‘All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling’: The story of how a lost Godspeed You! Black Emperor album was found
When it comes to mythologising ‘lost’ records from established artists, people are often guilty of spending plenty of time clamouring for information on why said records never saw the light of day. Often, the case is that they were either abandoned midway through the process, or the artist deemed them to not be good enough for a release, and while some have chosen to address this by saying they’ll never have an official release, the likes of Neil Young like to revisit them later in their careers and dig up these treasures for the most ardent of fans to fawn over.
While Young is only one example of an artist who has retrieved some of his unreleased material from the studio graveyard, a fellow Canadian act were long part of a mystery that surrounded the whereabouts of their debut tape; a release so obscure that many fans spent years speculating whether it was real or all part of an elaborate hoax that played into the band’s mystique.
However, unlike Young’s archival records that have been released decades after they were first recorded, All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling, the first record attributed to the band God Speed You Black Emperor!, as they were known at the time, had an extremely limited run of 33 cassettes shortly after it was recorded, and then appeared to vanish from the face of the earth.
Now recognised as one of the most beloved and pioneering post-rock acts to have ever existed, the differently punctuated Godspeed You! Black Emperor have released eight acclaimed albums since their 1997 label debut, F# A# ∞. However, the mere knowledge of this mysterious tape that predates their official debut led to fans of the band doing their best detective work to uncover the elusive release for almost three decades, and it seemed for the longest while that it may end up being a fruitless scavenger hunt.
For starters, the scarcity of physical copies of the recording meant that tracking it down would be difficult, and the band’s constant refusal to elaborate on the identities of any potential owners led many fans to believe that the only people who owned a copy were within the band’s inner circle. The band’s leader, Efrim Manuel Menuck, first publicly acknowledged the existence of All Lights Fucked in 1998, four years after the limited release, and said that due to limited financial resources and lack of label backing, it was never feasible for them to release the album on a larger scale.
Besides, the record itself was reportedly far removed from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor we know today, and was essentially an early demo tape recorded by Menuck with small contributions from others including eventual co-founder Mauro Pezzente. The sprawling, symphonic compositions that would characterise their later releases were virtually absent from the debut tape, and instead, its hour-long runtime was filled with lo-fi sketches that incorporated elements of noise, tape loops and folk music.
Menuck firmly believed that nobody needed to hear the project in its infancy, and therefore despite fans protesting for many years that All Lights Fucked should get an official release, their demands fell on deaf ears. This refusal to share the record led to fans establishing online communities dedicated to unearthing the release themselves, with everything from Discord servers in recent times and bounties being placed on private BitTorrent trackers. The band wouldn’t budge on their stance, and fans wouldn’t be deterred from their treasure hunt either. It was a complete stalemate in the mission to hear what was being dubbed as the ‘Holy Grail of Post-Rock’.
The first major sniff of success that fans had in their mission came in 2013, when one Reddit user shared some photographs of the cassette alongside digitised rips of two songs. Hunters thought that they might finally have a lead, but when the original post disappeared shortly after and the user deleted their account, everyone began to think that they’d been victims of a hoax. Perhaps the record had never really existed, and the entire story had been a fabrication created by the band, but people persisted in their efforts.
It wasn’t until 2022 that it would be leaked online in its entirety, and when the details and two tracks that had been shared nine years prior appeared to align with the new leak, people realised that they had made history and uncovered one of the most sought-after relics of post-rock. However, while they finally had everything they’d been searching for 24 years, a further question had to be posed: was it really worth the pursuit?
For one, the 27 songs that appear on All Lights Fucked are exactly what Menuck had previously described them as; they were rough demos that were recorded on a four-track Portastudio, with lots of imperfections, crackles and bizarre pitch-shifted vocals that feel atypical of later Godspeed material, despite there being brief flashes of the band that they would become. In addition to this, the fans might have had their way, but had they done it against the wishes of the band they adored?
Menuck did choose to upload a fully digitised version of the tape to Bandcamp after the 2022 leak, as if to confirm that the tape was legitimate and that he’d been holding onto a copy all this time, and chose to donate all download profits towards the Gaza relief fund. However, while he hadn’t initially wanted to share it due to it not being the finest representation of his work, it only felt right to make something good out of a situation he’d been wanting to avoid.
After the leak, Menuck appeared on an episode of the Kreative Kontrol podcast with Vish Khanna to discuss the tape’s long history and his feelings on its status as being uncovered ‘lost media’, and while he conceded that he was happy to see fans delighted, there were still clearly reservations about the entire scenario. “There’s something really fucked up making a cassette for 12 of my friends, and 30 years later it ends up on YouTube,” he claimed, before claiming: “I’m happy that people are listening to it in whatever form they want to listen to it in. I need to be clear about that, I don’t have any resentment.”
There might not have been resentment about his fans enjoying something he’d created long before achieving success, but he was seemingly disappointed at how the mythos that surrounded the cassette was more exciting for some than the actual truth and eventual contents, and that it was always going to live in the shadows of its history.
Still, Menuck has a sense of pride intact about it, and he’s certainly not ashamed to have made All Lights Fucked in his early days. “I don’t think the cassette was a mistake,” he told Khanna. “I don’t feel embarrassed by it. If I was younger than I am and had made the same gesture five years ago, I would have put it on SoundCloud by now.”
