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Michael Gira on Swans’ new album, ‘The Beggar’
06.23.2023
11:08 am
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The poster in vinyl copies of ‘The Beggar’, out today on Young God Records (illustration by Nicole Boitos)

Does time slow to a crawl during a Swans performance, or does it approach the speed of light? At the two-hour mark, have your feet really floated off the ground? If it’s a commonplace to compare a Swans show to a ritual, that’s because the shows really are like rituals in at least three respects: as reliable techniques for ecstasy, as exchanges between officiants and audience, as sacrificial acts. Like Sufi trance music, say, or Penderecki, the sound scrambles your sense of clock time, building and prolonging an almost unbearable tension, the expectation that a secret is about to be disclosed, that another dimension in time is close at hand, that the band’s labor will eventually divert the timestream’s flow from the horizontal to the vertical axis. Swans are one of the best live bands going.

The Beggar is Swans’ sixteenth studio album and the sixth since Michael Gira reformed the band in 2010. It continues the remarkable streak Swans have been on since that year’s My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, a series of records that not only keep faith with the band’s early work, but enrich it. I asked Gira a few questions about the new double LP by email.
 

Michael Gira in Berlin (photo by Nicole Oike)

I feel obligated to say how much The Beggar seems to be about death. Am I exaggerating?

Well, at my age it would be silly to avoid the subject, but the use of the word in some of the songs has a different implication in each instance, I would hope, none of which I’d consider to be morose. It’s just a fact of life, like having a bowel movement. The fact that it’s coming sooner rather than later at this point does lend an increased urgency, though I remain just as stunned by the raw and inexplicable fact of my existence as ever. I sometimes stare blankly at the blurring scene in front of me for minutes at a time, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabric of the air tearing and revealing what’s hidden behind it. It feels like it’s screaming for release. I hope I’m able to witness what it is before I terminate.

In Phil Puleo’s zoological illustration of the band on the tour poster, you appear as a pink poodle. Maybe it’s a question for Phil, but can you shed any light on the correspondences between band members and animals?

This particular group “promo shot” was conceived out of desperation to avoid at all costs another deeply regrettable photo of a rock band. I had noted with amusement Phil’s highly skilled efforts at memorializing people’s pets in finely crafted watercolors he sometimes executes on commission. So I thought, why not superimpose our heads on animals and have Phil illustrate it? I sent an email to everyone asking them to choose their own animal and provide Phil with a headshot. I have no idea why the others chose the animals they chose, but in my case a pink poodle is obviously apt! In the case of Phil choosing an ape for himself, that has to do with an incident from decades ago. There was a section in a long and ponderous instrumental where suddenly Phil would pound the hell out of a mounted kick drum with hard mallets, solo, with no particular rhythm, but played with incredible physical force and it would thunder against the walls of whatever venue we were performing in. Very dramatic. He’d leave brief silences between the volleys for added impact. It was somewhere in Germany I suppose, that placed perfectly in one of those silences someone shouted out in a deep voice with a thick German accent “He… plays… like… an… APE!!!” Ever since then I have often referred to Phil lovingly as Mr. Ape.
 

 
Recently on social media you wondered whether your last thought will be of Chris Burden’s “Velvet Water.” Is “Los Angeles: City of Death” about anyone in particular? I suppose it could be a self-portrait, but I also think of Chris Burden crawling through broken glass on Main Street, crucified on the Beetle in Venice, airing his “Poem for L.A.” on local TV.

