Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Turning power against itself has always been a useful form of resistance.

Donning the enemy’s flag and uniform has historically been deployed as a consistently successful strategy to confuse and infiltrate any opposing army. American Delta blues artists like Skip James and Robert Johnson confronted the misery of the Great Depression by singing sad songs. The legendary Montreal post-rock record label Constellation in the early days of the corporate internet posted to its website a manifesto proclaiming, “THE WORLD HAS NOT CHANGED. THE WORLD REMAINS THE SAME. THE END OF THE WORLD WILL NEVER COME. WE ARE ALL GUILTY.”

It is befitting, then, that more than two decades later, Patch One, the Portland, Maine-based artist and musician, the experimental guitarist and synth player Jonathan Downs, Efrim Manuel Menuck, a founder member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and numerous offshoot bands, and I meet via Zoom, the technology platform that came to fame most notably during the coronavirus crisis, to discuss their latest collaboration, a battle-weary go-screw-yourself forthcoming on Constellation Records, squarely aimed at state power, entitled NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER.

“Fuck this app,” Menuck ceremoniously exclaims from behind a mountain of beard and hair as he flickers onscreen.

The four of us are gathered virtually on the day that the last remaining North American university campus protest against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, at McGill, is bulldozed. It’s a stark local coincidence that underscores the simultaneous urgency and ambience of apocalyptic global events, as well as the necessity for artists to continue making art in the face of it all.

“I think ‘contribution’ is a key word,” says Patch in response to the question of how music can stimulate social change. “I can pretty quickly talk myself into a corner and think that this is nothing, this is fucking stupid that I’m doing this right now. But I don’t actually believe that. That’s what the powers that be are telling me to think. There is a lot to be said for putting things out into the world.”

“For me, making stuff is a compulsion,” Menuck insists. “As far as I can tell, the responsibility of an artist is to address whatever reality they’re living in in the moment in a way that’s truthful. And there are a bunch of different truths. I think the four of us in the band share certain types of truth that lead to the record that we made.”

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER clearly originates from a post-punk infused worldview, and a post-rock inspired aesthetic: shimmering, lurching, distorted dirges that harken to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s catalogue, as well as that of Big|Brave guitarist and collaborator Mathieu Ball, with whom I caught up a few weeks later at a gig at Ateliers Belleville.

“I don’t know how this album came together,” Ball admits. “It just did.”

Although Patch and Downs are American, Montreal’s zeitgeist comes to the fore with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN.

“Like every bigger city in the world,” observes Ball, “with the cost of living continuously increasing, I do find it slightly harder to continue pursuing creative endeavours. It’s becoming more difficult to find a studio and workspace. But the creative community in this city will not anytime soon cease to exist.”

The album was recorded over an intense week with the foursome hunkered down at Hotel2Tango, the studio which incubated some of Montreal’s most enduring recordings, including Fly Pan Am’s N’écoutez pas, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.

“Patch and I drove up to Montreal at the end of last August,” Downs recalls. “Efrim knew how we played and asked us to be a part of it. He thought we’d fit in. He and Mathieu had worked out some jams beforehand, and Efrim had sent us all some skeletal structures — some ‘songs,’ you might say. It was all kind of loose and we listened to the songs over the PA speakers and just put more into them and built them up.”

That layered approach produced an encrusted and profoundly moving LP that primarily invokes the despair of observing savagery from a safe distance whilst being unable to intervene. This theme is ever-present, even metaphorically, for instance, on the song entitled “Dangling Blanket from A Balcony (White Phosphorous)” which grapples with the shock of watching Michael Jackson suspend his son out of a hotel window for the apparent bemusement of the paparazzi.

“I think that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that having empathy or feeling pain watching something happen is a productive human value,” says Menuck. “It’s a reflex, and it’s a good reflex. But the reality is that it doesn’t do anything on its own.”

“Not that there’s not always horror and war in the news,” Patch chimes in, “but since we recorded this, I’ve thought a lot about how people use social media and post things on the internet. Everyone that I look at on the internet is just showing me all this shit and it’s like, what does this mean for the people? Are you trying to do this just to show me something about what’s happening, or to show me something about yourself? I don’t blame people because it is a thing, and I’ve been that person, too. You want to feel like you’re fucking doing something while you’re just sitting there at home or whatever.”

“The big problem,” adds Menuck, “is that the way to disseminate these images is all owned by huge sketchy companies that are really just data-scraping endeavours. Who owns these companies? I feel like there has been stuff on social media that’s made a change. But what that change leads to, I don’t know. What people do with that horrible feeling of being stuck just witnessing is what matters. Just the witnessing doesn’t matter.”

“I wonder,” muses Downs “what other moments in history would have been like with everyone having a smartphone, or a camera, and being able to connect information from those devices to a lot of people? I think it has made more people aware with a lot more people looking at it. The more people tear away from the mainline story of what’s happening, the better.”

The media landscape within which WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN emerged, however, is unique, even in a world that seems to interminably reiterate atrocity. There are now multiple wars raging, with no end in sight, and a panoply of viewpoints on every aspect of daily life. There is no question that art contributes to producing more positive conditions, if even to offer a soothing tune in troubled times. But how that occurs is difficult to describe.

“I think a melody with words attached that have some sort of meaning does get into people’s heads” Menuck explains. “But at the same time, we’re not making popular music. So, it’s just a few people at a time.”

Now Menuck starts second-guessing himself.

“If one song changes…” he pauses mid-thought. “No, if one song opens someone’s mind… No, that’s way too heavy. If one song gets a certain idea… No, that’s heavy, too.

He exhales a plume of smoke and reorients himself in front of the camera eye.

“Mostly the world is going to change based on small things like the conversation we’re having with each other. That stuff does ripple out. It’s not enough. It’s really not enough. But it does play a part. We live in an organic system, and all these small things interweave with each other. And all these tiny little accidents are what make change at the end of the day. It’s not a glorious thing or a heroic thing. It’s just trying to contribute to something that’s better than this.”◼︎

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is released via Constellation Records 13 September 2024.