YOUNG GOD RECORDS - PRESS

GAFFA (SWEDEN) - https://gaffa.se/recensioner/2025/maj/album/swans-birthing-far-en-att-ifragasatta-vad-musik-faktiskt-ar/
”Swan's seventeenth studio album Birthing makes one question what music actually is. Is it just sound, does it have to be beautiful sound, is it a feeling? Beautiful ambient background sounds performed behind a deep narrative voice that in a vacuum, but as soon as the drums start playing it becomes like a cacophony in true progressive rock spirit, with elements of several subcategories.”

KULT MAGASIN (SWEDEN) included “Red Yellow” in their ”Weekly Best” Spotify playlist - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Hu2rwXQQ3RnlkSDlqWoXG?si=48d338837ec44114

METAL CENTRAL (SWEDEN) - https://www.metalcentral.net/nyheter/31588-swans-slapper-ny-platta

PULS (NORWAY) - https://www.puls.no/20173.html

KAAOSZINE (FINLAND) - https://kaaoszine.fi/swans-julkaisee-17-studioalbuminsa-toukokuussa/

HYMN (SWEDEN) - https://hymn.se/2025/02/28/redaktionens-favoriter-v-9-10/
“If there's any band that can release a single in 19 minutes, it's Michael Gira and his Swans. The band announces the new album Birthing and releases the first sample "I Am a Tower", which can almost be described as a monumental piece of art. The sound journey takes us through several layers of experimental, dynamic, and drone-like compositions of both intense and stripped-down parts.”

EKSTRABLADET (DENMARK) - https://ekstrabladet.dk/musik/kommende-album/4824423

LOUDER THAN WAR, Album of the Week, 5/5* - https://louderthanwar.com/swans-birthing-review-album-of-the-week/

BLOW UP/IT -

13th FLOOR, album review - https://13thfloor.co.nz/swans-birthing-mute-13th-floor-album-review/

SPECTRUM CULTURE - https://spectrumculture.com/2025/07/06/best-albums-of-2025-so-far/

AURAL AGGRAVATION -
https://auralaggravation.com/2025/05/29/swans-birthing/

THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT - https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-michael-gira-swans-on-letting-the-work-speak-through-you/

CULT FOLLOWING, track review - https://cultfollowing.co.uk/2025/05/05/swans-i-am-a-tower-review/

GHOST CULT -
https://ghostcultmag.com/album-review-swans-birthing-young-gods-records/

LIMINAL LAMENT - https://liminallament.substack.com/p/liminal-lament-2-birthing

OUTSIDE LEFT, track review - https://outsideleft.com/main.php/bit.ly/main.php?updateID=3427

OUTSIDE LEFT, album review - https://outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=3554

THE ARTS DESK, interview - https://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/10-questions-musician-michael-gira

OUTSIDE LEFT, interview - https://outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=3556

NORMAN RECORDS, REVIEW -
https://www.normanrecords.com/records/207952-swans-birthing/reviews

RANGE - https://readrange.com/swans-michael-gira-interview/

SMELLS LIKE INFINITE SADNESS - https://smellslikeinfinitesadness.com/swans-birthing-review/

TREBLE - https://www.treblezine.com/swans-birthing-review/

TINNITIST- https://tinnitist.com/2025/05/29/albums-of-the-week-swans-birthing/

BEATS PER MINUTE -

Review - https://beatsperminute.com/album-review-swans-birthing/

Feature - https://beatsperminute.com/im-a-laugh-a-minute-an-exchange-with-michael-gira/

THE BIG TAKEOVER - https://bigtakeover.com/recordings/swans-birthing-young-god-records

ANGRY METAL GUY - https://www.angrymetalguy.com/swans-birthing-review/

SLANT MAGAZINE - https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/swans-birthing-album-review/

ANTI MUSIC -https://www.antimusic.com/news/25/0531swans_release_new_album_birthing.shtml

PUNK NEWS -
https://www.punknews.org/article/85703/interviews-michael-gira-of-the-swans-talks-the-end-of-the-bands-current-incarnation

NEW NOISE -
https://newnoisemagazine.com/interviews/interview-michael-gira-of-swans-talks-birthing/

THE YORKSHIRE POST -

PODCASTS

THE NEEDLE DROP -

https://theneedledrop.com/album-reviews/swans-birthing-album-review/

EVERY ALBUM EVER WITH MIKE & ALEX -

Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQaVyo74aBoT

Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivx3zdUr4d0

THE VINYL GUIDE PODCAST -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVR5uh5fmoQ

HUMAN REVIEWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVR5uh5fmoQ

The New Scene - https://thenewscene.podbean.com/e/episode-282-michael-gira-of-swans/

The Vinyl Guide - https://www.thevinylguide.com/episodes/ep498-birthing-the-end-closing-a-chapter-of-swans-with-michael-gira

ALBUM / TOUR ANNOUNCEMENT NEWS

NME, https://www.nme.com/news/music/swans-announce-new-album-birthing-with-sprawling-19-minute-single-i-am-a-tower-3841551

LOUDER THAN WAR, https://louderthanwar.com/swans-announce-new-album-2/

https://louderthanwar.com/swans-birthing-review-album-of-the-week/

SIDE-LINE, https://www.side-line.com/swans-announce-17th-studio-album-birthing-more-details-available-now/

RETROFUTURISTA, https://retrofuturista.com/swans-announce-birthing-with-a-may-30-release-on-mute-and-young-god-records/

XS NOISE, https://www.xsnoize.com/swans-announce-details-of-their-seventeenth-studio-album-birthing/

MXDWN UK, http://www.mxdwn.co.uk/news/swans-announce-ukeuropean-tour-to-support-new-album-birthing/

GET TO THE FRONT, https://www.gettothefront.co.uk/fri-25-april/

RETROFUTURISTA, https://retrofuturista.com/swans-release-birthing-on-mute-and-young-god-records/

SIDELINE, https://www.side-line.com/swans-release-17th-studio-album-birthing/

Swans’ Michael Gira and Kristof Hahn: EartH, London – Live Review

2025-05-12T09:27:13-04:00

https://louderthanwar.com/swans-michael-gira-and-kristof-hahn-earth-london-live-review/

Michael Gira and Kristof Hahn
EartH, London
17th April 2025

Last Thursday saw Swans’ Michael Gira and Kristof Hahn set down in London’s iconic EartH midway through their European tour for a rare performance of upcoming material and selected older works.

Known by many for a skull-crushing volume which would frequently distress audiences and crew alike, Gira has taken to bridging full-band tours with more intimate, stripped-back performances. This show, however, was by no means the sonic antithesis to a Swans performance (last reviewed by Louder Than War here). Although it may not have caused the irreparable hearing damage that might befall a reckless Swans concertgoer thinking too much of themselves for ear protection, the duo exercised a surprising ability to summon noise at a volume and frequency which burrowed itself deep behind your ear drums.

The gig opened with a virtuosic solo by Hahn on the lap-steel guitar (for this show entitled London Overture), flooding the art-deco theatre with whirlwinds of noise, in equal parts beautiful and overpowering. The overture could’ve gone on for five minutes or for thirty for all I could tell, and for its duration held us in a state of blissful anaesthesia.

Gira then joined the stage to transition into The Healers, taken from their upcoming album Birthing. Gira’s baritone voice seems to only have become richer with time, and with this his ability to transform an audience into the congregation of a passionate, if a little confronting, pulpiteer. The following three songs were all taken from the upcoming album, including lead single I Am a Tower. The final song of the Birthing batch, Red Yellow, transitioned into A Little God In My Hands, taken from 2014’s To Be Kind, broken up by the occasional check-in with Hahn.

“Pink little lamb, on a granite slab,” Gira called out, emblematic of his wider lyrical fascination with the innocent beside the cruel and violent. The lyricist doesn’t always deal in such abstracts, however, as fan-favourite God Damn the Sun proved in its personal tone and heavy, tangible, subject matter. Hahn was absent for this one, allowing for an especially intimate moment on the arguable standout track from 1989’s The Burning World, an album which the frontman seems to otherwise disown.

Later in the set, Gira went on to remove even his solo guitar from the mix for a brief but powerful a cappella segment, calling out over the audience with his arms rising and convulsing as he delivered the verse. He acknowledged its intensity with a cheeky grin and passing joke before continuing; a casual and friendly demeanour which may well have taken people off-guard, from a man whose craft routinely peers into the depths of the dark and inconceivable. A song like Failure, taken from 1991’s White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity, lent itself particularly well to the new arrangement, with Hahn’s lap steel guitar colliding with Gira’s repetitive strumming to conjure the devastating hypnosis we have come to expect of Swans – an excellent way to close the set.

Gira concluded with a confirmation of a full Swans return to London in November, in what will be the final ‘big sound’ lineup. As this lineup progresses through the fourth decade since the band’s formation, arguably producing some of their most impressive work yet, it seems imperative to make sure you’re there to hear the beating wings of Swans this Autumm, possibly for the last time, if you can.

All North American tour dates (from 4th September 2025) here

All words by Luke Lee, you can find his reviewer’s archive here.

All words and photos by Naomi Dryden-Smith. Louder Than War | Facebook |Twitter | Instagram | portfolio

Use of these images in any form without permission is copyright infringement. To use/purchase/license any images please contact naomi@louderthanwar.com

Live Review: Michael Gira and Kristof Hahn at Heimathafen Neukölln, Berlin – 27 April 2025

2025-05-08T04:01:31-04:00

https://beatsperminute.com/live-review-michael-gira-and-kristof-hahn-at-heimathafen-neukolln-berlin-27-april-2025/

Text by John Wohlmacher.

For a man that so many of his fans still claim to be intimidated by, Michael Gira in the flesh sure comes across as… somewhat of a goofball. “If you think he’s sexy now”, he expands on his collaborator Kristof Hahn, “you should see him after the show!” Moments later, he puts a finger on his backside: “TSSSSSSSS!” Possibly, his good mood is sparked by the fact that the show in Berlin marks the finale of his widely celebrated tour with Hahn – or because the two musicians are at this point so in tune, their dynamic interplay resembles telepathic communication.

Opening with a great performance by soloist Joanna Gemma Auguri, whose tender accordion led songs create an intimate atmosphere that perfectly captures the charms of Neukölln’s Heimathafen, the evening continues with Hahn performing a lengthy improvisation. His lap-steel guitar conjures ever shifting textures, sharp as concrete one moment, before diving into wild psychedelia – moving from ambient tapestries that would fit on Brian Eno’s On Land to No-Wave adjacent noise. Hahn is often held up as one of Gira’s most valuable soldiers, and his performance showcases a generational mastery that is mind blowing. As heavy noise bursts in and out, Gira walks to his chair next to Hahn, the two smiling at each other over the alteration between silence and cacophony. High art can be fun without reeking of irony!