Yikes! To have a haphazard post from an idiotic social media site quoted back to me is like being taken to task for something thoughtlessly scrawled on a public restroom wall while taking care of business. Actually, not dissimilar I suppose! Anyway, Burden was one among many formative art figures from my youth in LA. His work remains powerful, if opaque. To me the early stuff is poetry. Each visceral act is perfectly contained in a few short, dry sentences. Through the Night Softly (crawling bound over broken glass) was broadcast like a commercial on TV and it’s wonderful to think of a random unsuspecting LA TV watcher suddenly encountering such an image late at night. I always conflate it with Van Gogh’s Starry Night for some reason. In fact I refer to it in a line in a song I wrote about a different harrowing event, called “When Will I Return?” But anyway, when I wrote “Los Angeles: City of Death” I’d been suffering from intense bouts of nostalgia for the place while fully aware that the LA of my childhood no longer exists and also that I was actually ecstatic to leave it behind and watch it recede beneath me through the window of the airplane as I headed for my new life in NYC, decades ago. In a way though, LA is the flowering root from which all that’s beautiful and hideous in American culture grows, a place of awesome glamour, sunlight and artifice, concealing depravity, greed and thoughtless cruelty just beneath its surface. It’s the original land of sprawling subdivisions, shopping malls and choked freeways, the home of the giant simulacrum Disneyland, and as it metastasizes out into the desert hills it kills everything beneath it and within its reach. The whole place is an environmental, psychic and cultural cancer zone. Naturally, hovering above it is a malignant sun, trying its best to broil everything it can touch alive. And now of course come the fires, and then the floods, and soon I suppose an earthquake that will dump the whole mess into the sea. But I have tremendous memories of the place! I love it. I’m still drawn to it somehow. An impossible dream, but if I had the money I’d buy a house on the beach in the South Bay area in an instant and live there for the rest of my life.
 

Bill Rieflin, 1960-2020 (via Bandcamp)

Please talk about Bill Rieflin’s contributions to Swans, particularly in the latter period.

Losing Bill (and just a year before that, his wife Frankie) was like having a vital internal organ removed without anesthesia. The ache is still there and I try not to think about it. Bill was one of the most exceptional human beings I have ever encountered. His intelligence was boundless and his dry wit and unexpected insights were a joy to experience. Working with him once every year to 18 months or so was always a high point of my life, in that not only did I get to make music with him but I got the chance to hang out with him as well. He always brought a fresh and vital perspective to any song he worked on. Typically, he would have never heard the song before and I’d play it for him in the studio, and it would be immediately apparent what instrument he’d play. He performed! He didn’t just play a part. Whatever he played always had the stamp of his personality in it. He played piano, bass guitar, electric or acoustic guitar, organ, synthesizer, percussion, drums, and he sang, too – whatever it was deemed a song needed. Once, rather than play something, he erased the end of someone else’s repeating short guitar measure throughout a song – and it worked beautifully. He taught me the trick of sometimes recording onto a new track of a song without listening to the song itself in playback, so that the performance would have an unexpected effect. Anything to avoid the inevitable doldrums that often creep in after long hours in the studio. Sometimes he’d double an existing full-kit drum performance exactly, just adding slight nuances and accents along the way to ensure vitality. He played a tambourine to a song sitting in a swivel chair with the mic in front of him and he swirled slowly in a circle as he played so that the tambourine would fade in and out throughout the performance. He played very aggressive, climactic chords on a piano to a song that intentionally was lacking a time signature, so that the downbeats were entirely random (the band had played this with eye contact to maintain unity) and he nevertheless landed with his chords exactly on each downbeat flawlessly. He played a ride cymbal with a tiny nail so that there was no tone, only the slightest bit of glassy percussion and the sheen of sustain. He was never dull, never predictable, and always brought the right amount of pathos or humor to a song, whatever was called for that I myself would have never imagined. He was a titan of a human being and an unparalleled musician and a master of aesthetics. I am less of a person without him on this earth.

How did it come about that Norman Westberg opens the show?

Swans reformed in 2010 and the line up of musicians from then until 2018 was myself, Norman Westberg, Phil Puleo, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica, and Thor Harris (later replaced by Paul Wallfisch). At the end of that 8 year period we’d spent so much time together and hashed through so much music that it seemed there was nowhere to go with that configuration musically. I decided to continue Swans with a revolving lineup of musicians. As it turns out, everyone except Norman and Thor has slowly seeped back into the picture after the passage of a few years. I love Norman as a person and a musician. I suspect in the near future he’ll be back in the fold, but in the meantime he is great as a solo artist so I thought this would be a way for him to properly shine. We get to tour together again after all.
 

