Gospeed You! Black Emperor / Colin Stetson

Much of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s music is of a bluntly effective, unidirectional quality. First comes tuning-up noise, then a build, and then of course comes the squall breaking into sunlight. Their best work has a measure of pop satisfaction too, of total confidence in the structure of each song’s movements (“Moya” or “East Hastings,” say). I’m reminded of a Mexican accordion-guitar duo that frequents a train I ride. The two players have one trick: most of the time tuning or playing dissonant, scattered chords, right after the Carroll stop, when the train car bursts from the underground, they play a short melody, one that just lasts a few minutes in the sunlight before they pass around a bowler hat at the next stop, content their trick has worked once again.

All of Godpseed’s music has that same released-from-underground, shameless sublimity—and one’s reaction to it is often strong and entirely predictable. Start with the guitar figure, string me along with the violin. Build me up, then let me down quickly with some blustery noise. Perhaps let me stew in an awkward breath or two. Send around the hat.

The fact that you can go to a Godspeed concert (or five—their New York residency has been a lengthy affair) and are guaranteed satisfaction is a good thing. I can now say that I have had the Godspeed Experience. But it’s just like seeing the Pixies, or My Bloody Valentine, or Pavement, or any other indie rock “destination” band: one can’t help but unconsciously pair lots of money and lots of nostalgia. No, the surprise and absolute highlight of Monday night’s show, the one worth writing about, was opener and Bell Orchestre associate Colin Stetson, Saxophone Colossus.

Part of Godspeed’s populist appeal is that none of the members are particularly virtuosic on their own. Only together, sitting around an intimidating array of pedals like a posse of anarchist electricians, can they create a moving, symphonic noise. Stetson, on the other hand, is all auteurist vision, a combination of personal accomplishment, avant-garde confrontation, and unexpected accessibility. On paper his music sounds like a gimmick—humming and making loud noises while playing a giant saxophone; no effects (an attempt on the part of the sound engineer to add delay to his microphone was met with righteous indignation), just circular breathing, percussive noise, and sublime squalls—but it’s precisely that rigor which forces him to create compositions of mouth-slackening beauty. Constrained to a single instrument, yet struggling to excite the audience, overarching horn concepts like bebop or free jazz start seeming ridiculous. Interstellar Space (1974), John Coltrane’s masterfully minimalist work of drums and saxophone, feels sprawling, indulgent compared to this, its pleasures too easily earned.

Stetson works from the ground up on songs like “Judges,” starting with a trance-like rhythm on the lower notes, building in screams and overtones. This tension, especially on stage, adds to Stetson’s hypnotic power; think the dissipating rhythm of a Steve Reich joint released from cold orchestral confines and given swarthy, Herculean might. And then entered “Red Horse,” a breathy demonstration of bass sax and beatboxing. It was fantastic.

His mastery of the saxophone, and the primordial interplay between noise and analogue IDM-style beats, with melody sneaking out like Fennesz’s guitars from their digital dungeon, hits an exciting balance between accessibility and confrontation. The body is moved by both; that Stetson can trigger everything with a single instrument, manipulating so much with so little, heightens the stakes of his set. In other words, each song is primed to fall apart. Which may read like a series of cheap tricks, but compared to the bored, inexorable subway sunlight of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s performance, there is a turbulent, immense humanity to what Stetson is accomplishing in 2011.