Godspeed at Hopscotch

Godspeed You! Balck Emperor at Variety Playhouse, September 11, 2015

As previously discussed, we passed up going to Hopscotch in Raleigh this year to instead catch Godspeed You! Black Emperor here in Atlanta last Friday night at Variety Playhouse.  Since that time, the good folks at NYC Taper have recorded and posted Godspeed's entire Hopscotch show from the previous Thursday night and have made it available for free download.

I think I made the right decision to catch Godspeed in Atlanta rather than Raleigh.  Their set in Atlanta was at least two songs longer than the Raleigh set, and for Godspeed that means at least another 40 minutes or so of music, and here's a description of the Hopscotch experience from the NYC Taper website:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor shows are always meditative affairs, where you allow the band’s long instrumental sequences to draw you in, slowly, bombarding you with projected images against the backdrop of a black room. It’s an entirely different experience when that backdrop is of limited size, and the dark room is replaced with the downtown plaza of Raleigh, NC, lit by streetlamps and neon signs from Jimmy John’s and the local Marriott. In that environment, how can you concentrate on something like this? Can it resonate? 

Perhaps nature provided the best way, in the form of a downpour that blanketed the plaza in the early going, its sheets of rain and gusts driving away the merely-curious until only the die-hards were left. Absent the excess conversations, forced to reckon with whether this show was worth it under the circumstances, those who stayed answered their own question. GSYBE shows are events; their music isn’t for everyone, and they don’t make any effort to make things otherwise.

Here's the stream of Godspeed's rain-soaked Hopscotch set in Raleigh:

For comparison purposes, here's Godspeed's 9/11 set at Variety Playhouse as recorded and posted by Southern Shelter.