Aiding that sense of mystery is the relative lack of organization inherent in transporting a ten-member ensemble on an indie-rock touring budget. Therefore, when Splendid attempted to hook up with them at their recent performance in Chicago, logistics were, at best, flawed. For one thing, there's the difficulty of identifying specific members of a band that doesn't seem to have any focused press photos. And after finishing their soundcheck late, our designated Godspeed contacts were more justifiably more interested in grabbing a hot shower than sitting down for an interview. Our interview was postponed until after the show...giving us doubts that it would ever happen.

However, at 1:15 a.m., founder/guitarist Efrim and percussionist Bruce were ready to talk.

There's a big difference between an interview conducted inside a toasty-warm club in the early evening hours, and an interview conducted in a freezing cold back alley at 1:00 a.m. It's a difference that's particularly obvious when the interviewer has been up for 21 hours, and needs to be up for work in four hours. An interview done at 1:00 a.m. is more volatile. Questions are less coherent, answers are more passionate, and the entire interview teeters on the edge of becoming an argument. Or a brawl.

All things considered, we should probably do it this way more often...

Efrim: Well, what you've gotta understand is that most of the stuff on the first record was written over the course of maybe three years, in a period where the band was a lot smaller.There's a lot of stuff we wrote with a smaller group, and then people added on to it as they joined up. Recently, though...someone'll bring in a riff, or a part...

You've gotta understand that for the most part, we're still just like...punk rock kids, y'know? It's still just riffs to us, y'know, so people come home with a riff, or whatever, and we'll just build off of that.

Splendid: Yeah, it definitely seems to me like you're building off a riff, but the simple fact that I can recognize the songs means that there's a bit more structure there, at this point, than pure improvisation.

Efrim: Yeah, with the new stuff, we've been touring for the last year or so, so I think (group members) kind of figure out, as we're playing, what kind of niche they can fill, and things sort of get cemented that way, y'know?

It's hard for us to write stuff. It gets harder all the time for us to write stuff. It's something we're still trying to figure out how to do.

Splendid: Is it just because of the challenge of keeping the sounds new?

Efrim: That's part of it...and I think also it's a challenge because it's kind of an ambitious project that we've mounted for ourselves, and we're always kind of reaching beyond our abilities -- and our means, y'know -- to do what it is we do. It's a lot of learning on the fly.

Splendid: I know that you've got a big library of found sound and ambient audio. How did you put that together, and how does stuff get added to your collection? Do you just start up a tape recorder and leave it sitting somewhere?

Efrim: Yeah, there are maybe three or four of us who just walk around with tape recorders a lot of the time, especially when we're on tour, and we just sort of "grab" stuff that way.

Splendid: What are the qualifications, then, for a sound to find its way into your work? Does it just need to be striking?

Efrim: Yeah --

Bruce: You can take anything, and manipulate it, and if it works with something else...it can sound great.

Efrim: Yeah, that's it, as far as what the qualifications would be...it'd depend what we wanted to use it for.

Bruce: It's there at the right time.

Efrim: Yeah.

Splendid: But do you sit down and listen to every last second you've recorded?

Efrim: No.

Splendid: It's pretty much luck of the draw as far as what you grab off the tape?

Efrim: Well, I think it's kind of between those two poles.

Bruce: If there's something you heard -- say, that thing up there (he points to a humming air conditioning unit atop a nearby building) -- and it had a really nice sound to it, and it struck you at the time and you remembered it, you might go back and look for it.

Splendid: About your performance space, Hotel2Tango...I know that its whole nature seems to be very important to your live performances. How does it add an extra dimension to what you do, other than being a home as well as a performance space?

Efrim: I don't think we'd be here right now if it wasn't for the Hotel2Tango. We just played a show in Montréal that was the first show in a long time that we've played outside of the Hotel2Tango. It's pretty much the only place we've played in Montréal.

You've gotta understand that there wasn't really any steady place to play in Montréal 'til the Hotel popped up, and the Constellation Room (which is the space run by Constellation Records) popped up. And because there was a space for this kind of music, all of a sudden a whole bunch of bands sort of popped up too. And none of this would have happened if there wasn't the fuckin' shitty, stinky Hotel2Tango for us to practice and play in, y'know? And it's like a nasty space. It's toxic. It's a cancer pit.

Bruce: It's over a garage.

Efrim: It's over a garage, yeah. It's like...I don't know. It's everything.

Bruce: It's got...it's got...IT.

Efrim: Yeah, it's got something.

Splendid: So if I was to see you perform at the Hotel2Tango, how would it be significantly different from what I saw tonight? Other than my having trouble breathing, perhaps?

Efrim: I think it'd be the same, except the sound system's not as good...I don't know.

Bruce: It's sort of a more...informal space.

Efrim: Yeah, that's true. A lot of people know each other in that space. Less so, these days, but...

Bruce: It's not a bar!

Efrim: Not a bar, yeah.

Splendid: Right, it's just a loft space.

Efrim: (almost offended) Just a loft space? (Lounge Ax) is just a bar, and (Hotel2Tango) is a loft space, my friend. You gotta switch the "just a's" around, y'know?

Splendid: It's a loft space.

Efrim: Well, it's a big empty room with a little plywood stage in the corner.

Splendid: No disrespect intended to the Hotel2Tango...

Efrim: No, I know, I know.

