charming as always from gy!be
Here’s a link to the album’s storefront on the GY!BE Bandcamp page.
It’s real! all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling, the long-lost first album from Canadian post-rock icons Godspeed You! Black Emperor, hit the GY!BE Bandcamp page during the wee hours of February 14, 2022.
Calling the tape “legendary” would probably be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly cultivated a reputation among a specific breed of too-online music geeks (here I have to state that this is a label from which I am by no means exempt). It’s an infamous piece of lost media, and bin-diving Discogs addicts everywhere have no doubt fantasized about finding an original copy of all lights fucked in some far-flung dollar bin. An original physical copy would no doubt still fetch a lot of money, but we now have some actual music that we can attach to the ungainly name. How did that happen?
The last time all lights fucked was this talked-about was probably 2013, when a reddit user claimed to have purchased one of thirty-three original copies of the cassette from a record shop in Moncton, New Brunswick. The link that was supposed to contain audio of “Dadmomdaddy” has unfortunately been lost to time, and only one of the Imgur links to the user’s photos of the cassette still works. Eventually, the fuss surrounding the post blew over, the links quietly rotted away, the reddit user deleted their account, and all lights fucked slipped back to the lost media graveyard.
Fast forward almost a decade. On February 4, 2022, someone on /mu/, 4chan’s infamous music board, posted a link to a mega.nz file purported to be a lossless upload of all lights fucked. The indie music news cycle caught wind of the leak, and an avalanche of “is this real?” and “it’s real!” writeups swiftly followed. Ten days later, the group tacitly confirmed the authenticity of the leak by releasing something titled all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling to their Bandcamp page as a fundraiser for Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.
For what it’s worth, I was one of the people who thought that this album was either totally apocryphal or that it would never see the light of day (either due to the band preventing its release or the album just being lost to time). GY!BE is a group that relishes mystique, and it made sense that one of the first Godspeed-associated releases might never be confirmed to exist, forever condemned to existence as a vortex of reddit threads claiming to have discovered ten seconds of audio from the project and speculative, clickbait-y thinkpieces. But it’s here, after all that- or at least, the band released something they’ve called all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling (more on that ambiguity below).
So there’s your backstory: how does all lights fucked actually sound? First things first: this isn’t really a Godspeed You! Black Emperor project. The tape was recorded under the name God Speed You Black Emperor! by Efrim Menuck and a couple other contributors. Menuck states explicitly on the GY!BE Bandcamp page that the group that recorded and released all lights fucked is of “no relation to the band that followed.” In spite of the name that Menuck performed under and the Bandcamp page to which the album was released, this is much more of an Efrim Menuck thing than a GY!BE thing.
A listener familiar with Menuck’s oeuvre will no doubt be able to draw parallels between all lights fucked and his later work as a member of Godspeed and other projects. The crashing guitar chords on tracks like “Diminishing Shine” and “333 Frames Per Second” prefigures the crescendo-ing in GY!BE’s later work in records like Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and “Peasantry or ‘Light Inside of Light!,’” the sublime first track from 2015’s Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress. Elsewhere on the album,”Threethreethree” features the wailing, screwdrivered guitar work that would eventually become one of GY!BE’s defining sounds.
Menuck hasn’t done much (if any) vocal work as a member of Godspeed, but a number of the tracks on all lights fucked feature Menuck’s reedy, immediately recognizable singing voice. “Revisionist Alternatif Wounds to the Hair-Cut Hit Head” could well have been a demo track for a Silver Mt. Zion release. The record also features a whole pile of field recordings, found sounds, and enigmatic, pitch-shifted spoken-word sections, which is something that absolutely tracks with other Efrim Menuck-associated projects. The pseudo-title track, “And the Hairy Guts Shine,” sounds like a Jame Gumb slam poetry set, and “Buried Ton” is a sped-up recording of a conversation about drug-induced paranoia.
Structurally, all lights fucked broadly resembles Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, arguably Godspeed’s most well-known work. The tape runs just a hair over sixty-nine minutes long (nice), and it’s broken up into four major “movements,” which are themselves broken up into a bunch of lengthily-named submovements. A tracklist for this album would probably look a whole lot like the tracklist included on the LYSF sleeve (you can have a look at a visualization of that tracklist at this link).
Of course, this isn’t necessarily where the story ends. A million rumors are still swirling re: whether or not the version of all lights fucked that got leaked to 4chan and released on the GY!BE Bandcamp page is the version of all lights fucked that Efrim Menuck and a couple friends put together in some dank Quebecois basement back in 1993. I’d initially included a link to the 4chan thread that contained the original leak in this piece, but it’s since been deleted (Morrissey voice: linkrot strikes again). I went searching for it, and I found another thread from February 16 that was full of stuff like this:
So we have to ask ourselves: is this version of all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling the “actual” version? Who knows, and frankly, who cares. Listeners who want all lights fucked to remain an enigma are free to get Mad Online over whether or not it was Efrim himself who actually leaked the album to /mu/ or whether or not the “real” all lights fucked is still out there gathering dust on a mythical “USED” shelf somewhere in Quebec, but the fact of the matter is that this release sounds like it could be a demo tape for any number of GY!BE/GY!BE-adjacent projects. If it’s not a rip of the 1994 tape, the real 1994 tape probably doesn’t sound a whole lot different.
Ultimately, I’m of a mind that the scholars on 4chan and RYM have been a little harsh toward this album. It’s disorganized, abrasive, and not a little pretentious, but anyone going into this tape expecting something akin to He Has Left Us Alone… or F#A#∞ will inevitably be let down. It’ll be a rewarding listen for fans of experimental music and amateur music historians alike, but it might be a little difficult for fans to temper their expectations of what this album was “supposed” to sound like after all these years.
Recommended further listening:
I spent a lot of time in 2020 listening to an artist called Jandek, and some of the material from all lights fucked reminded me of his work. I’m not sure why I’m connecting these two; maybe it’s the sense that whoever recorded this was recording music while mostly alone in an empty room with nothing to hand but a thrift store guitar and some of the very shittiest mics known to man.
Obviously all lights fucked is sonically reminiscent of other Efrim Menuck/GY!BE-associated acts, especially Menuck’s solo work (published under the name Efrim Manuel Menuck). Unrelatedly, I don’t think I realized until I began writing this and listening back through the Efrim Menuck Expanded Universe how much he loves naming songs and albums after urine (G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, Pissing Stars, “Piss Crowns Are Trebled”).
A GY!BE project that I think is at least a little underappreciated is The Pretty Little Lightning Paw E.P., released under the name Thee Silver Mountain Reveries. If you don’t have the time to spare for a whole EP, at least listen to the first track from this one. It’s downright gorgeous.
Other notes:
I always wondered why Wikipedia had a tracklist available for an album that functionally didn’t exist until February 2022. It turns out that Constellation Records had uploaded scans of the album art (including the tracklist) to their website, and these scans fueled a lot of the speculation about the tape’s existence. You can check them out at this link.
Here’s a cool interview I found from GY!BE member David Bryant, who, it turns out, is also a founding member of the Montreal-based post-rock group Set Fire to Flames. The interview took place in 1998, immediately after the release of F#A#∞, and it’s interesting to see how people “interpreted” Godspeed before the post-rock genre as we know it today really took off. all lights fucked gets a brief cameo in the interview as “the other Godspeed project,” which I thought was kind of funny.
Only tangentially related to the rest of the piece: here’s a bootlegged live cut of LYSF I found while researching this piece. It’s really good.
Sonic Explorer 