The cover of ‘The Beggar’ (illustration by Nicole Boitos)
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.23.2023
11:08 am
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Listen to ‘Amnesia’ from the new Swans album ‘Leaving Meaning’
10.28.2019
10:45 am
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M.Gira by Jennifer Gira
 
The latest Swans album ‘Leaving Meaning’ was released last week on Young God Records. It’s the band’s fifteenth studio album and the follow up to 2016’s epic ‘The Glowing Man.’ Below, Michael Gira essays the varied talents employed in the making of his latest opus. This originally appeared on the Swans website:

Leaving Meaning is the first Swans album to be released since I dissolved the lineup of musicians that constituted Swans from 2010 – 2017. Swans is now comprised of a revolving cast of musicians, selected for both their musical and personal character, chosen according to what I intuit best suits the atmosphere in which I’d like to see the songs I’ve written presented. In collaboration with me, the musicians, through their personality, skill and taste, contribute greatly to the arrangement of the material. They’re all people whose work I admire and whose company I personally enjoy.”

Here below are the primary contributors to Leaving Meaning:

Michael Gira – Vocals, words, acoustic/electric guitar, production. I started Swans in NYC in 1982 and have been the primary songwriter, singer and producer throughout the years. In the early years I played bass, but later switched to guitar. During the years of Swans hiatus (1999 – 2010), I released several albums by and toured with a group called Angels of Light.

Kristof Hahn – Lap steel, various guitars throughout, backing vocals, generous and insightful advice on mixes and arrangements. Kristof first became involved with Swans in 1989, was a principal contributor to Angels of Light, and a core Swans member 2010 – 2017. Kristof’s other musical ventures have included the rock ‘n’ roll noir band Les Hommes Sauvages and Kool Kings (with Alex Chilton). He’s currently working on an instrumental record for Lawrence English’s label, Room 40. He holds a master’s degree in Political Science, and when Swans doesn’t pay the bills, he translates books for a living. Kristof’s presence, on and off tape, is pivotal to this record. Kristof lives in Berlin, Germany.

Larry Mullins - Drums, vibes, orchestral percussion, Mellotron, various keyboards, backing vocals. Larry (AKA Toby Dammit) is a trained symphonic percussionist and all-around consummate musician. He played through the 90s with Iggy Pop and later with The Stooges. He played with Swans in the late 90s and was a main contributor to Angels of Light. He is rumored to have been involved with The Residents.

His varied and numerous credits also include a stint with Silver Apples as well as recently, Shakespears Sister. His current main job is playing keyboards with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I decided immediately to ask Larry to contribute to Leaving Meaning after watching the German TV series Babylon Berlin, and suddenly, unbeknownst to me, there was Larry as the main focus of various cabaret scenes, drumming behind a huge kick drum in his inimitable style. After laughing in shock for perhaps half an hour, I decided to contact him. We hadn’t been in close touch for a long time and I’m elated I reached out. Larry lives in Berlin, Germany.

Yoyo Röhm - Electric bass, double bass, various keyboards, piano, backing vocals. Yoyo came to my attention through his work with Kristof and Larry in Berlin. In addition to his excellent bass playing, Yoyo’s ears were invaluable in helping to sort out many of the arrangements. Yoyo plays with numerous left field musicians around Berlin and also works with Mick Harvey on his Serge Gainsbourg recordings and tours. Yoyo, Larry, Kristof and I rehearsed in Berlin for 3 weeks prior to recording. Yoyo is a true Berliner – gruff and determined on the outside, a marshmallow inside. He was a great musical resource for this record.

The Necks – (Chris Abrahams - piano, organ; Tony Buck - drums, percussion; Lloyd Swanton - double bass). I have been an avid Necks fan since I first saw them perform at a Big Ears Festival in 2010. They subsequently played with Swans at a few shows in Australia. Their live performances and recordings are just about any superlative you can think of – mesmerizing, transcendent, sublime.

Their music is entirely improvisational – it’s my understanding that they have no idea what they’re going to play before they start. And yet, mostly using rudimentary jazz trio instrumentation, they manage to fashion burgeoning and ever-evolving, immersive clouds of sound that utterly envelop the listener as the music unfolds. I’m beyond honored and humbled that they agreed to perform the basic tracks for 2 of my songs (“The Nub” and “Leaving Meaning”). Their performances were then delicately, and (I hope!) tastefully further orchestrated upon in Berlin. Tony lives in Berlin, and also played drums on the song “Some New Things.”