Splendid: It's kind of surprising to hear that there's so little in Montréal for bands like GYBE to work with, because although you describe yourself as "punk kids", there's the whole Ambiances Magnétiques crowd --

Efrim: Yeah, but we're really not part of that scene.

Bruce: We don't hang out in...where do those bands play? I mean, like, art galleries? Chi-chi kinds of loft parties and stuff like that?

Splendid: Well, hearing their material down here (in the U.S.), I'm not really in touch with where they play, but it seems like their goals are kind of similar to yours. Is there any area where your artforms meet?

Efrim: I don't know. We played a festival in Victoriaville -- the Musique Actuelle Festival in Victoriaville -- and I can't speak for anyone else, but I felt pretty alienated being part of that. There's not much cross-pollination when it comes to that crowd and whatever crowd we're part of.

Bruce: Or at least not yet. Most of us come from a punk rock background, and a lot of the people that play in those groups...they've studied. They're not self-taught. They're people who are usually articulate in a lot of different forms and choose to play that type of form, so coming into that milieu there's some intimidation. And also, why even bother trying to fit into that? What's the point?

Efrim: Yeah, they're engaged in a different sort of thing. You've gotta understand, those are older people, who are coming from a totally different scene than we're coming from.

Splendid: For the most part, yeah, but I've heard a few of their releases that get into the same concepts and kind of intersect your space. What I've noticed about most of their work is that it seems to want to condense a wide range of sensory experience into audio, whereas you guys are trying to expand beyond it -- you really want to affect listeners in other sensory areas besides just listening.

Efrim: We're also a rock band, y'know? To me that's the biggest difference. We're a rock band, like it or not. And if people pay five, six, eight, ten, twelve dollars to come see you, and you're sitting on the stage, you've gotta do what you've gotta do. And it's a lot different from what they're involved in.

Splendid: Yeah, but I think if I sat down with someone and played them your stuff, and then played the Ramones and something from Ambiances Magnétiques and said "Which is closer?"...

Efrim: Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Splendid: But I'm not trying to put you in their camp or anything.

Efrim: Yeah, I'm just making a distinction.

Splendid: I noticed that with your first, cassette-only album, All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling, there are a lot more pieces, which presumably are shorter...

Efrim: Yeah.

Splendid: I assume that was more of an exploratory stage...

Efrim: Well, yeah. That was a long time ago...

Splendid: And each piece kind of...dovetailed into the next?

Efrim: Yeah, there were a lot of crossfades and rapid cuts. That's a four track thing, and it wasn't really a full band thing.

Splendid: And now, your works are longer, but they have distinct movements and discrete elements -- the same degree of variation under a single name. Is that ultimately just an evolution of naming conventions? Or styles?

Efrim: You gotta understand that the band that came out of this tape, that made the four-track recordings, wasn't a live band. And then three of us played a show, and the idea was to play one note for an hour, and that was Godspeed You Black Emperor for about a year, this band that played one note for an hour. And then it sort of became two notes, and three notes. It started this narrow, and then got that wide...and then we've kind of shrunk from there, in terms of the length of songs. The movement stuff was sort of a natural outgrowth of this thing of playing one note for an hour. Or that's how it seems to me.

Splendid: You're all involved in other areas of media -- filmmakers, artists, etc. Given the group's talents beyond the "aural" range, what do you see as the ultimate "form" of Godspeed You Black Emperor? And if you could do an ideal performance, encompassing any medium, what would it incorporate?

Efrim: Right now, just being in "tour mode", I think the ideal performance is a tiny, sweaty place with a low ceiling. Other than that...I don't know. You've gotta understand that I think mostly our focus is like...wahtever. I mean, touring with twelve people, trying to get along, trying to figure out how not to fuck each other over as much as they do, so as far as ideals, for myself all I can idealize is us getting better at that. And then whatever comes out of that, maybe then we can start dreaming of ideals bigger than that.

Bruce: Each person has a different ideal.

Splendid: So what's yours?

Bruce: In "tour mode", or...?

Splendid: Anything.

Bruce: Well...recently we played a show in Montréal, and what I really liked about that was that we played in a large theatre. And the visuals -- the movies we show during performances -- were so present. That was something that really struck me, that added such a grandeur to it...not larger than life, but the music is sort of bombastic in itself, and to have the...

Splendid: To be able to fill the space?

Bruce: Yeah. And I'm not saying that we could do that every time, but we did it that time and I was really happy that we were able to do that. It was also a really good, positive, home town group of people.

Efrim: When the "Hope" film loop came on, people broke into applause and screaming and shit...People in Montréal, I think, just because they've seen us more often, sort of are more comfortable with what it is we do, and respond accordingly. And that's super-nice. If we could get to the point where people understand what we do, and can respond, that'd be great. This initial hype that's happening now will sort of peel away a bit, and we'll get fewer people who don't know why the fuck they're coming to see us, and get more people who know exactly why the fuck they're coming to see us. To me that would be pretty ideal at this point.

Tonight there was a group of college kids in the front laughing at one of our guitarists' haircut. If we could get a lot less of that, that would be great...but I think we're some way away from weeding out that "element".

Bruce: But there's hope for that; we can achieve that, because we're different from a rock band in that we do have that "art" or whatever you'd like to call it. For want of a better word...

Efrim: Alienation factor...

Bruce: Yeah. We can play places which are suited to the music, from sweaty rock clubs to churches to nice theaters. Or crappy theaters, y'know? But we can play a bunch of different places, and those places will attract different crowds. It's not always gonna be the same audience. That's what's great.

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