Photo: John Wohlmacher

From there, the two dive into a selection of new songs off the upcoming SWANS album, Birthing! Hahn’s lap-steel creates powerful waves of cosmic harmonies, while Gira’s repetitive guitar strumming adds a lasting rhythm, over which his voice rises rich in expression – mocking, jesting, pained, angry. “The Healers” is hypnotic and forceful, while “I Am a Tower” allows Gira to loudly exclaim the arrogance of a megalomaniac protagonist (who may or may not be Donald Trump, judging from recent interview excerpts). However, where the song usually enters a blistering, euphoric Rock climax, Hahn abandons the lap-steel, and Gira enters a state of blissful calm, suddenly calming down. It’s one of the many goosebump moments of this evening. As Gira announces to the crowd: these are protest songs. But they also take the form of lyrical sound-narratives that function beyond the surreal imagery of their text (“I am a kitten!” remains one of Gira’s most oddly compelling choices). In this simplistic live figuration, freed from their ensemblic weight, they are rousing and somewhat sacral. As “Guardian Spirit”, the third new song of the set, opens, most of the audience sways in a trance-like bliss, nodding to a hidden voice inside of them, which manifests throughout the room, through Gira’s organ.

That might sound pretentious, but especially during these performances, Hahn and Gira manage to distill something transcendental, and everyone in the room seems caught within it. Between tracks, the two laugh, at one point there’s a brief chat between them, seemingly centred on a specific musical dialogue of the preceding song, that has both grin like school boys. They, too, seem to be aware that they touched upon something magical. Lost in the music, Gira closes his eyes often, swaying as if the rhythm of his guitar is fully removed from the movement of his hands.

Photo: Ania Zalaszewska

The second half of the set consists of older material – something SWANS won’t dare touch in their shows, as Gira has repeatedly explained his dislike for nostalgia. “It’s Coming, It’s Real” (the most recent tune of the selection) collects shades of a tuneful Folk track, radiating an aura of optimism and confidence. The atmosphere shifts to melancholia, as Hahn takes a break for “God Damn the Sun”, which Gira plays especially slow and weighty, briefly chuckling as a teenage fan is headbanging heavily in the first row, gesturing jokingly at him to slow it down after the first verse. As mentioned earlier: for a man that has often been described as “intimidating”, Gira expresses an incredible warmth this night! As the song ends, Hahn blows his nose – for the moment, it seems a genuine expression of grief.

The only moment of sinister transgression comes when the duo play “You Will Pay”, an unrecorded track that has become a staple of Gira’s solo sets. Heavy and forceful, it’s a highlight of the set! In the second half, both musicians abandon their instruments, as Gira delves into a lengthy, aggressively intoned spoken word passage. It is here where Gira’s eyes scan the audience, and finally find a lone smart-phone recording. His middle finger shoots up, as his voice continues to growl the lines, and stays up for a good while, only disappearing after, in a short break between verses, Gira shoots an especially grim expression. For those unfamiliar, these moments are a recurring occurrence during Gira’s performances – and for those worried, the audience member quickly removed his phone and had a pleasant conversation with Gira after the set (a blessing that Reddit can now provide the closure which, in the past, was left to speculative mysticism). The song ultimately benefits from the short moment, adding even more gravitas to Gira’s expression of confrontational anger and defiance. Possibly, “You Will Pay” has not been put on tape because, in its stark brutality, it demands a physical presence that turns paralysed in recording.

Photo: Ania Zalaszewska

Before Gira closes out the evening with a few lines of well spoken German (oh!), the set concludes with an especially moving highlight: “Failure”! One of Swans’ most legendary tracks, the song is driven by Gira’s pained howls, as Hahn finds sharp, angular notes to accompany the journey. After a host of songs whose rousing, optimistic or gentle tones and nuances dominated the night, this bleak, iconic performance is an especially haunting coda, with Gira finally screaming into the microphone, the final transmissions of a dying soul. Powerful and agonising, “Failure” quite possibly never sounded as poignant – or, let’s say it, better – than on this night.

I have remarked before, in my review of The Beggar, that Gira is the ultimate contradiction – a man who can, seemingly effortlessly or without warning, transform from gentle to brutal, from imposing to funny. This night, he is incredibly warm, funny, jovial, passionate and gifted with an aura of deep, uniquely grave artistry. Every note, every musical dialogue with the exceptional Hahn, every sung line, every emotional movement seems in tune with a deep, truthful, cosmic power that evades criticism. Was it loud? Yes, but not painfully so. Was it transcendental? Yes, but never overbearing. If you are awarded with a chance of seeing Gira and Hahn play – you must take it! It is a transformative, unique experience. And in Berlin, the two might just have performed one of the best nights in their artistic journey!

The Beggar and Live Shows Press Round Up

2024-04-17T14:41:57-04:00

LIVE REVIEWS

Friday night at St. George’s Church proved to be a momentous evening of musical ascendancy courtesy of underground music’s favourite experimental rock titans. Finally catching Swans live after all this time of being a fan amplified my respect and appreciation of them for creating such monumental and groundbreaking music, even after 40 years in tenure. Swans are no longer dead.

Brighton and Hove News - Christian le Surf

“The current iteration of Swans is something of a slow smolder. The music on The Beggar runs warm and temperate in the mode of psych-folk pioneers like Fairport Convention and the Pentangle with occasional storm clouds or short bursts of flames on the periphery. Gira and his collaborators on this album, which include the brilliant Ben Frost and bassist Dana Schechter, ride grooves and moods to their absolute endpoints.”

Paste Magazine - Robert Ham

“These new songs are softer, slower and more celestial, occupying the holes in space and time that were torn open by their predecessors. They bear up listeners on swirling clouds of steel guitars, massed voices and tense, withholding rhythms, only to deposit them before Gira’s looming voice.”

Magnet Magazine - Bill Meyer

“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.”

Dangerous Minds interview - Oliver Hall

“[T]he entire audience was transfixed for duration of the evening. I watched from my balcony seat as the crowd, which ranged in age from college students to senior peeps, swayed and shook in their own, unique, angular movements which could only be described as a rather twisted, interpretive dance.”

Bust Live magazine - Michael Levine

ALBUM REVIEWS

“A 120-minute purge of material Michael Gira penned while the pandemic kept him from his Berlin-based band, Swans' sixteenth is an unsurprisingly grueling experience, but paints the darkness of Gira's soul in variegated shades of black. There 's plenty of their trademark brutalism - the chilling crawl of Paradise Is Mine, with Gira pondering "Am I ready to die?", and the squalling jazz-rock turmoil of The Memorious are bleakly brilliant. But The Beggar al so finds space for macabre, Doors-esque carnival music (Los Angeles: City Of Death), American gothic folk waltzes (Ebbing) and the remarkable No More Of This, a magnificent, slow-burning lullaby in a Spiritualized vein that sweetens Gira's world-weariness with backing vocals and wall-of-sound production. Meanwhile, the purgatorial slog of The Beggar Lover - 44 minutes of scourging song broken up by ambient drone, terrifying din and choral interludes - is both uncompromising and brilliant.”

MOJO, ⅘ - Stevie Check

“The Beggar builds on the sound of leaving meaning., though Gira is clearly interested in pushing the band into weirder territory again… The Beggar is a riskier yet more successful effort that feels like a step in a more fulfilling direction.”

All Music - Paul Simpson

The Beggar is more dense modernist text to be pored over and deciphered than escapist beach read… While Gira’s lyrics are as apocalyptic, cryptic and uncomfortable as they’ve ever been, The Beggar is Swans at their loveliest, sounding earthy and ethereal rather than crushingly oppressive, as they usually do. It takes the sublime Gothic drone rock of Swans 1.0 — especially the gorgeous, ambitious noise symphony of Soundtracks for the Blind and culminating with the trance-inducing post-rock minimalism of the much-beloved To Be Kind and The Glowing Man — and incorporates some of the arty avant-garde experimental folk moves of Gira’s post-Swans work with Angels of Light in the process. It sounds half-a-lightyear away from their crushing industrial metal roots; more Arvo Pärt than Alien Art Farm.

Spectrum Culture - J. Simpson

“Searching for purgation through volume or its afterimage, The Beggar is peak twenty-first century Swans.”

Big Take Over - Michael Toland

“[T]heir 16th album shows that the old intensity hasn’t deserted them, it just comes in different forms, as suggested by opener The Parasite, which builds from a gentle acoustic guitar to a cacophony of quiet noise. Written in what Gira calls the “strange disorientation” of lockdown, the prevailing atmosphere on The Beggar is one of unsettling, claustrophobic unease, as the drawling 69-year-old contemplates life and mortality.”

The Guardian, ⅘ - Dave Simpson

“Brooding, menacing, decidedly unsettling, The Beggar is a masterclass of both songwriting and arranging. We struggle to think of a release that allows us such an insight into existential concerns of those responsible. Tracks like ‘Michael Is Done’ directly tackle the death sentence under which we’re all born, but burst into this emotional overture, as if reminding us to celebrate and take hold of those we love, including ourselves, while the opportunity remains. Just one example of an omnipresent poignancy, while overall this is a haunting experience it is nonetheless scored with declarations of what it is to be alive contemplating what might form next.”

Juno, MH

“The Beggar, their 16th studio album, makes good use of the quietly ardent tone, and whilst listening is intentionally oppressive, it’s like the insidious continual whisper of conscience rather than the brimstone sermon, and even when songs reach a clangorous attack they tend to build frog-boilingly slowly from hushed beginnings.”

Music Ohm - David Murphy

“…delivers a ritualistic euphoria”

Uncut 8/10

“a gargantuan demonstration of just how far Swans have come and how huge they’ve become”

Classic Rock 8/10

“The Beggar feels like a band once again developing a new identity, one that’s still coalescing into its full shape.”

The Skinny

Dangerous Minds ‘AMNESIA’ Debut

2019-12-19T17:32:00-05:00

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/listen_to_amnesia_from_the_new_swans_album_leaving_meaning

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.

Peek-A-Boo-Magazine Interview

2019-12-19T17:21:00-05:00

http://www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be/en/interviews/michael-gira-swans-2019/

MICHAEL GIRA (SWANS)

'Having a strong presence of death in your mind all the time is very healthy thing!'

