godspeed you black emperor! / labradford
12-09-1999
babylon, ottawa
(when i get back to the alter-reality, something else will appear in this space.)
not a lot of people can say they saw gybe! in 1999. so, what is my ultra-hipster story around this? in fact, the truth is that i couldn't get any of my friends to go with me - and i tried several. i know at least one of them probably regrets turning it down, in hindsight. but that is the actual truth of it....
so, i asked my dad to go with me.
"it's got a bit of a larks' tongues in aspic feel, but it's more like floyd, over all..."
in fact, it's a good thing i did, because when i got there i realized it was licensed and i needed adult supervision - had i gone with a couple of friends, they wouldn't have let us in. it didn't cross my mind because i'd never been to a concert in a bar, before - all the concerts i'd ever been to were all ages. i was just a few months short of being legal.
he enjoyed the set, but he was always more into the technical side of things and tended to keep a distance from atmospheric music. you could tell that he wished that the set was a bit more dynamic.
i didn't want to sit at the back of the venue with him, so i moved up to the front and sat on the floor, cross-legged, with a large number of slightly older kids. i was at the age where flickering projections of hope and hammers over blistering psychedelic music was actually pretty devastating, and i have to report that the show was a pretty profound experience for me and that it dramatically affected my tastes in music for a very long time afterwards.
if you're curious, i got the heads up from an internet friend [a torontonian] on the skinny puppy mailing list, epilogue.
labradford (i was only familiar with their 1996 disc, at the time) opened the set with a pleasant but uneventful set that i was hoping would be a little darker.
i don't have audio for the ottawa show, but the setlist for the montreal show two nights previous is very similar to what i remember.