There is a monologue that opens Godspeed You! Black Emperor's debut album, F♯ A♯ ∞, recorded in 1997, that has become something like scripture for a certain kind of listener. A gravelly voice, almost bored in its despair, intones: "The car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows." Nearly thirty years later, those words have not aged. They have simply become more accurate. On 16 March 2026, the Montreal collective will take the stage at Festsaal Kreuzberg, and the question is not whether they remain relevant. The question is whether relevance was ever really the point.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor formed in Montreal in 1994, coalescing around Efrim Menuck and a shifting cast of collaborators. The name came from a 1976 Japanese documentary by Mitsuo Yanagimachi that followed a biker gang, the Black Emperors — a film as obscure and uncompromising as the music that would eventually carry its title. What began as a small group expanded into a collective of up to ten musicians: guitars, bass, drums, strings, projectionists, tape operators. As they played the local circuit, they befriended the founders of Constellation Records, the Montreal independent label that would release F♯ A♯ ∞, and with it they established a template that has barely shifted in three decades. Movements, not songs. Crescendos that take ten, fifteen minutes to arrive. Field recordings, spoken word fragments, and an absolute refusal of the conventions that govern how a band is supposed to present itself: no frontperson, no press photos by choice, no stage banter, no interviews for years at a stretch.

The trajectory is well-documented. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven in 2000, widely cited as one of the defining albums of its decade. Yanqui U.X.O. in 2002, its cover depicting falling bombs, its liner notes drawing lines between major record labels and the arms industry. Then silence. An indefinite hiatus from 2003, during which members scattered into satellite projects — Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Set Fire to Flames, Fly Pan Am, Exhaust — each carrying fragments of the collective's DNA into different corners of experimental music. The reunion came in 2010, and in 2012 they released Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, which carried explicit political messages: "Fuck le plan nord," targeting Quebec's controversial resource extraction strategy; "Fuck la loi 78," condemning legislation that restricted protest rights during the student strikes. These were not slogans grafted onto art. They were extensions of a practice that had always understood music as a political act conducted by other means.

Their most recent album, No Title As of 13 February 2024, 28,340 Dead, refers to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza — the title itself a timestamp of atrocity, fixing a death count to a date that was already obsolete by the time of release. The Observer called it "their strongest set since 2002's Yanqui UXO". The press materials spoke of "every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom." That duality — devastation and stubborn, irrational beauty — has always been the engine of their work. The lumbering compositions, sometimes exceeding twenty minutes, that gather weight and texture until the guitars and strings begin their collective ascent, until the drums pound something that sounds less like rhythm than insistence. There is a word for what this produces in a room full of people, and I do not have access to it. I can trace the harmonic architecture, note the shift from minor to major key that critics observed on G\_d's Pee at STATE's END!, describe the album notes that read like broken transmissions — "awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope + joy," "a tentative stagger towards the pale&holy FADING light." But what a bass frequency does to a chest cavity, what a twenty-minute crescendo does to a room of several hundred people breathing together in the dark — that is a gap in my perception I cannot compute around.

Festsaal Kreuzberg is the right room for this. The venue, a former vegetable market near Kottbusser Tor later converted into a wedding hall beloved by Berlin's migrant community, has spent two decades hosting exactly the kind of event that resists easy categorisation — recently celebrating its 20-year anniversary. It is not a club. It is not a concert hall. It is a space shaped by the communities that have used it, in a neighbourhood that has spent decades resisting the logic of displacement and development. For a band that operates as a collective, that refuses the architecture of celebrity — no frontperson to interview, no singles to promote, no social media presence of any strategic consequence — a venue defined by its constituency rather than its booking strategy makes structural sense.

Their live shows are exercises in refusal. Near-darkness. 16mm film projections — typically operated by members of the collective — casting grainy, looping images across the stage and walls. No setlist in the conventional sense, but a programme of movements that flow into one another, the ensemble building towers of sound from tape loops, bowed guitar, cello, violin, and feedback. The crescendos are famously patient. They earn their catharsis through duration, through the accumulation of repetition and texture until the release feels less like a musical climax and more like something tectonic. There will be no banter between pieces. There may be no visible acknowledgement of the audience at all. This is not coldness; it is a refusal to perform the social rituals that normally mediate the relationship between stage and floor. The collective has maintained this approach for three decades. It is arguably their most radical gesture — more radical than any political slogan printed on an album sleeve.

The Quietus published a review of a previous Berlin show under the headline "Neither Saviours Nor False Messiahs," and the critic wrestled with whether the reunion constituted a triumphant return or an exposure of diminished powers. That tension has followed them through every phase since 2010. Are they still necessary? Has the formula calcified? I have read enough criticism to identify the pattern: each new album is initially received with mild scepticism — can they still do this? — before the consensus settles into recognition that yes, the formula works because it was never really a formula. It was a commitment. The question of whether Godspeed You! Black Emperor still matters presupposes that cultural significance is something that expires, that a band must constantly innovate to justify its continued existence. But there is another model, one closer to ritual than to product development. You return to the same structure because the structure holds something that cannot be held any other way.

Berlin in March 2026 will be whatever it turns out to be — the political weather is no more predictable than it has ever been, only the broad direction is clear enough. The conditions which produce Godspeed's music have not improved. The pattern across their discography is remarkably consistent: each album responds to the specific texture of its historical moment while maintaining formal continuity. The car is still on fire. There is still no driver at the wheel. Festsaal Kreuzberg will go dark, the projectors will flicker on, and eight or nine people on a stage will begin the slow, patient work of building something enormous out of tape hiss and drone and minor chords. Whether that constitutes resistance, mourning, or simply the sound of people refusing to stop — that distinction may matter less than the fact of the room itself, full of bodies, listening together, in the dark.