26/10/2019, Danil VOLOHOV

It is quite a difficult task writing about Swans. Of course, there are always certain moments when you, as writer, can mark. Clichés and tags that characterize a certain stage of their career. Since the early 80’s Michael Gira and Swans established a new standard for experimental music. Inspired by the music of Public Image Ltd and Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans created a whole new musical standard. But they were

never

the same. Of course, thinking about them now you’d imagine noisy guitars, a wall of distortion and slaveship-like drum-beats. And that would be right. But with this, Michael Gira also proved that he could step outside of a certain standard. And it seems that their new album “Leaving Meaning” serves as a proof: acoustic sounds mixed with bluesy chords and certain elements they you wouldn’t expect to hear from Swans. But with all the changes it sounds very organic. As always.

In the interview for Peek-A-Boo magazine, Michael Gira told us about songwriting and artistic evolution, about “Leaving Meaning” and performing live, about his cooperation with The Necks and death.

You've always been saying that you "have a sound" in your head. If we

’d speak about the current stage of your career and your upcoming album -

what were the factors that influenced the sound of

Swans now and your new album “Leaving Meaning”

The orchestrations were dictated by the songs. On this album, I had songs completely finished, written on acoustic guitar before orchestrating them.

I thought of little cinematic pictures that I’d like to make for the words and the melodies. On the last ten years of Swans with this specific group of people with whom I was working, the sound was more dictated by how we played as a band. And then I would maybe orchestrate as producer on top of that. But on this I wanted to go back towards the idea of having the specific songs finished and orchestrating them with whomever I worked with. And see how it developed from there.

There are some artists who primarily work trying to capture the atmosphere of time and space.

o you write all the time, or for you, is music a fixation

or a capture

of a certain moment ?

It’s very ordinary and banal! I sit down with the acoustic guitar and start playing and something happens. And then words appear. I don’t sit down with the idea: “Yes! Now I want to express anger or love!” – I just start playing and see what happens.

After years and evolution,

in what ways did you change your approaches to creating music ?

Over the years ?

Yeah-yeah!

I could write a book on that (laughs)! Now I write on acoustic guitar. And I think about colors and space and what world these words should live in. I suppose…Some decades of working changed the whole way so much!

The opposition

between creation and destruction has always been presented in your music. On second thought these are two basic concepts of our life. We were all born. We all gonna die. Just as our universe will explode and will emerge again – another big bang. But what helps you to find the balance between those two ?

Well, I would say that the bigger question is: “Am I really sure that I actually exist ?” (laughs)

One of the things that made Swans a very successful band are your incredible live-shows. Sometimes it seems that y

u're getting to a certain state of mind, getting to trans-state. What do you feel being on stage?

At the best times, I feel nothing. When the music is…everything. Then I’m nothing. And that’s kind of the point. Hopefully it’s the same point for the audience.

Despite your well-known sound there are some new elements you added to the music of Swans with “Leaving Meaning”. Like “Annaline” with its Italian or Spanish musical traditions sound. Or “Sunfucker” which starts following the well-known vibes of Swans and then gets to a certain bluesy point. Could you please tell me how it feels to explore something you didn’t really touch upon before ?

Well, the record…It’s like a painful surgery. It has to cut away expectations. And the process of making that happen both esthetic and very painful. It can also be very tedious and boring. So much work involved in making it! But traditionally with me, someone’s on the line, making a record. The both best and the worst points is when it’s completely collapsing and I just think it’s a complete piece of SHIT. And then I have to fight my way out of it and making it happen, nevertheless.

Like most of your works the album is a result of work with different people, musicians and individuals. Is there a certain secret, how to achieve

intergrity

when each person you work with brings something personal and dear to him of her?

I work with lots of musicians. And I choose the people with whom I work based not only on their musical skill. But on who they are as people. Their personalities and what they can bring to the music I’ve written as a human. Not just as musician playing a line. So it's the best instance on this record, there was a great rapport between myself and the other musicians. And we just kind of arrived at the common goal. Through working and playing songs together.

Your lyrics on the record are abstract, as always. And there are always metaphysical topics on the basis of things you speak about. In the lyrics for “Annaline” there’s a line: “Pushing us through / A window in time / Slipping into / A spiraling line” which may be regarded as a reference to a certain transitional phase. From one thing to another. So can you say that with “Leaving Meaning” you got a certain perspective on things you’d like to try later ?

Well, you just brought to mind something. I’ve always thought about this quote by conceptual artist – Bruce Nauman, where he said about feeling and what he wanted to achieve with his work. And there was that moment where you’re walking down some stairs and you think there’s another stair. And then you put your foot down and there isn’t another stair. And for a second there your expectations are completely araised. And you’re in this uncomfortable second. And that to me kind of applies to the way I think about it too. It’s like where you’re uncertain of your position…(laughs).

You once said that as an artist you work through

“trial and error” and I guess it’s a primary methodology when you write experimental and abstract music. But “Leaving Meaning” doesn’t really sound so. There are not so many distorted guitars or some other elements that characterize your music….

Let me interact you and say that distorted guitars and ugly noisy sounds would be opposite of experiment at this point. It would be something that’s very expected and ordinary.

So in what way did your creative tasks and objectives differ in the case of “Leaving Meaning” ?

Well, rather than having a band of specific people played in a certain way, rather than having a sound we had as a band, in this case I had these songs. And then I had a wide variety of people, I could choose from to help orchestrate the songs. So it’s completely different way of working. It’s not how I record this band and maybe orchestrate it. It’s how do I build these songs using whatever instruments are appropriate with whatever musicians are appropriate. And so it’s much different in that way. It’s like try to make a soundtrack for each song rather then having a band playing.

What helps to figure out new ways for things to happen to implement your ideas and after all these years – is it hard for you ? I mean, when you search for something and finally you get to the destination extremely happy with it.

Well, I’m never extremely happy with it, in fact. Generally, I’m disgusted with myself at the end of the record (laughs). And can’t wait to do something new because I don’t feel I achieved what I wanted. But I guess there’s some good moments of this record. And, I think it works. But to me it’s lost. It’s blood. Because, I’m so familiar with every second of the music. That gives me a time to just moving to something else. I would say that I’m very-very honored and happy to have had all the contributors worked. Particularly, to have the group – The Necks contributed to my music. It’s just to me it’s sort of a dream come true…Do you know The Necks ?

Yes, I do.

Yeah, to me to have them playing on the record it’s just amazing…And I was very happy with what they did, of course.

You just said that you’re disgusted with the end result of your work. But what did you feel at the moment of creation and are there any favorite parts of yours on “Leaving Meaning” ?

My favorite part of the experience of making a record is when it sort of starts getting orchestrated. And we put it out loud in the speakers in the studio. And there’s four or five people standing around who contributed to the sound. And it just feels like some kind of symphony of sound going on. And you can’t believe that it’s there. It’s just amazing! And you work on it and work on it. And before you get it you know that you’d straggled a cat.

While playing live you also focus your attention on the flexibility of forms you’re working on. There is also an aspect of communication present in your work. When you are on stage you’re quite

focused on each other

s’ individual work getting to this flow. Sometimes changing the general shape of the songs you’d written. Do you feel the same at the moment of creation ?

Well, that’s always the goal. Uncertainty.

You once said that the f

ear

eath

pushes you working forward. Is it still a strong motivator ?

Of course. I mean, having a strong presence of death in your mind all the time is a very healthy thing. Because it focuses you on the urgency of what you’re doing in each moment.

With Angels of Light, your lyrics were inspired by real people and events. Listening to the lyrics of “Leaving Meaning”, I found that among all the feelings and thoughts there’s only one reference to real-life – “The President’s mouth is a whore”. As lyricist you’re still true to yourself. But how does everything usually come to the place and where do your lyrics come from ? Or is it always a stream of consciousness ?

Oh, no! It’s not a stream of consciousness. It’s very slow process of accumulating words. They follow a trajectory. Very deliberate trajectory. But it’s not a stream of consciousness.

When I usually write something, I follow a certain “ritual” containing the things I should do…Are there any important conditions for you ?

Oh yes! It’s the same! I need a complete privacy. I can never write on tour, for instance. Never. I have to be alone in my office. And in the morning usually…It’s best to write in the morning because your mind is still connected to your dreams. So yes, these are my conditions to writing. But usually, once I find a phrase…One phrase leads slowly to another. And then a narrative develops. Phrase or image.

Do your lyrics always represent your thoughts and feelings or you’re always writing from characters’ perspective ?

Well, I’m not writing as me, Michael Gira, ever. I think that would be horribly juvenile and stupid (laughs). So I write from a point of view of a narrator. Then the narrator sings the songs. And I take on the character of that narrator performing it.

Mojo leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T17:20:00-05:00

Magnet leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T17:18:00-05:00

http://magnetmagazine.com/2019/11/27/essential-new-music-swans-leaving-meaning/

ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC: SWANS’ “LEAVING MEANING”

The last Swans album, 2016’s The Glowing Man, looked for a moment like it might really be their last. It capped a run that was epic in every way: songs that ran a half hour or longer, tours that stretched to years and a sustained energy that no one wanted to dishonor by letting it go flat. And it captured, as much as a studio album can capture, the essence of the live band. So bandleader Michael Gira went into the tour supporting it saying that this was the end.

Turns out that it was the end of “they,” but not the end of Swans. Leaving Meaning refigures the “group” as Gira and whoever he chooses to work with. Members of the 2010-2017 band appear, as do figures from other phases of Swans. But there are also people who were never Swans before or aren’t going to be with Swans for the long haul because they have other things to do. The Necks, an improvisational trio from Australia, back Gira on two tunes, and cabaret chanteuse Baby Dee sings lead on another. Enjoy them for a moment, first because that’s all you’re going to get, but also because the collaborations work really well. The Necks may simmer where the last Swans sustained a raging boil, but they still know how to keep the tension right where it needs to be.

Gira takes advantage of the unfixed personnel to unmoor the Swans sound. There are songs that ponder the need for purpose and the point of existence. Others look unflinchingly at what people do when they’re sure their right. “Sunfucker” will make you want to bar the door and find an escape hatch to avoid the narrator’s unholy—or is it too holy?—glee. There are still songs that rock for a good long while. But others drift, soft and sensual, or funereal and resigned, and they provide some of the album’s most sublime moments. As on The Glowing Man, Gira pulls a song from out of his past. This time it’s “Amnesia,” off 1992’s Love Of Life. By slowing it from its former galloping pace to a funereal trudge, he recasts it from a celebration of personal dissolution to a sour contemplation of a society in decline. Leaving Meaning asks what’s next, and finds plenty still to do.

—Bill Meyer

Vandala Magazine - Interview

2019-12-19T17:17:00-05:00

https://vandalamagazine.com/2016/09/02/interview-mortality-and-god-with-michael-gira-of-swans/

INTERVIEW: MORTALITY AND GOD WITH MICHAEL GIRA OF SWANS

Interview by Matt Bacon
From September 2016 Vandala Magazine
READ MORE ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS & MORE FREE

How do you feel about doing press days?

