The opening band, Dead Rat Orchestra, only got about a 12-minute-long set, due to the sound-check overrunning, but I thought they were pretty interesting. It was basically experimental woodblock-and-hacksaw-based percussion, a wailing fiddler and a guy who just 'played' various objects, including a record player, creating a hypnotic Deep South chain gang-style folk. I really enjoyed it, although a full-length set might have been a bit wearing.
Godspeed came out punctually at 8:30, setting us up for a marathon set. As the various band members got settled, and the projectionist started crafting some of the backdrops for the rest of the set, they started out with 15 minutes of drone. This can be wearing (as it was at the recent Swans gig I went to), but here it served to set the ambience for the rest of the evening, and just made the beginning of Gathering Storm (the first movement of Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, in my opinion their best full-length album) all the more powerful when it finally arrived. From this, they progressed through tracks from every one of their major releases, with an emphasis seemingly on those from Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, with barely a break - as on their albums, the ideas all mashed together into one glorious whole, with it being difficult to discern where ideas and builds ended or began. After 2 and a half hours, they finally brought the set to an end with the tour de force that is BBF3, from their Slow Riot EP. At the end, they left with barely a wave, let alone an encore, with only guitarist Efrim staying around onstage to mould the shards of feedback that closed the gig.
All the members of the group distinguished themselves. The least obvious, but perhaps the most effective, was the projectionist, working towards the back of the room. He created an on-the-fly set of low-key images that perfectly captured the senses of the music being performed, from transfixing sequences of numbers and letters, through to atmospheric shots of a claw-like crane working in the shadow of a huge bridge somewhere in small-town America, to shots that made it look as though the band were flying through the sky or racing through the hills. There was some very experimental playing - the use of a double bass bow on a hi-hat was something I had never seen before, and a lot of screwdrivers were used on all 3 guitars almost constantly from very early on in the performance.
None of the members of the band sang, or even said, a word during the performance. They used occasional vocal samples, such as the one in BBF3, that were, as far as I could tell, identical to the ones used in the album recordings. These gave some structure to the music, and served to heighten the sense of dread and dissatisfaction, but were also in a way beautiful - indeed, Chart #3, featuring little else but the violin and a voice sample, was one of the most affecting passages of the night.
A minor disappointment was the lack of many additional instrumentalists - Gathering Storm just doesn't have the same effect when the initial blaring of the horn section is played on a glockenspiel, and the lack of a cello was possibly responsible for my favourite track, Moya, being left out completely - but after a while you began to forget about the recorded versions and were just taken with them in their beautiful, breathtaking builds. This was a brilliant show, in every respect, and GY!BE truly are a step above any of the other bands trying to do similar things at the moment. We can just hope that they will be back, either with more shows or new releases, at some time in the not-too-distant future.
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