Anna and Maria von Hausswolff – Choral backing vocals. Anna is blessed with a soaring voice, lyrical acuity and increasing facility with the church organ. I was impressed recently to learn that she often travels around Europe and visits churches unannounced, where she talks her way into being allowed to use the resident organ – some of them rather massive, I imagine – and plays and explores for hours. Her searing records and live shows reflect the courage of her imagination and have garnered her increasing, much deserved recognition. Maria is an accomplished Swedish cinematographer and director of photography.

In 2017 I heard Anna and Maria singing together at a sound check for a special song they were doing in Anna’s set, was instantly enthralled, and resolved at that moment to ask them to participate together on a Swans recording.  I’m delighted they agreed to come to Berlin and record for me. They were a joy to work with! They live in Scandinavia.

Ben Frost - Guitar, synthesizers, sound manipulations. Ben’s adventurous sound-craftings, sometimes harrowing and sometimes delicate and quite musical, and his powerful live shows, have afforded him much recognition of late. I’ve also been highly impressed with his soundtrack work for the HBO series, Dark. He’s an extremely talented arranger and composer. His mission for this record was intentionally ill defined. I basically wanted his ears and sensibility, with no particular part or instrument in mind. I arrived at his studio in Reykjavik, Iceland, put up the songs, and he played what he thought a song needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover his unique approach to the electric guitar as well as his synth work. Ben also was quite helpful with arrangement and mixing ideas. Ben lives in Iceland.

Baby Dee – Lead vocal on “The Nub,” supported by her friends Fay Christen and Ida Albertje Michels, and Jennifer Gira. Dee has released numerous records (one produced by Bonnie Prince Billy, I think), and if you don’t know them, you should!  The first time I saw her she was riding a unicycle in circles outside the now-defunct Avant club, Tonic, in NYC, playing a ukulele (or accordion?) and singing with great mirth. I saw her set that night and was won over.

She’s since toured with Swans several times. Her music could loosely be called neo cabaret, but more accurately she’s totally unique and a great performer and songwriter, graced with a powerful voice and high-end ability on the piano, accordion and more. I wrote “The Nub” specifically for her to sing. I was stymied for words to the main guitar figure to the song, and suddenly she popped into my mind, floating through the universe in diapers, sucking milk from the stars. The song wrote itself. Dee lives in The Netherlands.

Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost – Jeremy: Santur, hi-hat, fiddlesticks, accordion, engineering; Heather: Stroh violin, violin, viola, fiddlesticks, engineering. Together, Jeremy and Heather comprise the band A Hawk and a Hacksaw. (Jeremy played at one time with the bands Neutral Milk Hotel and Beirut). Again, if you don’t know their music, you should! They’ve released several records. It’s Balkan/Gypsy influenced, somewhat psychedelicized, with great singing, playing and melodies.

They’re each multi-instrumentalists and they intrepidly travel the world, both touring and simply exploring the Balkans, in search of adventure and master musicians of the region, some of whom they simply befriend, others whom they record. They toured with Swans a while ago, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind to ask them to record on a record since. I travelled to their home studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, presented the songs, and did the same thing I did with Ben – I said, “Now what?” You can hear them on several songs on the record, sometimes subtly, at other times more.

Leaving Meaning’ is available on double vinyl in a brown chipboard sleeve, double CD in a brown chipboard digipack and digitally.
 

 
Below, a reworking of “Amnesia” from Leaving Meaning
 

 

Igor Krutogolov’s Toy Orchestra plays Swans’ “A Little God In My Hands” live. This is absolutely amazing, I promise you…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.28.2019
10:45 am
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Never before seen footage of Swans in concert; A DM exclusive premiere
06.14.2016
08:28 am
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In its nearly 35-year history, the utterly singular band Swans has elevated American underground music to high art, appealing to fans of goth, no-wave, industrial, experimental noise, and doom metal without ever actually expressing or even properly fitting in to any of those genres. By the late ‘80s, the band’s very name became a badge for a musical chimera of brutality and grandeur that nobody else has ever quite matched, though some black metal bands like Ulver and post-metal bands like Isis have veered admirably close.