Michael: It’s the low point of my day but there is no offense intended, it’s not my favorite thing to do to talk about myself or the music. I realize it’s necessary.

Have you ever liked to talk about yourself?

Michael: No. I kind of loathe people who talk about themselves and when you are in the music business you meet a lot of people like that.

So what do you like to talk about?

Michael: Usually it has to do with the proximity of death and the possibility of god.

I was going to ask you about that – I noticed you said you’re not a deist…

Michael: I think that’s a misuse of the word. I think deism was a popular theological argument in the 18th century. What I meant by that is I don’t subscribe to a particular religious belief but I have a suspicion that some creative force of love or intention is buried behind our consciousness.

What makes you think that?

Michael: Observation and meditation and being completely dumbfounded by my own existence.

You actually do say in another interview that the infiniteness of the music makes you wonder if there is something greater…

Michael: It could just be a neurological and physiological artifact. There is a positive force that occurs when the sound takes over. We are like marionettes and the music is playing us.

So do you view yourself as more of a conduit?

Michael: Well we rehearse like hell, but we look for spontaneity. Of course we don’t get there without thoroughly digesting the nature of the material first.

That’s something I’ve always loved about Swans live is that it is a very organic and almost spiritual experience…

Michael: The word spiritual is fraught with all sorts of hokey new age meanings these days but I see what you are trying to say. I can imagine seeing the Stooges back in the day must have been something similar. It is what it is. The guitars and the volume and the overtones and the sheer carnal abandon of it leads to something greater than the sum of its parts.

Something that struck me over the years is how many of them were inspired by your live show… where does your live inspiration come from?

Michael: First of all it’s great to hear you say that after so many years of doing this. Right now my live inspiration doesn’t come from anywhere since I don’t go to see a lot of live music. That’s mostly to do with my exhaustion. My ears can’t do it! There have been a few standout points along the way. Seeing Teen Suicide back the day both in LA and New York City was hugely inspirational. Many of the nameless punk bands I saw were inspirational. The experience I mean, not sonically. Seeing Pink Floyd in 1969 at a free jazz psychedelic festival in Belgium was awesome. It was like reaching for something that was impossible to reach. There were other things I can’t remember right now. I’ve seen some impressive Nina Simone and James Brown videos though.

What about those performances inspired you?

Michael: The wild abandon. With band like The Germs it doesn’t lead anywhere but when you are there at the time it’s fantastic.

So you said you also like to talk about the proximity of death…

Michael: That’s not a morbid occupation by the way. I don’t think it’s negative. I think it’s the most important thing that you can live with. It’s the most pressing question. It takes everything and focuses it on the correct perspective which is urgency. I just watched this fantastic movie by Andrei Tarkovsky recently called The Sacrifice. It’s very long and very slow but once you give up it’s utterly beautiful and thoroughly preoccupied with the question of mortality and the urgency of acting in life in light of the end. I wouldn’t say he was religious but it has religious themes. That’s a great movie I would highly recommend.

How does this urgency impact you day to day?

Michael: Like anyone. I get caught up in banal daily tasks and neurotic behaviors, but I’m talking as a general goal for my life, I’m talking way to personally, I don’t normally do this! I try to keep a general awareness of that.

How do you get that, meditation?

Michael: I meditate. Once you step back and look at experience beyond judgment and analyzing things become truly psychedelic in a way. It’s something I’m not privy to constantly but when the music gets there I experience something like that.

I’ve had similar questions personally, and I feel like there is a turning point where it goes from a grim specter to just something where it’s like “Oh, that’s going to happen” Michael: Yeah! I read Zen books – it’s obviously not meant to be translated into books but we are that kind of society. There is a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones it’s beautiful in that way. It rearranges your mind and scrambles it and leaves you with sense of positive helplessness and confusion. There’s another great book by St John of the Cross, Dark Night Of The Soul which is about people trying to get to the core of consciousness and existence and I find it to be helpful to read books that ask the important questions.

How long have you been.. seriously thinking about your own mortality?

Michael: I suppose when I was younger I didn’t think about it much or if I did it was a sort of vague fear off in the corner. In the 80s I started to get very preoccupied with these issues. That was just from existence and being the kind of person who questions things. That impacted the music too. Look at the words. I was just looking at some words I wrote years ago, from ’92 I think. You see it on a lot of records I’ve done. I’m particularly interested in how language through different juxtapositions loses meaning. It doesn’t become nonsensical, but it points the uselessness of language. In modern philosophy, I’ve never read much, but it was the lingua franca when I was in art school but there was philosopher, Wittgenstein, who points out the absurdity of language. Then there are artists like Bruce Nauman who really influence me in that regard. I see similarity in his thinking to Zen Buddhism for instance.

Do you ever try to escape the confines of language?

Michael: Well as a writer that’s kind of suicide! I don’t know that I can even answer that question. The forces of nature take care of that. I have fewer words to put into the music these days. I don’t think I will ever go instrumental though. I think that would be sort of cheating in a way, not living up to my full potential. I’ve obviously done a lot of instrumental music, and even the last two records have long instrumental passages. I did a record called The Body Lovers which was almost entirely instrumental. When it comes down to it I feel like it is my job to sit down with my acoustic guitar and write some kind of great song.

There’s a lot to unpack there, you said you feel it’s your job to sit down and write songs…

Michael: Well it’s like – what my circumstances create. I started off as a visual artist and somehow ended up in music and adding words to the music. I’m a songwriter by occupation and that’s so intertwined with my potential and being that to have a bad attitude would be doing a disservice to myself.

Is that something you grew into or is it from a God?

Michael: I’m not a believer in a puppeteer God looking at our daily activities. I think that’s anthropomorphizing God. I’m just talking about my own circumstances. For example when I restarted Swans it felt like I had been denying myself of my own potential. I wanted to see what I could make of it.

What do you think God is like?

Michael: (Laughter) That’s a preposterous question. I can’t answer that. I’m sorry. I would recommend you ask someone much wiser than myself. Most of the time I am completely flummoxed as to why I exist or even if I exist. I have no knowledge whatsoever.

So you question your own existence?

Michael: Well yeah. Don’t you?

Yeah, but I’m not a visionary!

Michael: I just do my work. I question my own existence, that’s important. I try to live decently too I suppose.

Why is it important to question your own existence?

Michael: I just don’t want to waste my life.

At this point, at 62 years old, do you feel like a success?

Michael: No. I just look at the music and my career as one long process of discovery and probably I’ll never discover what it was leading to. It’s a long process. People ask about how I view the new record but I don’t view it in any particular way I just view it as one piece of work in the whole cycle. Maybe this is taking on way too deep and philosophical a bent for a rock interview, I don’t know!

Do you ever find yourself reminding yourself that it’s only rock and roll?

Michael: Of course – but this is my life and as such it’s what I make and what I leave is the most important question. I can’t be frivolous about it, that’s for sure.

So what do you love so much about music?

Michael: When music is great I think it’s utterly transporting and it’s a truly spiritual experience. Whether you are listening to Howlin’ Wolf, or The Stooges or Ligeti or whoever. At certain points music reaches beyond itself and it’s great.

In an interview that has been filled with me picking your brain, do you have any final words of wisdom for me?

Michael: I have no wisdom, I probably should by this point, but sadly I don’t.

Swans Online
www.facebook.com/SwansOfficial
www.younggodrecords.com

The Seventh Hex - Interview

2019-12-19T17:14:00-05:00

https://theseventhhex.com/post/160224743285/swans-interview

Following the unprecedented critical and commercial success of Swans’ double-album masterworks ‘The Seer’ and ‘To Be Kind’, Michael Gira announced that the existing iteration of the band would only produce one more album and tour. ‘The Glowing Man’, as with its predecessors, is an expansive two-hour epic containing lengthy compositions that the band developed during their momentous tours. Throughout the latest release, Gira is less a songwriter than a summoner, channelling unspeakable amounts of energy into ritualistic spectacles. Many of the songs start out with tension-building drones, often utilising lots of percussion before ebbing and flowing with intense bursts, and eventually reaching ecstatic, trance-inducing states. There’s no way this type of boundless energy can simply be retired or silenced, though, so the album serves as another exciting portal into the unknown… The Seventh Hex talks to the legendary Michael Gira about being self-critical, sequencing and Buddhism…

TSH: Since the inception of Swans to now, how rewarding is it for you to consistently and continually develop little worlds and atmospheres with your compositions and have listeners connect on a personal level?

Michael: Without sounding too sentimental, that’s the greatest reward. When I talk to audience members after the show, hearing their responses and how the music has affected them in some true way is really the greatest repayment. I mean, I certainly haven’t had overwhelming financial rewards, so I’ll take what I can, ha! You know, it’s just great connecting with listeners; it allows me to strive to be self-critical and push things forward as much as possible in a true and honest way.

TSH: Is it essential for your arrangements to be free of constraint?

Michael: Yeah, I mean I never look at something as finished. It’s always a starting point for something else to happen, even with extent material it just keeps getting re-evaluated and iterated in a different way. My approach recently has been to significantly transform ideas and have them open to change as we go along.

TSH: What sort of trajectories are you applying to get your desired outcomes?

Michael: There are usually two trajectories that I’ve used on these recent records: one of which is me writing songs on acoustic guitar and then developing the songs with the band, as well as other people who subsequently perform on these songs in the studio. The other is writing songs on acoustic guitar and taking them to the band and we start developing them to perform live, which is an entirely different way of working. When we perform live things morph into these longer pieces that garner new sections constantly, and we keep pushing until new things happen.

TSH: ‘The Glowing Man’ is yet another excellent Swans release. What was your initial approach as you fleshed out ‘The World Looks Red / The World Looks Black’?

Michael: That song was just me playing this figure on the guitar and singing nonsense really. In the end, I just thought of the lyrics which I’d written and given to Sonic Youth over 30 years ago. I just started singing those words and it was kind of preposterous, but I thought, why not. I’m really happy with the end result on that one.

TSH: The remastered version of ‘The Great Annihilator’ is also another recent release. Do you remember forming the striking ‘Mind/Body/Light/Sound’?

Michael: That record was made during a great time for the band. You know, like all Swans records it was quite a torturous process unfortunately. Not being a real trained musician meant I was starting out with notions and colours with regards to how to orchestrate a song. I started working with people and I’d tell them about my ideas or play a song to them, and often they’d suggest something or they’d play something that would inspire something in me - it all just sort of grows organically with further contribution from others. I guess that’s how that song must have come about, I don’t remember too much.

