As I’ve promised myself: This year I will see more live shows. My first course of action at the start of this year was to look at the listings at the different venues around town. The first place I looked, Pustervik, yielded results immediately. Godspeed You! Black Emperor would make a stop here in Gothenburg.

I was already vaguely aware of them before, but never heard anything from them. Based on what I had read about their style, I thought it would be likely that I would enjoy seeing them. I decided not to listen to any of their work. Go in blind, have no prior memory of their music to fit their live performance to.

The entire night felt like a blur yet not. Bits of the show and events before and after and my thoughts resurface non-chronologically in my memory as I’m writing this, listening to the latest album of theirs that I bought the day following.

• The opening: the violin fed through some kind of effect with a lfo modulating the amplitude, layered above the droning murmurs of the huge cello. I remember loving this.
• A loose thought. Roughly: The different way human creativity can manifest itself. It makes me happy
• A followup thought: This show is named as a direct reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I should feel more than just happiness.
• (When they opened the doors to the concert room, I took a position at the rear balcony next to one of those stand-up tables. An older gentleman on the other side of the table. He asked me to hold his spot while he went to ask for a chair to sit on, because of his back issues. We struck up conversation after that.)
• Being further back made the little whirring and clicking from the projectors fill up the silent parts, like instruments of their own.
• (When he asked me if I’d grown up in Gothenburg, I said I grew up in the small town north of here. A look of surprise on his face.)
• I realize the projectionist has this huge library of film clips for the projectors, a rack of film segments, each one with its ends spliced together to create a continuous loop. A steady process of changing the loops, easing them into one another by physically blocking the light from the projectors with his fingers.

• Sections of drones and textures meld into rhythmic sections and back. At points, the projectionist blocks out the light to match when the song suddenly goes silent for a short moment.
• A thought: There are a lot of different cymbals on the stage.
• (The man across the table grew up in the same town as me. He did not go to the gymnasium I did because it was not built yet back then. But later in life he became a teacher there, teaching students enrolled in the building and construction programme.)
• After the show, I struggle to remember the music. I remember it the way I would describe it in writing, but nothing plays in my mind.
• (I asked him when he started teaching. He gave me a year. I told him that was the year of my graduation. We laugh.)
• The final song is set to imagery of recent protests. “Take back the future” can be seen on one of the signs.
• One by one, they leave the stage leaving only tape loops of their final notes playing continuously. The projectionist is deliberately feeding a strip of film slowly past the bulb so that it melts. Two of them eventually return and start altering the playback of the tape loops, fading them out, bringing us to an end.

Listening to the latest album now that my self-imposed embargo has been lifted and I can remember one of the songs they played. Probably my favorite track of the album:

I loved this experience and I will see them again if I ever get the opportunity.