godspeed
you! black emperor
yanqui
u.x.o.
(cst024 )
2xLP/CD
release dates:
europe nov 04, 2002
n. america nov 11, 2002
u.x.o. is unexploded ordnance
is landmines is cluster bombs. yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international
police state is multinational corporate oligarchy. godspeed you!
black emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting. the new album
is just music.
recorded by steve albini
at electrical audio in chicago. mixed by howard bilerman and godspeed
you! black emperor at the hotel2tango in montreal. available on single
compact disc and double phonograph record.
stubborn tiny lights vs.
clustering darkness forever ok?
===========
Independence is a much-invoked
term in the music world, and its co-optation by the industry all too often
corrupts and invalidates whatever real meaning the word possesses. Independence
is an empty pose to the extent it does not relate critically and stand
in opposition to the homogenising force of corporatism and culture commodification.
The capitalist system of exchange is at a certain level inescapable – it
takes money to make records and money to buy them – but the worst traits
and tendencies of this system must be resisted, not just in spirit, but
in practice. We understand our position as an independent record label
to be an ongoing attempt to define and enact such a practice.
Corporatism divides and
conquers and falsifies social participation in its pre-formed, group-tested,
hermetically-sealed cycle of marketed product, setting up a closed circle
of blind consumption. The corporation is inhuman, managerial, driven solely
by profit and “the sell”. It is incapable of actually caring about and
preserving the supposedly cultural objects it shills, for it can ascribe
no real content to them. The very concept of quality is anathema to it
– capitalism in its grossest form is a total reduction to quantity, to
moving units. Exceptions only prove the rule – if you’ve heard something
on a major label that you dig, this is purely accidental. To the degree
you have made this positive valuation in relative aesthetic freedom, you
are already approaching the corporate product in terms that are foreign
and threatening to it. The corporation would much prefer your docility
to your activity, and in fact does everything in its power to engender
that docility by creating the illusion of activity.
Independence is to our minds
the affirmation of real community, real conversation, and the real exchange
of artistic work. The urgent task is to build up and promote real dependency
through a network of dissemination and valuation of culture that strives
to address the truth of our human situation – a dependency based on freedom,
critique, and dialogue. Obviously putting out rock music, however experimental
and boundary-pushing, is only obliquely a political and social activity,
but we nevertheless hope to contribute in a tiny way to a meaningful model
of communication which takes its lead from art. We deal with bands face-to-face,
without formal contracts, on the basis of ongoing discussion and mutual
decision-making. A shared understanding of principles is crucial to the
process, the aim being to collectively define and set the terms of engagement.
Our foremost concern is to minimise the corrupting effect of bringing a
work to market, allowing it to preserve its own terrain, to speak for itself.
We are learning as we go, attempting to remain as critical as possible
about our methods of self-definition.
In most other respects, the
enemy lies without and is much easier to identify. We have no interest
in and make no effort towards the placing of our recordings in corporate
retail outlets. However, we do work with distributors we feel we can trust,
and relinquish control of certain commercial aspects to them. In a sense
there is more than a mundane convenience here, as it not only saves us
from much of the distasteful work involved in negotiating and penetrating
the marketplace, but allows us to deflect responsibility for the ultimate
placement of our records in shops. Guilty as charged – if we could afford
to work personally and directly with every Mom & Pop record store on
the planet, we would. At the very least, we are committed to a model of
expansion that seeks to minimise the role of corporate chains. The expectation
is that as our catalogue of releases and our understanding of distribution
networks increase, so too will our ability to expand and strengthen the
lines connecting points of independent exchange. Insofar as this possibility
exists and can be actualised, we have hope. The role of chain stores in
the pre-determination and warehousing of culture is to be resisted. Do
not shop at these temples of payola and product placement – they are zones
of domination. Seek out your local independent record shop, and if you
are amongst the unlucky many whose community has already been ravaged and
gutted by Wal-mart or HMV, please mail-order directly from us. This is
your least expensive option in any case.
Duplication is a cornerstone
of corporate capital – you too can be hand-fed your own identity as you
suckle the same fucking hamburger in the same fucking prefab environment
in the four corners of the world – but it can proceed by way of non-corporate
techniques. Avoidance of pre-formulated package design sets up the parameters
for localised multi-step reproduction. Our practice of record-making involves
local artisans, craftspeople and small businesses. You can read all about
this in the section on packaging. Sometimes we find ourselves with no choice
but to dirty our hands and do business with a behemoth. Paper producers
and suppliers are the foremost example, as they are almost without exception
directly tied to corporate harvesters of trees. We’re not about to forgo
the use of paper, so the best we can do is seek out those producers who
aren’t vertically-integrated from top to bottom, who don’t exist directly
as an arm of an odious multi-national. Reproduction of music on vinyl and
CD is also potentially dangerous terrain, though the former has mostly
become an independently-owned process by now. Our commitment to vinyl certainly
stems in part from its inherent resistance to the advent of compact discs
as the vehicle of mass duplication. We are neither absolute purists nor
luddites in this regard – while we do prefer vinyl both for sonics and
for its ability to create a larger canvas for art direction, we also recognise
the decentralising potential of digital duplication and transmission. It’s
clear that digital technology is increasingly empowering localised and
independent production, which for us mostly means the ability to press
our discs with small-scale companies. We are still wholly unconvinced of
the worth, aesthetic or otherwise, of displacing the tangible record-as-object
to the ephemeral realm of the internet. There may be limited applications
that we haven’t yet grasped, but until the technology is made both accessible
and refined enough to permit the exchange of music without compromising
either its inherent sonics or its contextualisation in a package, this
appears to us peripheral.
Mechanical reproduction,
whether digital or analogue with regard to the music itself, whether at
the local die-cutter or silkscreener with regard to packaging and printing,
is accessible technology and allows for the duplication and dissemination
of cultural work at the micro-level, even if the macroscopic potentials
of the technology machine, with respect to art no less than labour practice
or weaponry, are terrifying. It’s all about maintaining a human scale.
Fin-de-siecle capitalism both facilitates and threatens independent production,
and the key for us is to utilise those technologies that captialism itself
has marginalised and dispersed in order to create cultural objects that
are inherently critical of the system. To the extent this condemns us to
pursuing quality at the expense of quantity, it is a fate to which we willingly
submit.
Arthur Magazine 