TSH: Knowing sequencing is significant to you, is it often a case of following intuition with this factor?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Something I started with ‘Soundtracks for the Blind’ and continued since is developing material that works as transitions between the pieces, based on a discreet amount of already extent pieces. I’ll start developing other bits of music that serve as transitions or segues from one section to another. On ‘Soundtracks for the Blind’ the segues ended up taking precedence over the original pieces. The sequencing is really important to me in order to make the record a total cinematic experience.

TSH: Is it a constant spiritual and high level experience for you when Swans perform live?

Michael: Most certainly. I view the records and live performances as two completely different worlds, I don’t qualify them as one being better than the other. However, the live element is the apex of my life personally. It’s when the music kind of becomes bigger than us and we’re just puppets that are playing. We’re right in there with the audience, experiencing it ourselves. I always like live shows when they surprise me and wipe away my expectations of what reality is. Performing live is embedded in my bones and when the audience gets it, that’s the highpoint which creates pure elation for me.

TSH: Does the urgency of existence and proximity of death still inform your subject matter?

Michael: Well, I feel both are important topics in life for anyone to think about. At my age, I’m only naturally going to have these issues in mind. Certainly for me these types of factors inform my thinking more than anything else happening in life or in the past. I guess talking about it trivialises the subject matter though, so I leave thoughts pertaining to this type of subject matter open-ended.

TSH: Is Zen Buddhism a way of life that you admire?

Michael: Well, I think it’s preposterous for anyone to say ‘I’m a Buddhist’ because that negates the idea of Buddhism. I’m interested in the Buddhist way of thinking for sure, but I don’t prescribe to any notion of reality or how things should be.

TSH: Is it distracting to find discipline with so much information overload in this digital age?

Michael: I try to find clarity, but I’m just about caught up in this digital age as much as anyone else, unfortunately. I personally feel that social media and this age of information overload is a pernicious influence. I realise that our initial hope for the internet was the democratisation of information, but it seems to me that it’s become a swarm of distractions and neurosis. It’s like one big mind eating itself.

TSH: Also, does your daughter still prefer Katy Perry to Swans?

Michael: Ha! Yeah, she still prefers the pop world and cannot stand any Swans music. I think she kind of likes ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by Iggy Pop, which is pretty cool.

TSH: How have you been keeping your mindset fresh during your downtime?

Michael: I read a lot and I’ve been watching a lot of movies…

TSH: You finally got around to seeing ‘The Hidden Fortress’…

Michael: Yes, I did. Akira Kurosawa is an absolute master and the film itself was a real treat. You know, I came to the conclusion several years ago that the greatest artists of the twentieth century were filmmakers, not necessarily fine artists, but, yeah, I rank Kurosawa way up there.

TSH: Knowing nothing is ever finished for yourself, as you look ahead with Swans, is it very much a case of changing the conversation and keeping things fresh?

Michael: For sure. You know, this current version of Swans has definitely been the most pleasing period of my career, which is encouraging, but also we put in the hard work so it’s a natural progression. I mean it’s great be able to be in my dotage and still make something that has a severance of vitality to it. This configuration of individuals called Swans at the current time is the most fruitful of musicians that I’ve ever experienced, and I love working with these guys. However, at a certain point you begin to anticipate and know what each person is going to do, and so it can become too familiar. We’re still performing very well and discovering new things as we go along, but I just want to change it up. Looking ahead, I’m going to make records whilst gathering musicians - people I know from all over the world for each song, many of whom will be these guys, but the end result will be one of a more open-ended circumstance.

Under the Radar Mag leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T17:10:00-05:00

http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/swans_leaving_meaning

Swans

leaving meaning

Young God

Nov 26, 2019 WEB EXCLUSIVE By Michael James Hall

There's a moment on "The Nub," the 12-plus minute eighth track on leaving meaning, the 15th official studio album by Swans and the first with this line-up—The Necks are doing a stellar job backing one-true-Swan Michael Gira with their orchestral, atmospheric hesitations and runs—tension's building across the violin and keys and then slowly but suddenly the spectral horrors of the lyric "I'm naked, I'm drifting/In black milk that I'm drinking." The lyric lands and leads to other, even farther-out, space-sickening imagery. It drones and it drones and it drones and it's simultaneously transportive and terrifying. An obtuse image implants in the mind and feels unshakeable. Are we here, listening to the mighty Swans because we like to be tortured?

About a half an hour ago things had started so differently with the orchestral rumble—ominous, portentous, malevolent but specked with dots and dashes of light—of opener "Hum" and swiftly delivered follow-up "Annaline," a gleaming musical waterfall backdrop provided for Gira's crackling baritone as he croaks "Right here and right now, the first night of our lives" on what sounds like his most optimistic song in...well...a while? This prepares us for a different, gentler, perhaps even brighter Swans album. We do not get that.

As soon as that tribal rhythm picks up on the fucking horribly titled "The Hanging Man" we know we're in for some straight up doom and rigorous spiritual self-investigation. "I am the hanging man," roars Gira. Of course you are, Michael. Of course you are. It's a song that perhaps depicts some kind of inter-dimensional spiritual sex ritual. It's hefty—heavy as bastards in fact, without resorting to volume for impact. Gira's mastery over the dynamic presentation of his music has extended into a quieter arena altogether this time around—though nonetheless disturbing, no less heavy in the truest sense.

"Amnesia" gives us the biggest, most surprising pounding of the record—in which a vast choral refrain dominates a soundscape speckled with disembodied children's giggling and lines like the none-more absolute "Everything human is necessarily wrong."

"Funereal" doesn't begin to cover the tone of epic, pitch-black songs like, ahem, "Sunfucker," which sounds like an anxiety attack; unusual, uncomfortable vocal phrasing set to repetition and discord, a Krautrock beat dragging along the tale of an Aztec ritual. Or the lightweight banter of "Cathedrals of Heaven," a J.G. Ballard-inspired ballad which offers this height of Swans-romance-"I'm thinking your thoughts/You're wearing my lips"—then later asks painfully "Who made us like this?"

A seemingly endless parade of disquieting whispers, brutalizing screams, atonal babbling, dirge repetition, and with only one obviously duff lyric ("Hungry like a monkey" won't pass muster however shamanic you are), this is a magnificent dark companion for listeners needing a deep dive into the abyss.

"What Is This" arrives late—a stunning, gorgeous torch song that inverts the lyric of "The Nub" nicely—"There is a star in my throat/In a voice, there is hope/In a space in-between/Runs the milk of release."

The latest iteration of Gira's fierce, frightening Swans is a quieter, subtler beast perhaps—but it's no less an intense, oppressive, challenging, and magical experience than those created on vinyl by their recent "classic" lineup. Torture it may be, but it's never felt so sweet. (www.younggodrecords.com)

Author rating: 8/10

Please Kill Me - Interview

2019-12-19T17:08:00-05:00

https://pleasekillme.com/swans-michael-gira/

SWANS DIVE AGAIN: MICHAEL GIRA, SACRIFICE AND TRANSCENDENCE

AMANDA SHEPPARD NOVEMBER 27, 2019

The legendary musical outfit Swans—a revolving cast of inspired players centered around Michael Gira—has resurfaced with a new album, Leaving Meaning, and an upcoming 2020 tour. In his conversation with Amanda Sheppard, Gira covers much of the ground of his career, from art school in LA with Kim Gordon, living on nothing in ‘Alphabet City,’ sharing rehearsal space with Madonna and his eclectic influences like J.G. Ballard, Glenn Branca and Nico.

Throughout the 1980s, Swans pummeled audiences into submission with dangerously high volume and steam-room conditions. Singer and band leader Michael Gira choreographed their sonic death and rebirth ritual and derided audience members who dared to disrupt the proceedings with dancing or headbanging. With its lumbering atonal bass, shrieking saw-blade guitar, thunderous percussions, proto-industrial loops, and Gira’s deep, demonic vocals, Swans took the experimental noise of No Wave bandleaders Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham to its most dangerous conclusion and influenced the evolution of sludge metal, industrial, and death metal along the way.

Musically, Swans, too, have died and been reincarnated as a bludgeoning performance art ship on a voyage of the damned (Cop, Greed, Holy Money) to a snake-handling revivalist sect with singer/keyboard player Jarboe (Children of God, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity) to Swans’ most recent incarnation as the Large Hadron Collider smashing together the sub-atomic particles of its previous efforts to reveal the truth of its own being (The Seer, To Be Kind, The Glowing Man).

Now Swans lives again, in 2019, according to Michael Gira, as 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” for the band’s fifteenth studio album, Leaving Meaning, as well as its upcoming 2020 tour of North America and Europe.

PKM: First off, I have to say, I’ve been reading [Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence] the Oral History of Swans and I was really excited to see that you mention JG Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” I actually did a piece on him [and V. Vale] not too long ago.

Michael Gira: (Laughs) That’s one of his more obscure pieces, actually, but the title, itself, says it all. Six months ago, I just read most of his big, fat tome of collected short stories, as well as re-read Concrete Island and High-Rise, just tremendous books. And then I read a couple later ones, too, they’re just great! I think his perception of media and technology and how it affects our consciousness is really spot on.

PKM: Absolutely. And I noticed a lot of parallels between you two. High-Rise was terrific!

Michael Gira: There’s a movie, too, which is pretty terrible.

PKM: Yeah, I heard about that. I haven’t checked it out, good to know. I did see – I know it’s not based on the book, but they’re really similar––Shivers––the Cronenberg film. It’s not based on High-Rise but they are very similar.

Michael Gira: They have a similar sensibility, too.

PKM: Right, David Cronenberg!

Michael Gira: His take on technology is very similar, as well. His view of media and television, at the time. You know, before the internet. What’s that movie where the hand reaches out of the television? Videodrome! That was a tremendous movie.

PKM: I downloaded some of the early No Mag issues and I noticed that some of those have an Atrocity Exhibition feel. Were you getting into Ballard around that time?

Michael Gira: (Laughs) No.

PKM: That was just a happy coincidence, then?

Michael Gira: No, my friend, Bruce Kalberg and I, we published the first two issues [of No Mag] together. We were art students who were quickly converted to punk rock and the L.A. punk scene was pretty conservative. It was kind of our way of throwing shit at the local punk rock groups, actually! (Laughs) Yeah, and it was a fun thing to do, to publish that. It was a long time ago, I hardly remember it.

Now we’re in a situation where everything you could possibly imagine is now available on the internet, which is equally horrifying.

