Godspeed You! Black Emperor officially became a Live Music Archive band after their hiatus in 2004. They gave Archive.org explicit permission to host recordings of their shows and told people to keep taping them.
In the late 1990s, most of their early material moved through word of mouth, burned CDs, and live recordings traded between people who couldn't see them play. Even some of their earliest releases were hard to buy new and easier to hear secondhand.
I only learned about the formal Archive status after joining a fan community a few months ago. I expected a mostly static collection. Instead, it's still actively maintained. Since around 2018, contributors have added well over 250 recordings, with shows reaching back to 1997. That includes early Montréal performances, pre-9/11 era tours, reunion shows, and recent lineups with expanded instrumentation. New uploads still appear, sometimes years after the show happened.
A lot of that work runs through Nico (one of the people maintaining the collection). She's connected to old taping circles that predate streaming. Some of these recordings still move through mailing lists set up decades ago, back when sharing a show meant torrents, private trackers, or physical tapes passed around by mail.
The archive isn't trying to present a definitive version of the band but it sort of feels like its apart of their aesthetic. Some of the recordings are rough room captures where you hear the crowd, the projector whir, the space itself. Nothing is cleaned up or standardized. Which is pretty on point for how their music tends to be anyway.
The live recordings are here: