F♯ A♯ ∞

The grizzled voice could be that of God. “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel,” he begins over a ground-shaking rumble of drone, before surveying the horrifying landscape: The government is corrupt, buildings are imploding, the skyline is ablaze while a populace hides indoors, numbed by chemicals and drowning out the screams with the radio. The voice continues as mournful strings enter, playing a theme wracked by sadness and loss, the sound of the band on the deck as the ship goes down. Do we hear hope as a fragile guitar enters and repeats those lines? I think so. And once we sense that feeling of being crushed by despair while seeing a flicker of possibility, we’re fully inside of the universe of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 1997 debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.

The piece, which came to be called “Dead Flag Blues,” is a career-defining debut album-opener to rival Patti Smith’s “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo,” the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” and Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath.” Everything you need to know about Godspeed was foretold by the words and music of this first track, which occupies the album’s entire first side. They would eventually become one of the key bands in what we’d call post-rock. Through the first decade of the 21st century, more than a few groups would copy their soft/loud crashing orchestral style. All of their music takes place in the world described by that voice, a place where those buried by calamity are on the verge of breaking free.

The words on “Dead Flag Blues” were written by Efrim Menuck, who was born in Montreal and grew up in Toronto before returning to the city of his birth in his early 20s. They came from a script for an unfinished film called “Incomplete Movie About Jail” and were read by an unidentified friend. Menuck, like many in his circle, had grown up listening to punk and hardcore, but after moving to Montreal he started making music of his own in a very different style. In 1994, he and his friend Mauro Pezzente, who played bass, recorded a tape they called All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling and made 33 copies, giving them to friends. The project’s name, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, came from the title of a Japanese documentary about a motorcycle gang. (The band would relocate the exclamation point in 2002.) Twenty-five years later, All Lights remains a rumor—there have been no confirmed leaks of the music, not even a photo of the cassette. But after recording it and playing a few live shows, the band, joined by guitarist Mike Moya, began to take shape.

Pezzente moved into a warehouse space near the train tracks in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, and it became a place to practice, to hang out, and to scheme. When Menuck took over the lease, they called the space Hotel2Tango, translating part of the local postal code—H2T—to its military call sign. Soon they were hosting shows, and Godspeed became a kind of collective, with a swelling lineup that changed from one gig to the next. Cellist Norsola Johnson was another early member, and years later she’d articulate the ethos at work. “I think a lot of that just came from punk rock backgrounds,” she told Lucinda Catchlove in a 2016 interview. “You want to make something happen, you have to do it yourself.”

For Montreal art kids in the 1990s, there was no other way. Godspeed’s dark and foreboding sound suggests civilization heading toward collapse, and conjuring such a world wasn’t an act of imagination. They could see it around them. In April 1996, right around the time things were heating up at Hotel2Tango, an article appeared in the International Herald Tribune called “Montreal’s Deep Malaise,” in which reporter Anne Swardsoa described a city on the brink. On the ballot the previous year was a referendum on Quebec’s independence, and it was defeated by less than a single percentage point. Conflict and uncertainty were rife, and many English-speaking Montreal residents fled the city during the campaign. “The city that once was Canada’s financial and cultural center is in serious trouble,” Swardsoa wrote. “Its tax base is eroding, poverty is increasing, roads are deteriorating and, most important, citizens are leaving.”

As 1996 turned into 1997, a community was growing in these grim surroundings. Hotel2Tango, where a number of musicians lived and played, was a hub of activity, and a new label, Constellation, was on hand to document it. Constellation cofounder Ian Ilavsky played guitar with Sofa, a local band that made grimy post-punk—a 7" and album by the group were the first two releases by the imprint. F♯ A♯ ∞, on vinyl only, was the third.

Godspeed recorded the album in Hotel2Tango, with a group of musicians that had more or less solidified into a band. No single element in Godspeed was new, but their particular fusion of sounds didn’t sound like much else. For string-led drama over loose, stumbling rhythms, you could look to Australia’s Dirty Three, particularly their 1996 album Horse Stories. The twangy guitars, sometimes played with slide, brought to mind the high-plains drama of Ennio Morricone’s scores and the lonesome tumbleweeds of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas, a vein the more ambient-leaning Richmond band Labradford was exploring around the same time. And the gradual builds to crushing climaxes that brought the whole history of rock to bear were something Mogwai were exploring in Scotland, on their 1997 debut Young Team.

It wasn’t hard to draw lines connecting these sounds and scenes, but Godspeed were operating in a world of their own. Perhaps owing to Menuck’s interest in film, the album feels like a product of editing as much as playing, stitching together composed ensemble sections, field recordings, samples, and more abstract sound design. Over time, Godspeed would perfect the kind of pieces that go from soft opening to gradual build to thundering crescendo. But F♯ A♯ ∞ is a different beast, one more fragile and less tied to idiom.

So after the opening monologue concludes, “Dead Flag Blues” drifts—first come the screeching wheels and chugging motor of a steam train, and then gossamer slide guitar tones so quiet you begin to notice the ambient noise in the room you’re hearing them in. These are the album’s two essential features. The vibrating string sound—whether made by guitar, violin, or cello—evokes cables snaking down brick buildings, power lines framing the horizon as the sun sets, flaccid balloons snagged in barren trees. And the train sounds remind us of what the machines carry away, whether it’s a product of industry or the people who worked to create it.