Michael Gira and Bruce Kalberg met while studying at Otis Art Institute, a progressive school where creativity and ideas were nurtured in a pressure-free 1970s environment and were similarly unimpressed with the L.A. punk scene. No Mag features autopsy photo collages (featuring Gira’s dad), hermaphrodite genitalia, twisted erotica parodies, and Gira’s black humor illustrations of happy couples ingesting their own bodily fluids, as well each other’s, through strategically placed tubes alongside interviews with L.A. punk luminaries, (X, The Go-Go’s, The Bags, The Plugz, and the Controllers, to name a few) and L.A. performance artists Gina Payne and Kim Jones.

PKM: Excellent! They’re available online to download from Circulation Zero and what Ryan Richardson wants people to do, is to donate to Doctors Without Borders or Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Michael Gira: That sounds cool.

PKM: So, I made my donation so I could check those out.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Gira formed Circus Mort with L.A. guitarist Rick Oller, and twins Josh and Dan Braun. The band soon made a name for themselves with gigs at Hurrahs and Danceteria opening for Bauhaus and A Certain Ratio despite lacking a consistent drummer (Angelo Pudignano and Michael Pedulla, respectively) before ultimately hitting it off with future Swans drummer Jonathan Kane.

Michael Gira: Yeah, that was kind of a silly group I was in for a while trying to find my footing in New York.

Circus Mort soon split over the widening artistic divide between Gira and Kane and Oller and the Braun twins. Gira and Kane began working on Swans material while the others reformed the band as Deep Six, shortly after.

PKM: And you shared a rehearsal space with Madonna, I understand.

Michael Gira: Yeah, that was at The Music Building which was on 8th Avenue and 36th. Everybody rehearsed there. I knew her in those days, she was quite something. She was a really vibrant person and very good at getting her way (laughs) as she was pretty interesting.

PKM: Yeah, I can imagine.

Michael Gira: And smart.

PKM: Yeah, she seems like she’s really clever. It’s such a trip that she was part of the No Wave scene.

Michael Gira: No, I wouldn’t say she was part of the No Wave scene. She had her own goals. And rightly so. Good for her!

PKM: You also knew Kim Gordon from Otis, I understand, just before you moved to NYC?

Michael Gira: Yeah, we were friends at Otis and then we hooked up, again. Not in the modern term of “hookup”. We ran across each other in New York and you know, renewed our friendship and then, of course, I met Thurston (Moore) through her very quickly, and then Thurston and I were really good friends for a couple of years there. And then we, Sonic Youth and the Swans, supported each other in the early days because there really wasn’t anybody else around like us. There wasn’t much opportunity in New York City, at the time. We just kind of created our own situation. Toured together, helped each other.

Swans shared a rehearsal room with Sonic Youth, whose guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo carried musical influences over from their own stints with Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. Sonic Youth also recorded “The World Looks Red” for their 1983 LP Confusion Is Sex based on song lyrics Gira had written and left sitting out at the rehearsal room—with his blessing, of course. Swans later recorded their own rendition “The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black” for their 2017 album, The Glowing Man.

Sonic Youth also joined Swans on the road for the band’s two-week “Savage Blunder” tour in November of 1982. The shows were sparsely attended with heckling cowboys in Chapel Hill, pogoing new wavers in Athens, and lots of in-fighting between Gira and his bandmates, most notably, Jonathan Kane, who according to Michael Azzerad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, “got into a huge fight in the crowded van and after some preliminary name-calling (‘Dickhead!’ ‘Asshole!’) began strangling each other.”

PKM: Yeah, the tour sounded intense!

Michael Gira: (laughs) Oh yeah!

PKM: I imagine Southern audiences didn’t know what hit ‘em.

Michael Gira: No. There was usually one or two people there who had a clue and the rest were pretty hostile, but that sort of describes the first ten years of Swans’ career, as well.

PKM: Right, I was thinking New York City didn’t know what hit ‘em, for that matter, from the sound of it.

Michael Gira: I guess not.

PKM: I can see where a lot of those early experiences shaped those early Swans sounds and New York City would’ve appealed to you.

Michael Gira: You know, New York then was––it was cheap! (Laughs) It’s hard to imagine, but I had about an 800 or 900 square foot space that was on the corner of 6th street and Avenue B. Which was just a concrete box, basically, with no windows but I gutted it and built a sleeping area and living area on one side and a rehearsal space on the other side and the rent was a $100 a month. So, you know, then, I could work construction, say, a week or ten days or months, then have enough money to make music and get by, so it was conducive to making stuff. There was a lot of great art around at the time and music. It was a pretty fertile place, at the time.

There was usually one or two people there who had a clue and the rest were pretty hostile, but that sort of describes the first ten years of Swans’ career, as well.

PKM: New York City back then blows my mind. It reminds me of when you read about post-war Europe.

Michael Gira: Oh yeah, there’s a book out by an ex-cop, narcotics division person, about right where I lived, and it’s about the area. I think it’s called Alphabet City, something like that. It’s good to get a flavor of what was going on then. Most buildings, at least half, seemed to be abandoned and there was drug-dealing going on in them, burnt-out cars on the street, gunfire at night. I heard machine-gun fire a couple of times. Used needles, works, on the street, it was just, you know. The lines for dope were all from Avenue C to Avenue B, where I lived. I’d open my door and there’d be this line of junkies and the police would just kinda lookout and drive by and keep going because they were paid off.

PKM: Wow! Very different from nowadays.

Michael Gira: Yeah, I can’t even go in the area, I don’t recognize it. I mean, I’m not nostalgic for those days. There was a period in the late 1980s where it was a nice mix. It was a little safer but it wasn’t completely yuppified, but now it’s not really a place of any interest.

PKM: Let me dip into Leaving Meaning really fast and then we can jump back and forth into Swans. I’ve really been enjoying this album.

Michael Gira: Oh, I’m very happy to hear that! I have no idea how it sounds now. I’ve heard it so many times, it’s just like someone coughing, or something. It just has no resonance to me, now. So, I’m happy it has some effect on other people.

PKM: Absolutely. I imagine you get fatigued from hearing it so much, from working on it and everything.

Michael Gira: Yeah. To me, the best part of working on a record is after you’ve recorded it all the numerous, and in my case, way too numerous, tracks, and it’s in complete chaos and you put your head in your hands and you wanna blow your brains out. And then you kind of figure out a way to make things happen and you’re playing it loud in the speakers and it’s just suddenly transporting. And then you go through the tedium of mixing and mastering and then, by that time, all the juice has been squeezed out.

PKM: So, you’ve got Norman Westberg on this and you’ve got Christopher Pravdica and Phil Puleo, and Thor Harris on this.

Michael Gira: Yeah, all the guys who were in the band from 2010 to 2017, I guess it was, are on the record. There are also a lot of other contributors, of course. The difference in personnel is that this is not a band now; it’s a project and I gathered a lot of different musicians that I’ve met over the years. People I like, which is very important to that I like them, enjoy their presence. I gathered those people and I made a record.

PKM: Yeah, I’ve been having fun checking out all the other collaborators on this. I’m learning about some really amazing people I previously wasn’t aware of.

Michael Gira: Oh, right!

PKM: Like A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

Michael Gira: Oh yeah, they’re fantastic!

PKM: I had no idea, they do kind of a gypsy style.

Michael Gira: They’re really great musicians and they’re also very intrepid and they travel around on no budget whatsoever and to various––in the Balkans, Turkey, different places, and just kind of meet local––what should I call them? Master musicians and befriend them and play with them, record them. And they make their own music, of course, which is heavily influenced by that region’s music and to watch Jeremy, for instance, play this––what’s it called––the Zontar. It’s like a hammer dulcimer except with about ten times as many strings. To watch him play it so melodically is really something! Heather plays it and she’s a classically trained violinist and they play all kinds of different instruments and write books and music and just sort of endless curiosity.

PKM: That’s amazing that they do all that. Also, The Necks!

Michael Gira: Oh yeah! So, you didn’t know them before this?

PKM: No, and it’s funny, they’re from Australia and they played on Swans Australian tour dates in 2011 and I actually have a friend who had written a live review. It was initially supposed to be about the existence of the “brown note” but what it turned into was a live show review of Swans that blew him away, but he knew what he was going into, and The Necks opened for Swans at The Forum Theatre in Melbourne.

Michael Gira: Yeah, I saw them [The Necks] at a music festival called Big Ears, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I had no idea who they were and I just wandered into the theater because I heard some sound or something and I sat down just mesmerized by their set, you know what I mean? They just start playing! They have no set thing that they’re going to do and they just gel as a group. It’s not like jazz where they’re soloists or just kind of ego-driven virtuosity. They create these continuing, renewing, swelling, sheets of sound and groove and it’s just almost like church music, in a way to me, when you experience it live. And their records are tremendous, their most recent is really great, they’re all great, but the most recent is called Body, you should listen to that.

PKM: So, much of that is improvised?

Michael Gira: Yeah it’s improvised, but it’s different. In a way, it’s similar to what Swans has been doing live these last eight years.

Beginning with Swans’ 2014 album, The Seer, Gira decided the album was to be a culmination of Swans’ previous work and that of his post-Swans output with Angels of Light. According to Swans drummer Phil Puleo in Nick Soulsby’s 2018 Swans oral history, Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence, “The Seer was written, in part, on the road, while we were touring. We would branch out some pieces from My Father, and they would develop into new songs. As that set grew, we would drop some of the older songs. Then we did a pretty long tour where we did barely anything from My Father—we just did the material that we were going to go on to record as The Seer. That set up the whole cycle of writing the next record on the previous tour.”

Michael Gira: You have to figure that you’re playing and you just hammer away at it and gruffly it morphs and changes and keeps burgeoning and growing just through persistence and slight bits of improvisation and variance within the context that you’re playing. And it results in like, for instance, Chris Abrahams piano playing is just unbelievable –– actually, it reminds me of Charlemagne Palestine in the sense that there’s these repeating figures that suddenly, you’re hearing choirs of angels with all these overtones happening and it’s just really beautiful.

PKM: Yeah, I’ve just been learning all of this through you and working on this post. Getting back to Swans for a second and then back to the album. It kind of surprised me – well, it didn’t surprise me, after it just kinda sunk in that Howlin’ Wolf––I read that he was a bit of a––I don’t know if inspiration is the right word?

Michael Gira: Sure, yeah!

PKM I’m a big fan of his but it makes total sense. I don’t know if primal is the right word.

Michael Gira: It’s a bit demeaning, isn’t it?

PKM: Yeah, because it’s so much more refined than that.

Michael Gira: [Jonathan] Kane introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf, at the time. I was playing bass, then, and I came up with these similar rhythm figures that played with these atonal chords I was using at the time. And we felt grooves like that and eventually things just got slower and slower so, I don’t think it had much resemblance to Mr. Wolf’s (laughs) at that point, but it was a good inspiration. And early on, another inspiration, a big inspiration, was The Stooges, of course, but we didn’t wanna sound anything like either of those people or groups. It’s just that the kind of the thread was the sex thread running through it was attractive.

