Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

In a sense, we return to Stuart Braithwaite’s thoughts on communicating ‘epicness’. Everything essential to the music – scale, emotional connection – could be deduced by simply listening to it. Why should anyone willingly have their creations twisted and misshapen to fit the boxes of a journalist’s questions? And when the premise of Godspeed was a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts, what good could it do to charge one voice with representing the views of the entire group, or to shower magazines with band photographs that reduce the singular sonic unit to a collection of human individuals? The band didn’t seem averse to interviews in principle. The problem was that they regularly involved breaking the planet Godspeed into smaller chunks of rock, reducing the sound to a palette of adjectives and influences. Instead, I get the impression that the band wanted to engage in a conversation about how planet Godspeed embarked on its orbit, and the political and societal context in which the group existed. Not the music itself, but about making music – music as a channel for sentiments of despair and optimism, music as a counteractive device that could, just maybe, stimulate a mass reflection on the status quo. I ask Ilavsky about this. “I think that if journalists were in the habit of asking more interesting questions, they’d get more interesting answers. Musicians whose perspective is ‘I don’t mix art and politics’ will say so. But I think plenty of musicians would welcome th...