The edits keep coming, as the band stitches together fragments, only some of which sound as if they were initially designed to fit together. After a middle section of “Dead Flag Blues” that’s as close as F♯ A♯ ∞ comes to a spaghetti western soundtrack, the piece shifts back to hammered guitar strings, like the sounds you get when you strike a cable that keeps a telephone pole upright. The first side then shifts to a tuneful vignette led by glockenspiel, a jaunty melody you might find in a music box, the sort that people decades ago put on to forget their problems. And then it concludes with what sounds like an improvised piece for voice and banjo, where the player asks “What’s my motivation?” as if speaking to a director as the camera is about to roll.

It turned out that the elaborate structure of the original LP was only one possibility among many. After the Constellation release of F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed contacted the Chicago label Kranky because they were playing shows in the U.S. for the first time. The Chicago imprint—home to Labradford, Stars of the Lid, and several other bands whose music was situated in the same general universe—wanted to put the record out on CD, and for a wider audience than Constellation’s limited distribution allowed. But rather than reissuing the LP as is, the band made a new version of the record to take advantage of the CD’s longer runtime. They re-edited and re-configured the material, shuffling the sections and adding music, a large chunk of which wound up on a new, third track, called “Providence.”

The album, released in multiple formats with different tracklists, broken with long overarching suites divided into sub-titled sections, can be difficult to parse on paper. It’s an unusual situation for such a defining record—two competing versions, quite different from one another, on two different formats, put out by two different labels. The additional material is excellent, but for my money, the definitive version of the record is the Constellation vinyl LP. Regardless, “East Hastings,” from the CD version, would contain the most-heard piece of music in Godspeed’s oeuvre, after Danny Boyle used the section titled “The Sad Mafioso” in his 2002 post-apocalyptic zombie film 28 Days Later. The side opens with a man’s voice yelling on the street, and then a bagpipe plays the theme from “Dead Flag Blues,” easing us back into landscape established by the first side. From its desolate opening section, “The Sad Mafioso” builds piece by piece into the sort of wall of sound that Godspeed would later become famous for.

In Boyle’s film, the opening section of “The Sad Mafioso” plays as the main character, Jim, leaves the hospital and discovers a deserted London. “For me, the soundtrack to 28 Days Later was Godspeed,” the director told The Guardian. “The whole film was cut to Godspeed in my head.” It’s easy to understand why: Boyle had the means to create a film with a scene—gazing out over desolation, feeling completely alone—that was familiar to those who listened to F♯ A♯ ∞ and dreamt up their own pictures.

Besides the quintessential Godspeed builder, the second side of the LP has several abstract sections, some built from manipulated samples. The final movement of the album proper, called “String Loop Manufactured During Downpour...,” begins with a warped recording of a haunting voice sourced from the early-’70s musical Godspell. The voice floats into a whining drone that whines and hisses and quakes, until, on the vinyl version, it slides into a locked groove and plays for as long as you want it to.

Godspeed had good timing. As the 20th century was winding down, there was an uneasiness in the air that sometimes became outright paranoia. Any calendar change this significant will bring with it people who think the end of the world is nigh. In this case, there was the Y2k bug, which suggested that the computers that now powered so much of the world’s infrastructure might stop working properly when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. “Dead Flag Blues” describes being trapped inside the belly of a horrible machine that’s bleeding to death. At the end of the millennium, in more despairing moments, it seemed as though a simple programming glitch might open that vein.

Godspeed’s avoidance of the trappings of the music industry only enhanced their prophetic aura in the year after the release of F♯ A♯ ∞. They issued no photos, sold no t-shirts, and gave very few interviews. Given all the mysteries surrounding the record itself, and the openness to interpretation of the mostly instrumental music, that contextual void left a lot of room for the imagination.

The band did provide a few clues. Within each LP copy is a print showing a train with a tribute to the Reverend Gary Davis, a show flyer, a small envelope that contains an intricate blueprint called “Faulty Schematics of a Ruined Machine,” and, most famously, a single Canadian penny that has been crushed by a train. The coin is a potent symbol that connects so many of the album’s threads—the proximity of violence to money, the surprising endurance of supposedly obsolete technology, the intensely local nature of the entire enterprise, and, above all, the simple childlike joy of knowing a giant machine turned such a common object into a copper pancake.

The vinyl version of F♯ A♯ ∞ has to rank with the greatest packages in the history of the LP, but not because it’s especially elaborate. Its ultimate triumph is that each copy still comes with its own sleeve of goodies, including the penny, while the record itself is still comparatively inexpensive. Where most labels create special editions that become valuable because of scarcity, Constellation, 23 years and almost 50 pressings later (some runs numbered in the thousands), makes this one available to all for a modest price.

Which brings us back to community, and that dirty loft by the railroad tracks, and a word that crops up a lot with Godspeed: hope—you don’t start a long-term project with people you care about unless you’re driven by it. As dark as this band’s music gets and as deeply fucked as the world it portrays may be, it always contains a glimmer of catharsis, some moment that suggests there’s a future worth struggling for. “When you live in the city, railway tracks are the most open space you can find,” Menuck told the Montreal publication AMAZEzine in 1998. “There’s usually no high buildings around and it’s the place where you can see the most sky.” That’s what those massive major-key resolutions point to—they suggest that if we’re creative, we might band together with others and find possibility in what surrounds us, even in places the rest of the world has abandoned.