The first snowfall of December 2025 kept many Beijingers at home on a Friday night, but some youth instead bundled up and stood in the cold outside Olympic Park, eyes closed and ears straining to catch the sounds coming out of Fulang Livehouse.

Inside, a crowd pressed together shoulder-to-shoulder, jackets still on despite the hot tickets they coveted. Godspeed You! Black Emperor may be an obscure name to the general public, but the Montreal-based collective commands a loyal enough following that they had to add an extra date each to their Beijing and Shanghai tour stops, all of which sold out immediately.

The lights dimmed and a bass-heavy drone seeped out of the speakers, but the audience gave only modest applause and scarcely a whistle as the musicians took the stage. It began with an upright bass and violin eking out echoing bird calls, as if testing the air before digging their bows in deeper to harmonize with the droning.

More and more instruments joined in: drums, a guitar, another bass, another guitar, another drummer, yet another guitar. With so many instruments crisscrossing the air waves–some strumming, some waving strange devices over their strings–it quickly became difficult to identify the source of individual sounds.

The disappearance of individuals into a swirl of noise is a manifestation of Godspeed’s ethos. Godspeed is known as anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, but since there is no singer in the collective, this ideology mostly lives in the structure of the music itself, as well as song titles and the members’ public comments. The title of their latest album is No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, in reference to Gaza. 

A post-rock collective–not a “band,” mind you–, Godspeed throws textures of jazz, rock, and classical into a cauldron that slowly bubbles towards ecstatic liberation and simmers down into droning dread. Each piece builds around one repeated riff, growing in volume as wailing guitars, shimmering cymbals, and violin textures pile on top and boomerang across the speakers. The intensity reaches a peak where it sounds like the music might take off flying into the divine, only to collapse back onto a lower plateau before shifting to the next riff and repeating the sisyphean process.

Godspeed also splices field recordings of other people speaking into their music: an anti-government conspiracy theorist ranting, a narrator describing the aftermath of an apocalypse, a repeated “welcome to Arco AM PM” announcement sounding like the last relic of civilization. The only field recording I heard in this evening’s set was a rapid outburst of Spanish sprayed too quickly to soak in.

The audience took it all in with quiet but intense focus. Godspeed pieces run from 10-30 minutes and often consist of multiple sections with pauses in between, not unlike movements of a symphony. That the audience refrained from applause whenever the noise subsided, waiting until the end of each full piece, showed their familiarity with the discography. The lack of phone screens in my view also impressed me, and made me feel self-conscious to even document the event with a couple photos and videos.

Despite the abstractness of the music, the concert followed a formula typical of rock and pop acts: play your newest material for the first two thirds of the concert, close with selections from your golden era, and whip out an old fan favorite for the encore. 

The main set ended with “Gathering Storm,” the opener of 2000 album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and the first Godspeed piece I ever heard. A joyous four-note descending motif was passed like a round between the instruments, growing from a delicate whisper into a crashing celebration. Videos of trees against blue sky spun faster and faster on the video screen behind the group.

In the decelerating march that serves as a coda to “Storm,” each member took an individual exit, leaving their amplifier running a feedback loop and offering a quick handwave towards the crowd. The feedback fluctuated like a swarm of invisible wasps zooming in a circle around the empty stage, and the audience stood pat. Eventually two band members returned, moving from speaker to speaker and adjusting the noise until it streamlined into coherent individual notes and, after a good 5-10 minutes, decayed into full silence. 

Then began the push for an encore. Some tentative calls of “one more song” were quickly overtaken by “encore,” a more appropriate word for the performers’ quebecois origins. This became a call and response between sections of the audience for the next few minutes, but either through my own mishearing or an actual misunderstanding of the word, it came out sounding like “Encore! Uncle! Encore! Uncle!” (In China, it’s polite to address an older man as “uncle.”)

After a longer-than-average wait, the greybearded and baldheaded uncles (plus one aunt) did re-emerge. Bows over strings produced the descending squeaks of trains disappearing down distant tracks, settling on a sparse, folksy bassline. Wistful slide guitar and clear-toned chords bent by whammy bar announced “The Cowboy” as the evening’s encore. The video screen projected rolling train tracks and rural scenery passing by in greyscale. In that particularly blissful moment, I forgot it was a snowy night in Beijing. The perfect sync-up of mellow music to dusty train imagery connected to the weary traveler in everyone. 

This time the house lights went on as soon as the music finished. More desperate calls of “encore” started back up, but others shook their heads and muttered “no way” as they reluctantly trudged back out into the snow.