The memory has weight. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean I can feel the flattened penny in my hand—the one that came with the first pressing of F# A# ∞. My friend had the vinyl in university; we treated it like a holy relic. That penny had been placed on a train track in Montreal, crushed by the wheels of industry, and then packaged for export. It was dangerous, tactile, and real. In my twenties, Lift Your Skinny Fists was the structural engineering that held my chest cavity open when my heart tried to collapse after The Big Breakup. I only listened to it when I was feeling strong enough inside to take a look at what held me together. Apologies if this all sounds very deep and meaningful… to be honest GSY!BE are a band I like and have known about for over two decades, but they aren’t the kind of thing I go around with in my headphones all the time.

Anyway, fast forward twenty years to December 17, 2025. Kanda Square Hall, Tokyo. My friend, who is a bit of a gig afficionado right now, told me they were coming. Godspeed! Yeah, of course I was going too.

I paid 10,000 yen for the privilege of a ticket. The gig was good, amazing even, but different to what I had hoped, even though I don’t know what that was. Maybe I was hoping to go back in time and emerge younger, or with some new kind of wisdom. All I got was the money I saved from not buying a lousy, pre-faded t-shirt.

The venue was the first odd and inexplicable thing. At first I was sure we were at the wrong place. Kanda Square Hall is a Sumitomo Corporation development, a sleek glass monolith built on the bones of the old Tokyo Denki University. It feels appropriate, in a grim way, that we are standing on a graveyard of engineering dreams to watch a band that sounds like industrial collapse. We are spitting distance from the Kanda Police Station.

You have to understand—Godspeed You! Black Emperor isn’t just a band; they are an anarchist collective. They released Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada with a Molotov cocktail diagram on the cover. Their music is supposed to be a manifesto against the state, against capitalism, against the very concept of a “police station.” Yet here we are, taking an escalator up to the revolution, neighbours with the enforcers, surrounded by boutique coffee shops and polite signage. The air conditioning is set to a sensible, corporate ambient temperature.

I knew I was in the right place when I saw the other people (fellow oddballs) waiting to go into the venue. Special Guests were allowed in first, and I can only imagine they were all influential music-biz people with personal connections to the band members, or a podcast with enough clout to get them in for free… or whatever counts these days in that alien world of being a VIP. Me and my friends all met up together and went through the normal doors when they finally opened up. By then I was already drunk and had a little bottle of Jim Beam to smuggle in my back pocket. I would deeply regret that later.

As soon as we were through, we had to pay 600 more yen to get a non-negotiable drinks token. This was to pay for the venue. 600 yen and what we got was a choice of 350ml can. I didn’t care really at this point but that’s not good value for the can let’s put it that way, though I know it was a structural thing not really about getting a good deal on a can of Suntory highball.

I wasn’t bothered by that drink ticket extortion, because what really jarred with me was the merch line. It looked like I was in fucking Zara. A single clothes rail—the kind you see in business hotels—and a queue of oddballs stretching all the way around. I peeked at what they were flogging, looking for a totem. They were selling t-shirts for 6,000 yen. I touched the fabric and my heart sank. It was pre-faded. Further evidence of something not right. To get that “vintage” look, you have to subject the cotton to an industrial assault of chemical baths and high-friction washes. You are literally burning fossil fuels and wasting gallons of water to damage the structural integrity of the fibre before it even touches a human body.

It is planned obsolescence masquerading as “soul.” It is entropy as a service.

Here is an “anarchist” collective selling us a garment that cost extra energy to manufacture and will last half as long, just so a bunch of associate professors and IT guys can look like we’ve been sleeping in a van since 1999. It is the simulacra of a hard life, sold at a premium. I hated it. I looked at that row of pre-broken cotton and realized that even the revolution comes stone-washed now.

But then I thought about hardwood trees. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is like a hardwood tree. They didn’t sell out—that’s a lazy critique for teenagers. No, they just grew. They grew slowly, ringing the years in distortion and drone, until they became tall and thick and unshakeable. But the problem with being a giant tree is that you eventually become the canopy. You stop being the obstacle in the road and start becoming the roof of the forest. You blend in. I went into the auditorium and added some extra whisky to my 600 yen highball can.

There I was, surrounded by a few friends and a lot salarymen and expats, waiting for the lights to dim, feeling the “corporate weird” settle in my stomach like bad coffee.

The Loop

The lights didn’t dim so much as the room just surrendered to the noise. They opened, as standard, with “Hope Drone,” which is less of a song and more of a structural stress test for the building. Kanda Square Hall was built in 2020—it’s seismically isolated, designed to withstand a Tokyo magnitude 7.0, but for ten minutes, the floorboards felt unsure of themselves. I loved the way the word HOPE was scratched onto the negative with a coin or something… it gave the letters sometimes the image of having a spine or being made out of bones.

