Two articles on the band Swans..
From Mike Powell:
Swans
are a band that conjure primal forms of power: thunder and lightning,
fire and brimstone, master over slave, predator over prey. Their
earliest albums came out in the wake of New York's no wave scene, a
loose, radical contest to see who could make rock'n'roll sound as ugly
as possible while still retaining the rhythms and forms that made it
rock'n'roll. Swans, not central to the scene, countered with the
possibility of wiping out rock altogether. The result was something that
sounds sort of like monks chanting in front of a jet engine. Frontman
Michael Gira once compared being in the band to "trudging up a sand hill
wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget
taunting you"-- a description that could just as easily describe
listening to them....
//Stylistically, the album draws a jagged line through a universe of
serious, apocalyptic music, from country blues to free jazz to drone and
the brutal, hypnotic guitar rock Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth made
while Gira was still moaning into the void...
...Vision has always been a metaphor for both political counterculture and religious mysticism. Prophets, pulling back the veil, "seeing through" things in an interest
of revealing what they believe to be the raw, burning truth-- this is
what Swans have always been about, and what
The Seer seems more explicitly occupied with than anything they've ever done before...
..In the world of Swans, the pain of catharsis is always in service of
elevating to some higher plane of being. Granted, most people probably
prefer to find this in exercise and not public sex, but when sifting
through Swans' apparent bleakness, it's important to recognize that
their goals are and always have been to remind us of the ways extreme
states of being, however intense, a unique kind of blessing. One of
their live albums was called
Feel Good Now, which is as succinct a self-summary as any artist could offer: Later, Swans bluntly suggest, you'll be dead...
..r 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and
ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse. To borrow a verb from
their own violent, polarized world,
The Seer is the album that transcends them.
link
--From Brandon Strousy:
Pitchfork: To Be Kind strikes me as an
unusually positive record for you—it ends with the line, "There are
millions and millions of stars in your eyes." How did this happen?
Michael Gira: If you're looking for a religious conversion, it's not here. [facetiously]
Yes, I decided to give up alcohol and convert to Jesus. No, I
discovered this sort of joy in the music when Swans reformed in 2010.
Once we started touring, I realized the thing that was really worth
pursuing was the bliss in it. I don’t feel complete or alive unless I’m making something.
Pitchfork: The live show is so intense, do you have to do any sort of training to physically prepare for a tour at this point?
MG:
Oh, I’m just constantly fucked—I’ll just drop at some point. I’m not a
physical fitness kind of person. I mean, I can dig ditches or shovel
snow just great, but doing some kind of fitness regimen is really
tedious to me, so the set itself becomes a regimen. It’s like a workout.
It’s exhausting, certainly. We just work ourselves as deeply into the
music as we can, and when it really works, it’s like going to church
which includes participation by some worldchangers:Ivana Bell, Chris Chacon, Jennifer Thomas, Bradley Shawn Rabon et al.
