Efrim Manuel Menuck

“In this troubled world, there’s just two things that are sure,” Efrim Manuel Menuck sings near the end of Pissing Stars, his 2017 solo album. “The beauty of children/And the war against the poor.” Menuck sings from experience: As a Canadian teenager who had struggled in school, he left his dad’s house and split for Toronto, living in basements and short-term rentals when he was lucky enough to have a home at all. Student welfare saved his life several times, but it eventually ran out, leaving him to fend for himself on the fringes of society while dealing with a nervous breakdown. But Menuck eventually moved to Montreal, enrolled in film school, and stumbled into starting a band that became one of the most indispensable projects of the last 40 years—Godspeed You! Black Emperor, his ragtag instrumental activist orchestra that goes out on the road to find the misfits of the world, to transmit a message of hope simply by showing up.

But Godspeed has always been a slow-moving machine, not only musically but in terms of its releases, especially since its reunion 15 years ago. Menuck, though, has a busy mind, and he remains prolific beyond Godspeed, despite being a father of a teenager and a toddler. Over the years, he has contributed to records by Vic Chesnutt and Carla Bozulich, started a band with Big|Brave’s Mat Ball, and collaborated with Tashi Dorji, Dorji’s group MANAS, and Growing’s Kevin Doria. (This is not to mention, of course, his brilliant but erstwhile Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra.) Menuck’s solo records distill it all into worlds of drone and noise, where political invective and found sounds commingle with bits of hope, optimism bursting through clouds of truth like a day’s dawn. Menuck has new solo material in the works; aside from a collaboration with Dorji, he plays his own set at Big Ears 2027.