The first incarnation of the band reached its apotheosis with the utterly magnificent 1987 album Children of God (though this writer also favors the dizzyingly experimental Greed/Holy Money era of the band), on which the band’s singer, leader, and lone constant member Michael Gira cut his trademark tales of self-abasement and profound suffering with heavy doses of religious imagery. It was fucking jarring at the time—when the band that became notorious for songs like “Money is Flesh” and “Raping a Slave” made a masterpiece double LP on the opening song of which its singer bellowed PRAISE THE LORD! PRAISE GOD!, that shit turned some heads. It holds up extraordinarily well, and is justly regarded as a classic.

The band ended in 1997, when Gira formed the neo-folkish Angels of Light, members of which band ultimately re-formed Swans with Gira in 2010, releasing My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, which, though it clocked in at 45 minutes, would prove to be a short-form release for the reconstituted band, who’d go on to make three TRIPLE LPS of surpassing excellence. 2012’s The Seer and 2014’s To Be Kind are caustic, sprawling and all-consuming exercises in tension and release, built around songs of up to 30 minutes in duration crafted from hypnotically repetitive drones and post-rock crescendoes.

The third, and as it happens, final expression of this phase of the band is the new The Glowing Man, easily the equal of its mind-blowing predecessors. It’s more atmospheric than skullcrushing, and actually makes for an enjoyable background listen, but close attention to it is still as intense and emotionally taxing as any Swans output. That said, it’d be imprudent and disingenuous not to address this: The Glowing Man includes a chilling song called “When Will I Return?,” on which Gira’s wife Jennifer sings a harrowing first-person account of sexual assault. It’s a breathtaking song in multiple senses of the word, but Mr. Gira himself has recently been accused of just such an assault by Larkin Grimm, a singer whose work he’s produced. He doesn’t deny that something happened, but he characterizes the 2008 encounter as consensual. Grimm characterizes it as rape, but according to some close to her, she may have a burgeoning history of specious accusations. Both of their public statements with regard to that incident are published in this Pitchfork article.

Here’s “When Will I Return?” As stated above, the lyrics describe an assault, so proceed or don’t with that in mind.
 

 

 
Gira was kind enough to take time to chat with Dangerous Minds about the new album.

Dangerous Minds: I understand this is the last album from Swans as the band is currently constituted?

Michael Gira: Yes sir.

DM: What needs to change? Personnel, direction? Everything?

MG: All of it. We’ve been in this configuration for seven years, and I think it’s the most fruitful musical period of my life, it’s been wonderful. I can just see that if it were to continue, the satyr would begin eating its own corpse. So I think it’s time to change things up. I’m going to continue Swans, just not as a permanent band. I’m more inclined to have a rotating cast of members. It was like that for a long period during the ‘80s and ‘90s so I’m just going back to that mode. It’s kind of more responsibility than I’m able to deal with anymore to have a permanent band, and the band members have things they want to do in their lives as well—it’s well over 200 days a year that we’re together, and it’s a huge commitment. We just want to fly free like little birds.

DM: The Glowing Man is your third consecutive 3XLP. That’s surely unprecedented, right?

MG: I have no idea. It’s a double CD, triple album. It’s the format that works for the music. At a certain point I decided I didn’t care about figuring out a way to fit it on to a certain format—just let the music follow its path, and then figure out how to release it, and whatever that was would be how it is.

DM: The composition strategy on To Be Kind came largely from developing songs from improvisations that happened in concert. Is that the case again here?

MG: That’s one facet of how the record was made, yes. Another facet was that I’d have songs that I’d bring in to the studio on acoustic guitar, and those songs would be developed and orchestrated in the studio with the band. The songs on the record that came out of live performance were “The Cloud of Forgetting,” “The Cloud of Unknowing,” “Frankie M” and “The Glowing Man.” The rest were developed as I described.
 

 
DM: I’m curious about the connection between The Glowing Man’s “The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black” and the old Sonic Youth song “The World Looks Red,” for which you wrote the lyrics about 35 years ago. Why revisit those lyrics again after all this time?

MG: Because they were there? They were there in my head—I was playing what I thought was a pretty compelling little guitar figure, and I was utterly bereft of words for it—as I’m sometimes wont to be these days, I had no words whatsoever. I just started singing those words as place-fillers, and I though why don’t I just fucking use them? I’d recently reconnected with Thurston, so maybe he was on my mind and that’s why I thought of that song, but it felt like closing the circle.

