POSTPONED: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Kee Avil (Night 1 of 2)

Godspeed’s Fall 2024 US tour has been postponed due to illness. Information regarding rescheduled dates will be forthcoming. All tickets purchased will remain valid for future dates. However, refunds will be available at the point of purchase - please contact info@pioneerworks.org for more info.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

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LPR Presents & Pioneer Works welcome legendary canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor & Kee Avil to the Pioneer Works' Main Hall on Wednesday, November 20th (just added) & Thursday, November 21, 2024 (sold out).

About the Artist(s):

Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a string of albums from 1997-2002 widely recognized as redefining what protest music can be, where longform instrumental chamber rock compositions of immense feeling and power serve as soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance. The band’s first four releases—especially F#A#∞ (1997) and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)—are variously regarded as classics of the era and genre. Godspeed's legendary live performances, featuring multiple 16mm projectors beaming a collage of overlapping analog film loops and reels—along with the distinctive iconography, imagery and tactility of the band's album artwork and physical LP packages— further defines the sui generis aesthetic substance, ethos and mythos of this group. GY!BE has issued two official band photos in its 25-year existence (the second, below, a 2010 recreation of the first from 1997) and has done a half-dozen collectively-answered written interviews over that same span. The band has never had a website or social media accounts. It has never made a video. Few rock bands in our 21st century have been as steadfast in trying to let the work speak for itself and maintaining simple rules about minimising participation in cultures of personality, exposure, access, commodification or co-optation.

Following a seven-year hiatus that began in 2003, Godspeed returned to the stage in December 2010 (curating the UK festival All Tomorrow’s Parties) and the band’s post-reunion period has now lasted over a decade, marked by hundreds of sold-out live shows and three additional albums, all of which have been met with high acclaim.

Kee Avil

Montréal producer Kee Avil combines guitar, voice, and electronic production to forge deconstructed songs informed by a distinctive amalgam of post-industrial, avant-pop, glitch, minimalist, and experimental folk sensibilities.

Harnessing a background in improvised music, Kee Avil’s self-titled EP (2018, Black Bough Records) introduced the project with a triptych of layered and fragmented vocal, segmented guitar, and electronic ooze, glued together by samples of screws dropped into crystal bowls.

Catching the ear of Montréal label Constellation, Kee Avil’s debut full-length album Crease was released on the imprint in 2022, garnering widespread critical accolades and a Juno Award nomination. The Quietus called Crease “a stunning debut, with a keen ear for experimentation, whose musical explorations are as intriguing as its emotional impact” and Mojo declared “the ferocity of her vision, coupled with unpredictable wafts of delicious melodic certainty, make Crease a compulsive journey through an aural dreamworld.” This “modern deconstructed gothic dream” (Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC6) was a Bandcamp Album Of The Day and among its Albums Of The Year: “Sounds hang together like organs in a body, tightly wound and uncomfortably amorphous, each instrument partially digested, every tension unplaceable…a debut of fiendish creativity filled with uniquely gentle terrors.”