t finish with Scrape It. I really like Neighbour and Tinderbox.

Amanda Palmer leading a conga-line through parkland outside GOMA was an early point of brilliance, while Prince Rama also impressed with their dance-raga approach at Woodland. Whitehorse was like some freaky harbinger of the Apocalypse while Boris just blew me away for an act that I’d hardly ever seen or heard.

Useless Children remain one of Melbourne’s best live bands, and Pre-Ending/Post-Completion is, hands-down, one of my favourite albums this year. Dead To Me at Basement 243 (now renamed The Crowbar) gets a prize for the efforts of the bassist after he split his thumb in the opening song. Refusing medical attention, he kept playing for another 50 minutes. His bass was a bloody mess by the end.

Terror at The Hi-Fi featured some of the most relentless stage-diving I’ve ever witnessed. I was scared for people at various points. And for myself near the end too. Radiohead get props for their superb visual effects at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, the immaculate sound (no mean feat that) and for not playing Creep.

Locally, Tiny Spiders is my choice of the year. I don’t think I saw any act nearly as often and certainly none who were consistently as good. I really enjoy the way Cameron Smith and Innez Tulloch create seemingly simple tunes that have heaps of drive and a lot going on inside them. And maybe the brashness of their sound reminds me a little of I Heart Hiroshima. Although IHH was more to the pop end, both bands seem to project a similar attitude.

The Heathen Skulls-presented Chelsea Wolfe was an unexpected pleasure, as were the extended jammy psych-drones of Earthless, and Benoit Pioulard’s drifting minimalism. Three on-a-whim choices and three wins.

The annual Skynet Day gig was Maria Minerva at the Judith Wright Centre. I came away with parallels to some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work from the early ’90s that used heaps of sampling to achieve a dreamy reality-through-gauze feel. And with Single Gun Theory for, I expect, the same reason. I enjoyed her performance so much that I quested to obscure parts of the internet to acquire a legitimate digital copy of Will Happiness Find Me? Lead track The Sound is my 2012 song of the year, and Lawrence English is a magician for his ability to consistently find and present immensely talented musicians such as Minerva.

Seeing Shellac was a bit like that scene in The Simpsons where Homer is force-fed doughnuts in hell. Watching and listening, there was a nagging sense that it was Albini and co’s way or the highway, but in this case the auteur’s vision was just so unrelentingly good that you couldn’t refuse second, third and fourth helpings (I know that’s a food reference, but whatever). My second-favourite gig of the year.

Which leaves Grouper — the work of Oregon electro-ambient musician Liz Harris.

If you’d told me just five years ago that I could sit enthralled by a performance of knob-twiddling and tape looping, I would have said you were crazy. But Harris’s live recreation of her 2012 opus Violet Replacement at Room 40’s annual Open Frame is hypnotic. At times the music is an eerie atmospheric moan. At others it’s an almost-subsonic rumble. Yet the transition is so subtle that discerning the inflection is impossible. Occasionally, the crisp clack and click of the play button is clear as day when Harris switches tapes (tapes!). Other times it’s muted under heavy layers of sound.

But throughout, the piece offers a comforting sense of envelopment, as though cocooning the listener from the real world in a cotton wool of sound. The over-riding sense is of being in stasis — an island in the stream listening to life life hazily flow around you. And at the end, you emerge as if from meditation, renewed and ready to face it all again. Mind-clearing stuff, if that’s not too hippy-ish to say.

In all 2012 was a pretty good year on the live music front. The return of All Tomorrow’s Parties to Australia after a long absence — bringing with it Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, My Bloody Valentine — promises even better for 2013.

Date: October 6, 2012
Venue: Sun Distortion Studios, Brisbane
Acts: Tiny Spiders, Die On Planes

Tiny Spiders confess to being rusty and slightly out-of-practise. It still sounds damn good to me.

Die On Planes make a welcome return to the stage after a long absence. Even if it’s only a one-off (which seems likely) it’s a real pleasure to be pummeled by their sludgy, crunching stoner rock again.

Date: September 8, 2012
Venue: The Waiting Room, Brisbane
Acts: Useless Children, Undead Apes, Last Chaos, Golden Bats

I was quite taken with the snotty, aggressive punk of Useless Children’s 2009 effort Sky Is Falling. Their latest release, Post Ending // Pre Completion, is an altogether different beast: more desperate, more menacing, more apocalyptic.

And that’s what shines through tonight at The Waiting Room.

In these small confines, the noise the Melbourne three-piece produce is immense. The psychedelic echoes stretch to the edge of forever, and the pace shifts constantly between a pell-mell gallop and a deranged lurch. The heaviness just bruises. As they shudder and screech their way through the vast majority of the new album, it’s like watching some gargantuan beast in its death throes.

Date: March 9, 2012
Venue: Woodland Bar, Brisbane
Acts: Timothy Carroll, Planet Love Sound

Despite good intentions, I haven’t caught Timothy Carroll live for a good eighteen months. Maybe longer.

That means I’m caught by surprise when he eschews his rich back-catalogue of acoustic folk in favour of a much rockier sound. I wonder if the surprise is why the first half of the set really doesn’t hook my attention.

I mean… it’s nice, it’s competent. The melodies are pretty enough. But it just doesn’t resonate. And in the end it’s nothing that half a dozen indie-rock bands round town aren’t already doing — some of them better.

Perhaps the source of my discontent is the one-foot-in-the-water approach that only sees him swap from acoustic guitar to electric late in proceedings. Because that’s when things really start to take off as he focuses on creating a thick, fuzzing sound that has some real meat and grunt.