DM: Maybe it’s because the lyrics made me mindful of Sonic Youth, but the guitar figure you’re talking about reminded me of their song “Shadow of a Doubt.” I’d wondered if there was a tribute or homage thing going on.

MG: Not at all, I just had this thing I was playing and the words came to mind. I don’t actually remember how that song goes.

DM: Who is Frankie M?

MG: He’s my banker. [laughs] No, he’s someone I know, a very troubled soul. Preternaturally intelligent, but also spectacularly fucked up. And it was a tribute to him.

DM: Is “The Glowing Man” anyone in particular?

MG: It’s an allusion to a state of mind, I suppose. That moment when your mind incinerates, which I find myself experiencing quite often during live performances, and I’m hoping the audience is experiencing something similar. I don’t mean to be grandiose but when it works it’s really transcendent. I wouldn’t even take credit for it, it’s like a benevolent angel from the underworld was released to take over the sound, and we follow it.

DM: Will there be a final tour?

MG: Absolutely, we’re preparing for it now. We’ll be rehearsing for three weeks and we tour for 18 months. We’ll be doing some songs from the album which we’re going to hack away at, and find new forms for them. And I’m working on some new songs now, which I want to work up with the band, and we’ll see where it goes. I want it to be constantly changing throughout the tour, I don’t want to just do some kind of set that replicates the album.

The Glowing Man will be released on June 17th. One version of the release will be a deluxe CD box that includes a 28-minute DVD of live footage from 2015. It is Dangerous Minds’ extreme privilege to debut that video in its entirety here today.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Swans’ Michael Gira on their forthcoming triple album ‘To Be Kind’
Own a piece of post-punk/No Wave history: Swans ‘Holy Money’ master reel for sale—again
‘Hard Rock’: First release from Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label w/ Lydia Lunch & Michael Gira

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.14.2016
08:28 am
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Swans’ Michael Gira on their forthcoming triple album ‘To Be Kind’
04.18.2014
10:38 am
Topics:
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Michael Gira’s band Swans have shape-shifted but plenty. They made their reputation with an extraordinarily punishing and shockingly nihilistic take on no-wave music in the 1980s, culminating in the colossal masterpiece Children of God. They then curve-balled their fans with relatively introspective and quietly mournful LPs at the decade’s turn. The ‘90s saw further experimentation, ending with the final album of their first incarnation, Soundtracks for the Blind in 1996. But whatever Swans’ approach, be it the bludgeoning riffs of their early years, the tape loop experiments of the mid ‘80s, or the early ‘90s acoustic efforts, the band’s oeuvre has been united, partly by musical and lyrical darkness, certainly, but also by the ability of all the band’s many lineups to conjure the elemental.

Swans went silent in 1997, after which Gira continued to work both solo and in The Angels of Light. Then, in 2010, Swans reappeared, with Gira and stalwart guitarist Norman Westberg leading an otherwise entirely new lineup. Quoth Gira, from a recent phone conversation:

I just wanted to continue making music. I was doing the Angels of Light project for 13 years and I was growing a little bored with it. I wanted to do something a little more all-consuming, intense. So I started to think seriously about reconstituting Swans, I thought that was the best path. There are certain ways of making sound, and avenues that were maybe started that weren’t fully explored that I wanted to continue, and that pushed into new things. Once we started working on Swans it became its own new entity, and opened up in ways that I never would have anticipated.

 

 
This reinvigorated Swans released My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, an album that met with instant acclaim. As if to prove that this was no fluke, they followed it with the triple-LP The Seer, an album so successfully ambitious it easily equalled Children of God at the absolute top of the band’s discography. In mid-May, the band will release a second triple-LP, To Be Kind, with a heavy-friends lineup that boasts vocalists Al Spyx, St. Vincent, and Little Annie, and Ministry/R.E.M. drummer Bill Rieflin. I wonder, who else has done two consecutive triple-LPs? Anyone? And furthermore, who has done two consecutive stunningly awesome ones?
 