I was looking forward to the visuals, as I’d heard this is what really makes GSY!BE a live experience. Karl Lemieux & Philippe Leonard are often considered the 9th and 10th members because they manipulate the film live to the music. It was just as I had expected, but also not. I was expecting 16mm film loops clattering through projectors that looked like they belonged in a museum exhibit about the Cold War. But there was only one projection, and it started out first with Jellyfish. Then bees swarming a weird, alien flower. Then a rose on fire. It was beautiful, but it felt like I was watching a screen saver for the end of the world. And that’s when the disappointment hit me, quiet and cold.

The new album is titled NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. It is literally named after a body count. It is a scream against the genocide in Gaza, against the machinery of death. But here, in Chiyoda-ku, surrounded by polite applause and the smell of high-end conditioning, it didn’t feel like a scream. It felt like art. Safe, curated, consumable art. The politics had been sanded down, polished, and presented as a vibe. I was expecting a very visceral set of images… maybe war-torn footage. That’s why I got drunk before hand… I had numbed myself ready to get scorched by reality. At one point, the projection was an old man, covering his face with his hands. It seemed like an actor, acting.

Later, the footage shifted. It looked like it was filmed by the band themselves out the window of a tour bus—sad, grey American landscapes, massive and mountainous, passing by. Then it cut to the view from a passenger seat, looking out over the wing of a plane. Then trains.

The connection fired in my brain, but I waited until the song ended so I could shout it all. Canadian band. Canadian legend John Candy.

“PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES!” I shouted.

I’m not sure if they liked it. I’m not sure if anyone even heard it. It felt like a Dad Joke thrown into the void, a moment of pop-culture irreverence trying to puncture the high-seriousness of the drone.

As soon as the music started I had pulled out my phone. The volume was pushing 100dB—a wall of sound built by eight very talented musicians, including two drummers. The recording I made was utterly brickwalled of course. As the music moved me and the alcohol stirred up the less self-conscious version of myself who I always take to social outings, I started whispering into the mic, trying to layer my own poetry over their noise, trying to inject something personal into this massive, impersonal machine.

“The tree is spinning,” I whispered as the screen showed a spinning tree, exactly like one I knew from childhood. “It’s MY tree. It’s their tree. It’s everybody’s tree.”

But when I played it back later, there was nothing. Just the roar of the band erasing me completely. Like the projection themselves, my narration was lost to the wall of sound. The “Hardwood Tree” didn’t care about my poems or ad-lib lyrics. It just kept growing and spinning.

The Frontier

The feedback loop closed. The lights came up, and I checked my watch.

I didn’t leave early—I’m not a casual—but I walked to the station feeling the specific exhaustion of a 40-year-old father who has stood still for two hours, save for the movement of my hands to pour carcinogenic solvents down my throat, purely out of habit. Jim Beam is shit whisky and I know it. My feet hurt. My ears rang. I thought about the lousy 6,000 yen t-shirt I didn’t buy. The best thing was the projections and, despite my complaint about the lack of war imagery, I loved the nostalgic and artistic visuals and realised that was the only thing that had really added to the experience.

Mostly, I thought about getting home. I had missed an evening with my son. He would have wanted to boot up Red Dead Redemption, where the fires are digital and the stakes are fake, but the connection with him is real. That sad yearning felt more honest tonight than the vacuum-packed anarchy in Kanda.

I got on the train. The doors closed. The hum of the Chuo Line took over, a different kind of drone, carrying me back to the suburbs where I belong.

Info

My recording is rubbish, but luckily Godspeed You! Black Emperor is one of the few modern bands that explicitly encourages fans to tape their shows (a very Grateful Dead ethos),so I was able to locate a better quality version of the recording.

Listen to it here:
https://archive.org/details/gybe2025-12-17/06

The Personnel (The 8 Musicians):

• Efrim Menuck (Guitar, Tape)
• Mauro Pezzente (Bass)
• Thierry Amar (Bass, Contrabass)
• Sophie Trudeau (Violin)
• David Bryant (Guitar, Tape)
• Aidan Girt (Drums)
• Tim Herzog (Drums)
• Mike Moya (Guitar)

The Projectionists (The “Other” Band Members):

• Karl Lemieux & Philippe Leonard

The Setlist (Dec 17, Kanda Square Hall):

1. Hope Drone (Intro / Projection)
2. SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS
3. BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD
4. RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD
5. Tape Interlude: “They Don’t Sleep Anymore on the Beach…” (The Murray Ostril monologue)
6. Monheim (Sleep)
7. PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS / GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS
8. Bosses Hang
9. Gathering Storm (Storm)