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Montreal — Godspeed's other band

A Silver Mt. Zion

Efrim Menuck formed A Silver Mt. Zion in Montreal in 1999 as an outlet outside Godspeed You! Black Emperor, bringing in bandmates Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar for a live debut that March. Godspeed stayed wordless. This project put group vocals up front, with lyrics that got more political and anti-authority as it went, and the whole band sang in a semicircle facing each other. The name has nothing to do with Jerusalem; band lore traces it to a misheard lyric. It kept changing as the lineup grew, from "A Silver Mt. Zion" through a run of Tra-La-La Band and Memorial Orchestra variants before it settled. Menuck also co-runs Montreal's Hotel2Tango studio and Constellation Records, the two engine rooms of the label.

Calgary's Women, reborn in 2012

Cindy Lee

Cindy Lee has been Patrick Flegel's project since 2012, started after his band Women ended. It showed up first on stage at a Victoria club, and became permanent after guitarist Christopher Reimer's death. Flegel records mostly alone and performs in women's clothing and makeup, which he's described as making room for a part of himself he otherwise kept back. The music drifts between doo-wop, no wave and hypnagogic pop. In 2024 the triple album Diamond Jubilee appeared with no warning, free on a GeoCities-style website, streamed as a single two-hour YouTube video, and deliberately kept off Spotify. Pitchfork gave it its highest score in four years and named it Album of the Year.

Vancouver to Montreal, ambient noise

Tim Hecker

Tim Hecker was born in Vancouver in 1974 to two art teachers and moved to Montreal in 1998. He still works there. He debuted in 1996 as a techno producer under the alias Jetone before recording under his own name, and along the way earned a PhD from McGill studying sound culture, with a short stint as a policy analyst for the Canadian government. On records like Harmony in Ultraviolet, the Juno-winning Ravedeath, 1972, and Konoyo, he runs heavily processed pipe organs and synthesizers through big swings from near-silence to overwhelming volume. He's described the approach as testing the line between beauty and noise.

Toronto folk, Mariposa 1961

Bonnie Dobson

Bonnie Dobson came up on the early-1960s folk circuit, playing the 1961 Mariposa Folk Festival and recording in New York the following year. Her songs got around. Over the decades, the Grateful Dead, Jeff Beck, Nazareth, Robert Plant, and The National all recorded her work.

Calgary, a name they had to lose

Viet Cong

Viet Cong formed in Calgary in 2012 out of former members of the band Women and built a following on tense, motorik post-punk. Then the name caught up with them. Critics and Vietnamese-community groups said it trivialized a wartime history that still carried real pain. A 2015 show at Oberlin was cancelled, and roughly 170 protesters turned up at a Seattle gig that October. Frontman Matt Flegel later admitted the band had been "naive" and "ignorant" about what the name meant, and said what changed his mind was face-to-face confrontation, more than anything said online. In April 2016 they announced a new name, Preoccupations, and have recorded under it since.

Raised on a converted school bus

Lhasa

Lhasa de Sela grew up traveling the US and Mexico in a converted school bus with her Mexican father and American mother. She was homeschooled, and largely trilingual by the time she settled in Montreal at nineteen. Her 1997 debut, La Llorona, sung entirely in Spanish, went platinum in Canada and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in France. She then spent years touring with a French circus troupe before coming back to write and record in English, French and Spanish. She made her self-titled third album while being treated for breast cancer, and died in Montreal on New Year's Day, 2010, at thirty-seven. A park in her old neighborhood now carries her name.

A dollar-bin mystery from 1983

Lewis

In 1983 a Calgary-born former stockbroker calling himself "Lewis" recorded a whispered, minimal album called L'Amour in Los Angeles. The private pressing was so small it vanished almost at once, and one copy turned up decades later in a flea-market bin. When Light in the Attic Records tried to reissue it in the 2010s, they traced the singer through his sleeve photographer to Randall Wulff, then spent over two years searching before they found him alive in Vancouver in 2014. Offered a $20,000 royalty check, Wulff reportedly said he had "no interest in coin." He signed a few copies for fans and declined to authorize any further pressing, so the reissue is now nearly as hard to find as the original.

The Collection