Last night at Glasgow’s iconic Barrowland Ballroom, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (hereafter referred to as GY!BE, since even the band’s name feels like an epic) put on a show that could have easily doubled as a sonic séance or the soundtrack to the last apocalypse. For those who don’t know, the band’s name is inspired by a 1976 Japanese documentary about a biker gang, but frankly, the nine-member ensemble could have just as easily taken their name from a film about intergalactic space travel. If there’s a band out there that sounds more like the last signals of a dying star, I’ve yet to hear them.

But let’s back up. Yes, nine people. You read that right. This band brings so many musicians on stage, you start wondering if they’re running a DIY community or an avant-garde music cooperative. Each of them has a very specific role: one drummer plays a regular kit while another occasionally picks up a saw (you know, as drummers do), and the rest rotate between violins, guitars, basses, and a variety of mysterious stringed things I’m not entirely sure even have names.

Towards the back of the audience one visual technician is frantically switching between four Super 8 projectors, because, naturally, music like this can’t happen without visuals of grainy peace slogans flickering on the walls like coded messages from some secret, long-gone civilization.

The show begins with “Hope Drone,” which sounds less like a musical composition and more like something the Voyager probe picked up on its way out of the solar system. GY!BE doesn’t so much take the stage as descend upon it—wrapped in shadows, barely visible, as though even the idea of stage presence is too bourgeois for them.

The only real illumination comes from the Super 8 films spinning behind them, which is just as well since it matches the mood of the music: stark, mysterious, and possibly apocalyptic. Oh, and they asked the bar staff to dim the lights, because who needs to see what they’re drinking when you’ve got music like this to melt your brain?

The thing about a GY!BE show is that it defies the basic laws of rock concerts. There are no lyrics to sing along to (unless you want to try chanting “SUN IS A HOLE, SUN IS VAPORS” at your friends), and there’s no discernible verse-chorus structure to guide you. Instead, the band constructs vast soundscapes that build slowly, like glaciers grinding their way through the terrain, only to suddenly explode into a wall of noise that leaves the audience feeling like they’ve just been caught in a thunderstorm. The music is dynamic in the truest sense: quiet, eerie strings give way to distorted guitars, which give way to drums pounding like they’re scoring the fall of an empire.

The highlight of the evening came in the last 30 minutes, where—as any good GY!BE fan knows—things get real noisy. One of the drummers (the one who occasionally picks up a saw, because of course there’s a saw involved) decides it’s time to summon the thunderclouds and returns to his kit with a ferocity that makes you wonder if he’s been communing with some ancient weather god. Meanwhile, violins screech like alien communication, guitars loop on endlessly, and you start to feel like you’re floating somewhere between Earth and deep space. Somewhere in the madness, a few fans shout out from the crowd, but their voices are swallowed up by the avalanche of sound. At a GY!BE gig, this is as rowdy as it gets.

And then, almost as suddenly as it began, it’s over. No encore. No goodbye. Just a long distorted outro that sees various band members fiddle with some knobs on monitors creating a final note of distortion that’s left hanging in the air like the last remnants of a cosmic event. The crowd stumbles out into the night, dazed, confused, and wondering if what they just experienced was a concert or an art installation that somehow tore open the fabric of reality?

Here’s the thing about GY!BE: it’s not about catchy tunes or crowd-pleasers. They demand your attention, pulling you deep into their world of feedback, drones, and orchestral flourishes. And sure, it’s a little weird. A little intimidating. But it’s bold, it’s breathtaking, and it’s unlike anything else out there. At the end of the day, if you didn’t leave feeling like you’d just had your heartstrings and brain cells rearranged by alien forces, were you really even at a GY!BE show?

Images & Words: Angela Canavan