Carroll is a prodigiously talented songwriter. The memorableness of the tunes on For Bread & Circuses is proof enough. Here’s hoping he can translate that knack to this new arena.

Date: March 17, 2012
Venue: Woodland Bar, Brisbane
Acts: No Anchor, Whitehorse, Quiet Steps, Tiny Spiders

Tiny Spiders capture my love with an fabulous interplay of messy guitar wizardry and some of the most physical drumming I’ve seen since Liam Finn last toured. There’s an underlying blues catchiness, just roughened to fuck as though its come down with severe strep throat. The moments of squealing feedback like someone dragging fingernails down a chalkboard, but are the perfect brake on the groove when Innez Tulloch throws them into the mix.

There’s something wholly unearthly about Whitehorse’s doom-sludge sound. Sure the bass end of things could be used herald the apocalypse, but I think the real culprit is the high-pitched keen of vocalist Pete Hyde. It’s piercing and echoing like someone 10 doors away is having their testicles removed with a pair of pliers. Unnerving and just a little creepy, it’s what prompts me to purchase their latest vinyl.

No Anchor bookend tonight’s performance by splitting the mammoth 15-minute drone session that is Gatton Bohemia in twain. Strangely, it makes the final closing section feels almost like a teaser, and its brevity accentuates the gut-punch of the cacophonous feedback-riddled conclusion where Donovan Miller and Ian Rogers get really physical with their bass guitars.

Maybe it’s a concept prompted by compactness of the new EP. Each of the four tunes — one a cover of Big Black’s Jordan, Minnesota — is short, sharp and focused. If the band wanted to leave the crowd reeling through a continuous series of hammer-blows, then this 10-song, 45-minute set certainly accomplishes that purpose.

Date: March 16, 2012
Venue: The Waiting Room, Brisbane
Acts: Do The Robot

I’ve always enjoyed the lush pop meanderings of Do The Robot, and still regularly listen to their 2009 long-player First Names.

Tonight they don’t play anything from that particular release. Still, that’s not especially surprising considering the time that’s since elapsed, and their consistent output of splits and cassettes in the interim.

In the end, the lack of familiar tunes doesn’t matter. Matt Deasy’s still guitar shimmers with all the enfolding warmth that I remember so fondly, and Sarah Deasy’s voice just soars.

Date: January 20, 2012
Venue: Woodland, Brisbane
Acts: Sun Araw, Prince Rama, Blank Realm

Whimsical choices occasionally pay off.

I know of Sun Araw. And, by know of, I mean I knew they’d recently played at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Still, considering the English festival’s reputation as a purveyor of the weird, the chance to catch Sun Araw for a measly $20 seems almost a no-lose proposition.

And that’s how I find myself at Woodland on a Saturday night watching three bands I’ve never actually listened to previously.

Blank Realm leads the line, and the Brisbane four-piece push all the right buttons with their messy pop-yet-not that’s full of little psychedelic guitar wig-outs. Add in Sarah’s Spencer’s vocal burrs and some crunching percussion, and there’s no chance of mistaking this for candyfloss.It seems a confession of failure to describe Prince Rama via Bollywood musicals. At a stretch, I guess you could make some Bhangra comparisons. The Brooklyn-based trio project the same vivacious energy, driving the music onward with similar bursts of pulsating tribal drums, cascading cymbals and soaring Sanskrit chants and mantras.

It’s thrilling in an unapologetically direct-to-the-hindbrain fashion — a joyous repetition of beats and chants working over and around groaning slabs of synths. Primally transcendent, if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms.

Sun Araw finally appear at a quarter past midnight (what is it with Woodland’s late start times?). The band’s insistent drone patterns immediately put me a little in mind of High Wolf.

But where the French psych outfit leans into spacious felt-as-much-as-heard shamanic stylings, Cameron Stallones’ Sun Araw is sonically dense and urban: a wholly modern claustrophobia of electronic glitchiness, complicated guitar lines, percussive jams and occasional bursts of free jazz saxophone overlaid on humid, slow-moving grooves.

For much of the time it’s hypnotic. But with the finale pushing 1am, all the hard edges of this whirling kaleidoscope of sound prove too much for one tired mind. Damn Woodland’s late start times.

Date: December 16, 2011
Venue: The Zoo, Brisbane
Acts:  The Gin Club, The Stress of Leisure

The Gin Club’s nominal frontman, Ben Salter, is trying to give up his between-song speaking duties. It’s the product, he says, of making the new live album that they’re about to release. “I realised after listening to all those live shows,” he says. “That I just talk too bloody much.”

However, his bandmates, talented though they are, just don’t have the same knack for effortless banter, and Salter’s attempts to coax each of them into saying something between tunes prove amusingly counter-productive.

Founding Swedish member but recent absentee Ola Karlsson makes an appearance for the first time in what seems an age and it’s a delight to once again hear his contributions in the live setting, especially the maudlin sea shanty Abigail. Brad Pickersgill also jumps on stage to take a turn with The Fall and Coming Round.

But for mine, the night’s goosebumps moment is when Bridget Lewis takes a turn at the front for the amusingly titled but deadly serious Milli Vanilli: a tribute (or warning) to living in flood-prone areas. It’s sparse solemnity, combined with the simplicity of Lewis’s rhyming couplets, is a stark and doleful reminder of the water-borne destruction that struck Brisbane not-so-long ago.

Fences falcon favourite toys
All these things have been destroyed

And the odd title?

You can blame it on the rain
That’s been tried before in vain
If you live beside the bank
Guess you’ve got yourselves to thank