PKM: Right! I’ve just been enjoying everything I’ve heard, it’s just otherworldly and beautiful and dark.

Michael Gira: That’s great! The music’s changed since those days, measurably, but if it hadn’t changed, I’d be kind of an idiot. I don’t think I am.

PKM: No, absolutely not! I can see where it’s a journey, nothing like that you could just stay locked into.

Michael Gira: Well, I always like to be in an uncomfortable place, so, I think that’s the best program for me.

PKM: You worked with Xiu Xiu back in 2008 and also some of the guys, can you tell me a little about that “Under Pressure” duet you did?

Michael Gira: (Laughs) Well, Jamie [Stewart] sent me the tracks and asked me to sing on them, so I did. I love Jamie! He toured with Swans a couple of times solo and he’s a great artist and person, so I did it. That’s not one of my favorite Bowie songs, I know that Freddie Mercury’s on it, too, but, that’s just not one of my favorite efforts by them but I did it for Jamie because I like Jamie.

PKM: I’ve been listening to Angels Of Light, as well. I noticed that some of the guys who were on Angels Of Light are also on Leaving Meaning and I felt some of that vibe on Leaving Meaning, as well.

Michael Gira: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s similar. Maybe there’s some of it, yeah? I don’t know. With this record, I just had these songs and produced them how I thought they should sound. I don’t quite know how it fits in the catalog and I don’t frankly think about that at all. I just make a record. But I think it moves forward from the last one [The Glowing Man] and that’s what I wanted to do.

PKM: It has some of that haunting quality.

Michael Gira: Yeah. The thing that it doesn’t have that I deliberately eschewed was it doesn’t have the multiple layers of electric guitars. It doesn’t have the apocalyptic exploding downbeat. It doesn’t have the caterwauling tornadoes of sound. It’s more based around the songs, orchestrating the songs as –– they’re kind of like art songs. You know, in the sense that Nico, that her songs might’ve been arranged by John Cale or something more in that vein.

PKM: I love Nico.

Michael Gira: She’s an absolute hero of mine.

PKM: I’ve been listening to Chelsea Girls a lot.

Michael Gira: Oh, you’ve gotta go to The Marble Index and Desertshore and The End, those are fantastic records! They’re just utterly fierce and super uncompromised and really dry and intellectual [and] at the same time, they’re searingly emotional. They’re just incredible records! I think that in Chelsea Girls she was still in that kinda ingénue thing that she was still saddled with in the Velvet Underground, but once she started making records that were entirely written by her and she came into herself as an artist, [those records] are just fantastic!

Fun Fact: Nico hated Chelsea Girls! She did, however, hit her artistic stride with John Cale’s artful production on the course-correcting trilogy as she paired her powerful Germanic vocals with a rudimentary grasp of the harmonium to hypnotic effect.

PKM: I’m very excited to check those out. Leaving Meaning has a very cinematic quality and your recent albums all really have a cinematic quality. I noticed some of the personnel on these albums actually work on film scores…

Michael Gira: You mean like Ben Frost?

PKM: And Paul Wallfisch, too, I understand. Do I have that right?

Michael Gira: Yeah. Ben, his soundtrack to [the Netflix series] Dark is really great. Ben’s a tremendous musician and composer I met on tour sometime back and we shared some bills and stayed in touch. And when it came time to do this record, I thought of him, of course, because I was just drawing from people that I’ve known along the way whom I like, as I say, and whose music I admire. So, I called Ben and I’m really happy he contributed.

PKM: There’s a very stark, atmospheric beauty. I’ve been checking out a lot of your collaborators’ solo work away from this, I can see where you knew exactly what you needed for this and you knew exactly who to go to, but It sounds like Swans all the way.

Michael Gira: That’s good, I don’t know exactly what Swans sounds like, but I guess there’s some kind of undercurrent that unites the records, even though they are so disparate, but I hope there is.

PKM: It’s not any one thing

Michael Gira: I know what it is! It’s this grumbling guy who can’t really sing, that’s what ties it all together! (laughs)

PKM: So, Swans will be touring in the Spring of 2020, will that include North America?

Michael Gira: Yes, ma’am. We’re doing Europe and North America. What happens after that, I don’t know. I guess I’m not supposed to announce the group, yet. It’s six people on stage and we’ll all be sitting. It won’t be as extreme sonically as the previous incarnation of Swans, but it will hopefully have its own inner power and it won’t sound anything like this record, I can say. (Laughs)

PKM: Wow! It almost sounds, I don’t want to say, orchestral?

Michael Gira: Yeah, the instrumentation is going to be kind of strange but you’ll see.

At press time, Gira announced his touring lineup as Kristof Hahn, Dana Schecter, Ben Frost, Phil Puleo, and Christopher Pravdica along with special guest Anna Von Hausswolff. She, as well as her sister, Swedish cinematographer/director of photography, Maria Von Hausswolff, also appears on Leaving Meaning. As Michael recalls in the Leaving Meaning press release, “In 2017, I heard Anna and Maria singing together at a [sic] 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.”

[Tickets are on sale now]

Spring 2020 North American Tour 2020 w/Anna Von Hausswolff:

6/5/20 – Dallas, TX Granada Theater

6/6/20 – Austin, TX Oblivion Access Festival at Empire Garage

6/9/20 – Los Angeles, CA Regent Theater

6/10/20 – San Francisco, CA The Fillmore

6/12/20 – Portland, OR Revolution Hall

6/13/20 – Seattle, WA The Neptune

6/16/20 – Minneapolis, MN Varsity Theater

6/19/20 – Detroit, MI El Club

6/20/20 – Toronto, ON Lee’s Palace

6/21/20 – Montreal, QC Theatre National

6/24/20 – Boston, MA Brighton Music Hall

6/25/20 – Philadelphia, PA Underground Arts

6/26/20 – Brooklyn, NY Warsaw

6/27/20 – Brooklyn, NY Warsaw

PKM: Cool, I’m very excited about that and intrigued. So, if we could rewind back for a sec to the “Children of God” era, that was the “Kings of Independence” tour?

Michael Gira: Oh yeah, that was the “Magical Misery” tour!

PKM: It sounded intense, so, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Butthole Surfers were on some of those dates or were they there for the whole tour?

Michael Gira: Butthole Surfers quit after one show (laughs) because it was so disorganized and shambolic. The first night, I was at some hall in Hamburg or something and the promoter – I don’t know how many people it held, say 1,000 people – and the promoter sold 2,000 tickets and didn’t honor or something and there was a riot and it was just a mess. And in the end, I don’t think we got paid, ever, either. It was part of a tour that we had arranged through the same promoter and once we got to Europe, we discovered that there were only like three shows booked and we didn’t have the money to get home or continue. It was a disaster.

It’s just sorta how the whole thing went in the early days.

PKM: You really had to fight hard just to get the sound right at the shows from what I’ve read.

Michael Gira: Always.

PKM: So, you guys played East Berlin? Was that at that time on that tour?

Michael Gira: No, we never played East Berlin, no we played Berlin, but we did travel into Eastern Europe, I don’t think that was that tour. I think that was a little bit later. Yeah, we traveled into Czechoslovakia, then it was known as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. We were there for two weeks, I think. And that was, again, no money and just barely getting to the next show. We were playing illegally in Czechoslovakia and so the promoters had to kind of hide, kind of keep the shows underground. And one time, the police showed up and they (the promoters) admonished us to not speak any English, just to be quiet because if the police found out that we were an American group playing there, they would go to jail. (laughs)

PKM: I can’t even imagine!

Michael Gira: But it was an interesting view of seeing communism and its effects on people. It’s all dolorous and pretty gray and people were pretty unhappy with the situation, not that I’m touting the benefits of consumer capitalism, which I think is a nightmare beyond description.

PKM: It just goes to show ideologies in the wrong hands, then again, ideologies are what they are, I guess.

Michael Gira: I think just by definition, ideologies are pernicious.

PKM: Right! It’s mind-blowing I can’t even imagine being in that part of the world at the time! The things we take for granted!

Michael Gira: It was really interesting!

PKM: I understand people were mimeographing books since they were illegal

Michael Gira: Oh yeah, they couldn’t get the real thing, so they did.

PKM: I imagine they must’ve had to have a similar approach for getting music in.

Michael Gira: Well, now we’re in a situation where everything you could possibly imagine is now available on the internet, which is equally horrifying.

Michael Gira: Sure, it has benefits, but I look at the internet as a giant human brain. It’s human consciousness and it’s like a neurotic human that’s taken too much methedrine and it’s saying, “This! This! This! Not That! This, this –– just eating itself! And I think it’s kind of terrible to get sucked into it.

PKM: I agree. Can we talk a little bit about Angels Of Light?

Michael Gira: Sure, I don’t remember everything, but we could try.

Michael formed Angels Of Light in 1998, after ending Swans with the evocative, Terrence Malick-esque Soundtracks For The Blind and the live album, Swans Are Dead as well as the equally Malickian side project, The Body Lovers/The Body Haters.

PKM: And that was with Kristof Hahn and Larry Mullins

Michael Gira: Yes, lots of different people. I guess the primary contributors on the first two or three were Larry, Kristof, Thor Harris, Dana Schechter, an old friend, a very good bass player. Cassis Staudt, she played accordion and keyboards.

PKM: It’s all really beautiful and haunting. So, that was a bit of a – I wanna say departure, but at the same time I still pick up that Swans’ intensity because it’s still you. Can you tell me a little about how it was for you to do the Angels Of Light?

Michael Gira: Well, it was quite a departure from Swans, that’s for sure. That was when I made the decision that everything we performed was written on the acoustic guitar and the song had to stand up just on the acoustic guitar, otherwise I would reject it. And that was a huge departure from Swans which was about sound and being immersed in the sound. So, I had that goal for myself with sometimes, good results, other times, with not-so-good results, but I got better at it as I went. And after I had the song written, of course, I would work with various people and I would orchestrate them and build them up in various ways, but it was the first time I was only gonna write material that was specific to the acoustic guitar. And so that was a challenge and it kept me busy for quite some time. Angels Of Light never really took off, it was kind of a disaster financially and career-wise, but it was what I had to do at the time.

PKM: Do you find more people coming to Angels Of Light nowadays or do you see a potential for that in the future?

Michael Gira: I guess people are coming to it, now, I imagine.

PKM: There’s like an entry point to it, now. I imagine people who were following you through Swans probably just didn’t know what to make of it, fully, at the time, perhaps.

