This weekend is going to be pretty busy for me, but I knew a few weeks ago that two incredible acts were coming to Dallas this weekend: Dan Deacon and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. My schedule just didn't work out to go see Dan Deacon today, so I spent the money I saved on Godspeed You! Black Emperor last night at the Granada Theatre in Dallas.
I drove down after a long drive to and from work in McKinney, so I was on my third hour in the car on my way to the show. I love driving, but honestly, it tends to wear me out; whenever I road trip, I can't drive for long periods of time, except that time I ran over a dead deer in the middle of the night, then I was up the rest of the night. So my energy level was a little on the low side.
I made it, parked, forked over the thirty bucks for my ticket, and headed inside. I made it in time to catch the opening act, an electronics artist. When I walked in from outside, I thought I heard a loud hum, but didn't hear any music, but as I got closer to the stage, it turned out that the hum was the music. I found a spot unfortunately close to the subs, and tuned into what I assumed was probably his second song of at least five or six. I spent the rest of my first half hour zoned out inside the massive wall of sound the artist was producing, a low A flat rumble in the bass that came and slightly subsided in slow waves, with some tones in the middle that I couldn't quite make out, and some noise sustained through a tremolo effect, which the artist would carefully slow down or speed up.
At a certain point, I realized that this wasn't his second song, and as he kept going, I almost started to feel cheated; was he really just going to sustain a huge wall of the same sounds, with some background noise sped up and slowed down for a half an hour? I can't say that I was offended, because first of all, it doesn't matter, I'm just a listener, and second of all, I don't really know what I was expecting. I had no idea what to expect.
About half an hour in, though, you could tell he was building to a sort of climax. The tremolo processed noise was constantly picking up speed, adding volume, and getting more and more intense. I thought for sure I could tell when the peak would come, but sure enough, I guessed incorrectly over and over again, for at least five minutes. Even though I was sort of in the wrong mindset, waiting for what was next after this song instead of listening to what the artist was currently conveying, I was on the edge of my figurative seat, since I was standing. I couldn't wait for the peak.
And then it happened. It simply couldn't grow any larger, and just blew up. The sound seemed to be overwhelmed by itself, and slowly, I heard elements vanish that I hadn't even noticed when they were all together. At the end, nothing was left but silence, and in what seemed like moments (even though it was really minutes), I had gone from eagerly awaiting what was next to feeling very empty, longing for the wall of sound that used to be there, missing that large presence that was so overwhelming, yet so necessary.
When the artist carried his table off the stage after that single piece, instead of feeling cheated because he had only played one piece in a half an hour, I felt like I had cheated myself because I had taken in for granted. It's amazing how something as seemingly simple as sounds stretched over a long period of time could mean something so profound. In my case, it told the story of an amazing thing that lost its luster over time, simply because I got used to it and made myself too comfortable with it, and after taking it for granted, it left me, and I suddenly realized again how amazing that thing initially was.
M
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