slow-muse
Submitted on: Jun Sat 27

      Day two at Sled Island is all about not worrying. Get up. Don't worry about sleep deprivation. Don't worry about missing shows that day because of full venues. Don't worry about that bruise on your leg. Don't worry about the fact that you're supposed to be on a low-sodium diet for your high blood pressure and you had three hot dogs and a buffallo chicken wrap the previous night. 

   Don't worry about it, because it'll all be perfect in the early afternoon. You'll find yourself singing along to a song you were born to love and staring transfixed at the guitarist as she ferociously shreds, mangling the ether in twisted soundwaves. No time to worry.      

    Friday and high school was out. The train downtown was full of teen euphoria. The city smelt like a farm in spring and greasy spoons.  Big cities built on fertile land. Cars worth the price of a home in Houston, BC. The rocky mountains hidden beneath Nexen, Shell, PetroCan and Husky oil towers. Flat and tall. Calgary. 

   Godspeed You! Black Emperor arrived on stage at Central United Church. You could hear a pin drop. 3 Guitarists, 2 bass players, 2 drummers and a violinist: sitting, standing and wandering on stage. Bows, picks, sticks and fingers carressing instruments.

     Planting seeds to find crescendos: there's Godspeed lingering on notes with wrists fluttering and heads down-tight and singular until the whole package is loosened with a subtle burried dissonance. It grows, and takes over. Distilled urgency. Godspeed: Imagery behing them of stock exchange tickers, and industrial waste. Slow destruction. 

    Then Yo La Tango. To try with words is to fail, because music is the shorthand of emotion, and Tango found a way to express the entire spectrum of the human experience in their hour and 45 min set.

       On the side of the stage, bouncers with bulging lips full of chew spit in cans and wear Cowboy hats.  There are sides in Calgary that couldn't be defined in a clearer way. 

    Eyes closed, hand on wammy-bar, guitar tech scrammbling to change strings, 'Tango made noise like could never have been imagined in my mind before.

   Yo La Tango with Godspeed mind is like Godspeed with 'Tango mind. They are complimentary tastes that reinforce eachother. Like salty peanuts on top of a thai salad in the sun. Not worrying about blood pressure, not worrying because it's all just too beautiful to let any negative thought enter your mind. If the world thought with 'Tango Emperor' mind, war wouldn't exist. 

    Sled Island is a revoltion. Preaching to the converted and bouncers in cowboy hats. 

   Tonight? Viet Cong, Big Brave, Body/Head, Avec le Soleil. And ahh, yeah, way more. 

 

 

   

 

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