 
Having only gotten all the way through it twice, I’m still just going to commit to this: To Be Kind is very nearly as astonishing as its predecessor, and with exceptions noted below, it’s just perhaps a bit less musically diverse—many songs here share a noticeably similar emotive arc (21st Century Swans seem to have taken a liking to post-rock crescendoes), though fortunately it’s a compelling and effective one. And most of these songs are loooooong, but this, too, is a good thing; every musical element is treated as though it has great value, and is given plenty of room to grow and breathe and live before new ideas and dynamic shifts creep in. Both albums have half-hour set pieces, and my chat with Gira revealed that the new one is actually an outgrowth of the previous.

”Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture“ grew out of playing “The Seer” live. As that song was winding down, we started improvising, and what you hear on this album is what came out of that over a year of playing. These pieces kind of developed along the way, and I gradually developed words for them. I was reading a friend’s book about one of the instigators of the slave revolt in Haiti, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and so I started throwing in signifiers for that gentleman, and it became that song.

Though it parallels The Seer in other ways, and it’s easy to conclude that two oceanic-sounding triple albums could work as a matched set, Gira holds that the albums aren’t meant to be taken as a pair:

I don’t conceptualize how things fit together with what came before, or the next thing. The one thing I do try to accomplish is not to repeat ourselves exactly, just to take certain threads from what we’ve done and move forward with those and leave other things behind. I tried to avoid the kind of long soundscape kind of passages that were on The Seer, I felt that would be redundant to do again, and wanted to push more of the groove aspect that was nascent in the touring band.

The groove-oriented songs are a welcome surprise. Passages in “She Loves Us” and “Oxygen” have moments that could pass for straightforward rock, moreso than any other Swans songs I could name off the top of my head, and “A Little God in My Hands” sounds like a new direction altogether. Even when toying with decidedly not-so-Swans ideas, though, Swans, as always, sound unequivocally like Swans. Here are “A Little God…,” which has been online for a few weeks now, and “Oxygen,” which debuted earlier this week on The Quietus. (Incidentally, if you’re not already reading that site, good lord, get on that already, it’s fantastic.)
 

Swans, “A Little God In My Hands”
 

Swans, “Oxygen”
 
Lastly, here are early live versions of “Just A Little Boy” and the title track, recorded in Barcelona last summer.
 

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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04.18.2014
10:38 am
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‘Hard Rock’: First release from Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label w/ Lydia Lunch & Michael Gira
11.01.2013
11:46 am
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Hard Rock was the first release from Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label. One side of the hand-labeled cassette had a fucked-up spoken word piece by The Swans’ Michael Gira titled “I’m An Infant, I Worship Him” and the other a dark short story by Lydia Lunch, “Wet Me on a Dead Night.” Both pieces were recorded in Gira’s apartment in February of 1984.

The cassette listed as the label’s address, 84 Eldridge St, #5, New York City, 10002. I think it’s safe to assume that young Thurston was the one making the dubs and that this was where he lived at the time. I picked mine up at the legendary ‘zine store See Hear on 7th Street in the East Village. I lived down the block from the store when I was in my early 20s and I’d see Moore there often, more than anyone else save for the proprietor, Ted Gottfried (who, it occurs to me, has a ukulele combo called Sonic Uke.)

It’s pretty extreme stuff. The Gira piece is simply depraved. It represents a hefty dollop of what made The Swan’s live shows so incredibly powerful and scary—well, that and the mind-splitting volume—back in the 80s. You want intense? Go see The Swans live. They will pulverize you. It’s like getting beaten up by pure sound.

YouTube commenter, “falloutMAN84” mused:

I wonder if when Michael Gira was writing this he thought.. hmm, maybe I should keep this to myself. Nah, fuck it…

Er, yes, that’s right: DO NOT even contemplate putting this on where you work for any reason whatsoever. Not even for a minute or two. The rest of the cubicle farm will shun you, it’s virtually guaranteed. You have been strongly warned.

No matter where you are, proceed at your own psychic risk. I probably should have posted this on Halloween. I wonder if Moore’s deal with the Universal Music Group to distribute Ecstatic Peace releases covers this one? Even if it would I’d think the chances of the UMe re-releasing Hard Rock are slim to none.
 

Michael Gira, “I’m An Infant, I Worship Him”
 

Lydia Lunch, “Wet Me on a Dead Night.”
 
Bonus clip, Swans’ “A Screw” from the It’s Clean, It Just Looks Dirty video:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.01.2013
11:46 am
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