Guernica Parallel

A past work that urgently comes to mind when faced with these moral questions is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which commemorated the infamous bombing of the Basque city by fascist German and Italian planes during the Spanish Civil War. Influenced by the French photographer and leftist Dora Maar (née Henriette Theodora Markovitch), who was his partner at the time, Picasso executed the large-scale painting in a matter of months, having been commissioned by Spain’s anti-fascist Republican government to represent the country at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

Guernica was not universally acclaimed when it was first displayed. Receiving criticism from reviewers and other artists, as well as Marxist activists, it was deemed too high-brow and abstract for its intentions. It was during the decades that followed and the continuation of conflicts in Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere that the mural garnered its iconic, antiwar status while residing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ironically enough, Francisco Franco sought to have Guernica relocated to Spain during the late 1960s, as recounted in Gijs van Hensbergen’s Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (2004). The painting moved to its current location in Madrid only in 1981: Picasso, who joined the Communist Party after World War II and died in 1973, refused its transfer to Franco’s Spain during the dictator’s lifetime.

It is difficult to imagine the creation of an analogous artwork for Gaza. During the past twelve months, social media has been saturated with photographic evidence of the horrors of dismembered and incinerated Palestinian bodies. Among the living, children with lost limbs amid bombed-out buildings frequently populate video footage. We witness a constant Guernica, day in and day out, without the abstraction, abetted by seemingly interminable cycles of aerial violence and indiscriminate destruction by the IDF. It is the same military technique. It is the same civilian suffering.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor recognizes the impossibility of representation in this context, not for reasons of accuracy but to avoid mere repetition: the visibility of human misery is already omnipresent. NO TITLE is accordingly a near-wordless affair, with its intentions, similar to Guernica, to arrive at a form of truth through abstraction, in this instance guitar reverb and distortion. Like Guernica, NO TITLE is part document and part elegy. A sense of the future is not projected or even fully considered, with stress placed on a concern for meeting the present on its own unvarnished terms.

Broken Melody

Consisting of only six songs and lasting almost an hour, the first minute of NO TITLE is comprised of a lurking, nearly inaudible hum before a single electric guitar comes in, playing a musical phrase that resembles a traditional Chinese melody, a reference that becomes clearer as additional instruments come in. This melancholic opening, “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS,” is not pessimistic, however. Dispensing with fatalism, it hits like morning sunlight.

NO TITLE ventures from this unlikely premise to explore more meditative spaces and other political geographies. Clocking in at close to fourteen minutes, the austere second track, “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD,” which begins with background noise resembling distant sirens and gunfire, introduces a cavernous soundscape that shelters and uplifts, while providing quieter moments of atmospheric reprieve. Midway, “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD” contains a spoken interlude in Spanish, low in the sound mix, with the line “En nuestro lado son mártires desde antes que siquiera hubiéramos nacido” (“On our side they were martyrs since before we were even born”). Taking after a documentary field recording, which Godspeed have often used, these are the only vocals on the album.

NO TITLE concludes with three tracks that are splintered by anxiety, anguish, and enduring lament. The song “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” is a plaintive and slowly building composition that is haunted by the modulating presence of a solitary violin. The brooding “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS” similarly ruminates, though it is almost three times as long, lasting an excruciating eleven minutes to reach its denouement, if it can be called that. This prolongment of resolution is the point. As implied by the title, this composition seemingly regards and questions the voyeurism and apprehensions of the outsider. The album closer, “GREY RUBBLE — GREEN SHOOTS,” anticipates a return to the sanguine beginning of NO TITLE, but this awaited rendezvous is incompletely realized. A degree of melodic solace is gradually provided as the music progresses, but only through the filter of the sorrow that came before.

Taken together, these are not songs that ask to be received as songs. They are better understood as a series of conflicting moods, a provisional collage of broken sentiments at a time when emotional clarity remains out of reach, even if political commitment is not in doubt. This is political music without being obvious political music. It dispenses with doctrinaire slogans and false charisma to instead let unresolved feelings coarse through the foreground. Like our current moment, there is an inconclusive trepidation to this LP. In spirit, it forgoes the format of a requiem in favor of the unsettlement of an interregnum. Though openings of resilience inhabit this album, NO TITLE bears the scars of disruption and ongoing unease.

In this regard, while Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival months before the war, possessed a sense of startling coincidence — the unexpected event when art making and war making collide with unforeseen implications — NO TITLE holds a mirror to the present. The liner notes infer this dimension and are written with characteristic brevity. Commenting on their recording process, Godspeed states, “we drifted through it, arguing. every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom. we sat down together and wrote it in one room, and then sat down in a different room, recording.” Then further: “what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?”

Artist as Witness?

Music is always a matter of taste, and listeners, Palestinian or not, may disagree with the concept and approach of NO TITLE, criticizing the idea that a Canadian rock band can speak about the war in Gaza. Other music compilations, including those involving Palestinian musicians, have been released in support of Gaza over the past year. Furthermore, Godspeed You! Black Emperor may themselves disavow any comparison, let alone equivalence, to Guernica.

Yet NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD returns to perennial questions about the possibilities and limits of the artist as witness. This album is imbued with strength and fortitude, but it is also tempered by vulnerability and uncertainty. There are sections that etch the mind like barbed wire cutting into soft flesh. Godspeed You! Black Emperor understand that silence is inadequate, but that indirection may be more powerful and lasting than another replay of images of destroyed bodies and infrastructure, as essential as such evidence is.

In this way, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD is ultimately about neither hope nor despair. It is neither a requiem nor a call to arms. Like Guernica, it confronts the vanity, the futility, and yet the moral imperative of portraying an active war zone.

The ultimate legacy of this album remains indeterminate. But this long-term consideration is beside the point. In its attempt to soundtrack a moment, one both disturbingly ordinary and historically profound, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD dispenses with matters of reception and consensus. It seeks to fix in time a black box of memory and emotion, before even these basic human elements, which connect us all, are lost and gone forever.