Michael Gira: I’m lucky in that the people that care about the music seem to really care about it and they search out everything. Gradually, that cadre of people has grown enough to sustain the project into the future. And I’m grateful for that. It’s good when we play shows to see really young people, y’know fifteen to sixteen and ranging all the way up to fifty and sixty, and a good mix of male and female. It’s just a wide variety of people and that’s gratifying.

Leaving Meaning is out now on Double LP and 2-disk CD through Young God Records/Mute Records (UK) and digital download on Apple Music.

Follow Swans on Facebook and Instagram for more updates on Swans’ 2020 Spring Tour w/Very Special Guest Anna Von Hausswolff.

Follow Marco Porsia’s Swans documentary, Where Does A Body End on Facebook for Upcoming Screenings!

Readers Digest - Michael Gira: Records that changed my life

2019-12-19T16:56:00-05:00

https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/music/michael-gira-records-that-changed-my-life

Michael Gira: Records that changed my life

Eva Mackevic

We chat to the founder and frontman of the cult experimental rock band Swans, Michael Gira, about the records that shaped him

Michael Gira: I listened to The Doors’ first album when I was 13. It came at a time in America when there was a great deal of turmoil, a turmoil which I wish still existed today, in that there was mass rioting and protests in the streets. It was the first kind of eruption of a counter-culture and The Doors to me, being from California, were emblematic of this ongoing apocalypse and, sonically, they just embodied that to me perfectly.

The songs can be quite sensual and beautiful. I think that the song “Crystal Ship” is just absolutely beautiful, it’s like Frank Sinatra-beautiful. In fact, there’s a YouTube video—guess YouTube is good for something—of Jim Morrison singing it acapella. I guess they just isolated the vocals but it’s just so unbelievably sensual and tactile.

But then there’s the song “The End”, which is like 12 minutes long, and mainly it’s an experience; it’s this unfolding world that you fall into when you're listening to it. It’s not virtuosic or anything, but it just has fantastic dynamics and drama.

Jim Morrison's vocals are incredible. I guess they had a lasting impact on me in the way that I think about music being an immersive experience.

RD: What’s your next record?

MG: The next one is very much conjoined in my mind. And that is The Mothers of Invention album Freak Out!. That’s a pivotal experimental psychedelic spit-in-your-face anti-consumer society record. It’s utterly fantastic. Some of it sounds a bit dated, but it employed sounds, tape loops, great rock grooves and really acerbic words.

It has such great songs like “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”, “Who are the Brain Police?” and a really great psychedelic song, “Help, I’m a Rock”. And this was at a time when psychedelics conjoined with other rejection of consumer society and, you know, people think of hippies as these dazed, happy creatures or something, but I think that this record was more punk rock than punk rock ever was.

It has a great song about the Watts riots. Watts was a black area in Los Angeles and it erupted in riots in 1966—at the time this record came out—and burned down part of the city. There’s a song about that event called “Trouble Every Day”. It's a great pastiche of strange musical adventures and overwhelming psychedelia, and it’s truly a great record.

RD: Do you remember how you were introduced to it originally?

MG: You know, that’s centuries ago. I just hung out with the hippies and did the things that they did and the word got around. I certainly wasn't reading magazines about music or anything of that nature. It was just around—it was kind of the lingua franca, a great psychedelic record at the time.

"When I was about 16, I ended up in prison in Israel and to pass the time, I would recite The Doors album in my mind"

I listened to it on one of those little record player stereos that were like a tiny small-size suitcase, it didn't have any external speakers, and I listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times.

I had a sort of chequered youth and later on, when I was about 16, I ended up in jail and then in prison in Israel after running away. And to pass the time, I used to recite The Doors album in my mind, I didn't really actually need to play it anymore.

RD: How did you end up in prison in Israel?

MG: I was in Europe with my father and I ran away. I was in Germany with some older hippies, and I hitchhiked down Germany through Yugoslavia into Greece and then into Istanbul. We were running out of money and someone knew someone in Israel. So we went to Israel and I spent a year there as a vagabond, just a homeless kid basically. My older friends had procured some hashish and they left town and left it with me—and I idiotically went to sell it at some youth hostel and then I was arrested there for that.

RD: What a story. So naturally you still associate The Doors with that rebellious period of your life?

MG: Oh yeah. I mean, I didn’t listen to them for decades and I started exploring them again recently for some reason, and I think the Doors records, the first three albums, really hold up very well. And I can't listen to them without associating it with my childhood, so it still sounds magical to me.

You know the song “When The Music's Over”? That to me is just Wagnerian, you know, when it takes off and the synthesiser and the slide guitar enter—it’s just unbelievable.

Morrison was a great singer, even though his poetry was a bit juvenile sometimes. But he sang with such authority that it didn't matter. And I guess, speaking of sticking it to the authority and singers, I could segue into another artist who had a great impact on me, which is Nico.

After her first stilted solo album Chelsea Girls, with the album Desertshore, she became a true artist and chanteuse. Her solo albums Desertshore, The Marble Index, and to the lesser extent The End…, are just unique in modern music. I think that they’re thoroughly uncompromising and most importantly, she’s just completely engrossing and her voice is without apology. She sings in these difficult to parse words but she delivers them with such force that they just convince you immediately.

The arrangements on Desertshore as well as on The Marble Index are just phenomenally good and strange and very abstract. They’re done by John Cale who’s one of my idols in terms of music production. They’re art records, you know, I guess they’re like art classical records.

I guess it didn't have this European feeling to them in that they’re often dissonant and they’re very sparse, there’s a lot of spaciousness to them. But her voice is a warrior’s voice, it’s really powerful.

RD: Would you say you borrowed anything from Nico, musically speaking?

MG: Well, yeah, actually. There's a song on the new Swans album that I specifically drew from the arrangement on a song called “It Has Not Taken Long.”

If you listen to that and then you listen to the song “Sunfucker”, you’ll immediately see the relationship. It's not the same musically, but the arrangements are very similar. I just used it as a template because I was so taken by that arrangement.

RD: What’s your next one?

MG: I'll say two records that directly influenced me to move from Los Angeles to New York in 1979. And those two records were the No New York compilation record, which was put together by the so-called no-wave bands of New York at the time. On this record, there were the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks featuring the marvellous Lydia Lunch, DNA and Mars.

And the other record, which I conjoin in my mind, the Suicide’s debut album. When I heard that record I thought, Wherever that sound’s coming from, I want to live there, and so it had a direct influence on my moving to New York City when I was first starting to make music.

It has moments of beauty and of touching love songs like “Cheree.” But then there is the infamous “Frankie Teardrop”, which is I think an 11-minute song, and it’s got the most minimal accompaniment possible, it’s just kind of this keyboard throb in the background while Alan Vega narrates the song.

It’s a song about a factory worker who loses all his money and ends up killing his wife and kids and then kills himself. And it's kind of a nightmare, a sonic nightmare, it’s really well-done. I realised recently that it relates directly to the Bob Dylan song “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, which is a song about a farmer in a depression who loses all his money, kills his wife and kids and kills himself. [Laughs] So I guess that’s something people do sometimes.

The Suicide album was inspirational to me because it’s pointing to the fact that, if you’re a musician, you can make something happen with the most minimal of means. Musicianship is not the point, it’s about being able to organise sound and have a voice that has conviction.

And that’s certainly also true with the No New York record and particularly in the case of Lydia Lunch who was at that point a fantastic lyricist and just the brattiest, most in-your-face singer imaginable, she was really a great presence. Seeing someone like that living in New York as well as Kathy Acker, the writer, all of those things made me want to live in New York City.

RD: Did the New York scene prove to be everything you wanted it to?

MG: Absolutely not. When I moved there, most of the bands had disbanded; I saw the Contortions a couple times but that whole scene didn't last very long at all. I just started from scratch and made Swans happen, made one really bad record and then found my voice and the music found its voice, and then we had a career.

RD: You said that musicianship is not always the key to success. Do you think that's typical of the current music scene?

MG: I don’t know anything about the current music scene and I never have really. But for me, punk rock’s primary lesson is that you can make something happen with the most minimal of means. You don't have to be some virtuosic musician. You can organise sound, whether that’s through bashing on a guitar inexpertly or a bass, or through using tape loops.

"I have never gotten “better” at guitar, it's just a piece of wood with some wires on it that I use to make sounds so I can sing to it"

It just takes—well, first of all, it takes talent but it also takes vision and commitment. And that's always been my way of approaching music. I have never gotten “better” at guitar, it's just a piece of wood with some wires on it that I use to make sounds so I can sing to it.

RD: When did you properly discover your voice?

MG: It took a couple of records for me to find myself vocally. I used to shout a lot, I don’t know if that qualifies [Chuckles]. I guess after the first record, I felt some kind of strength in my voice, I learned to sing better. I’m certainly not a great singer per se but I think I've learned to do what I can do pretty well.

"I guess I just have the arrogance to think that I can make something happen"

RD: That’s such a modest answer [Laughs].

MG: Well, I’m not being humble, it’s just a fact. You know, I'm not a musician really, I don't know most of the chords I play. I guess I just have the arrogance to think that I can make something happen, I don't care what anybody says and I'm just going to do it. So that's what I’ve done and I gather people around me that have much more musical skills than I do, but I'm able to work with them and guide things into a sonic terrain that I think is convincing.

RD: Do you have more records for us?

MG: Oh, Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. I didn't buy it at the time I saw it. When I was a runaway in Europe, I went to a rock festival in 1969, it was a rock festival in Belgium where I saw Pink Floyd, as well as Chicago Art Ensemble, Pretty Things, an early incarnation of Yes—all these psychedelic experimental hippie bands at the time. And I remember seeing Pink Floyd play at the exact era that generated Ummagumma and it was, again, through the aid of certain gateway substances but it was transformative.

I was sitting there in the dirt with all the rest of the hippies and “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” was played and to me, that was just mind-shredding. It’s a completely immersive experience, with music not being about songs so much as an unfolding journey that you would partake in. I lost interest in them very soon after that record. Particularly with The Wall.

RD: What made you lose interest in Pink Floyd?

MG: I guess it became too finessed and engineered for me. It didn’t have that kind of abandon, the searching quality that their earlier works had. And I guess it sounded kind of pompous and plodding. But that is not a true qualitative judgement, because who am I to judge.

But Ummagumma, the whole album is just an experience. One LP is their live concerts and the other LP is them each doing a song. It has all kinds of light and shade and different kind of qualities to it. I like how it goes from these grand sonic statements into these very minimal moments.

And I took that as a direct influence on the Swan's album, The Soundtracks for The Blind, which has a lot of that, a lot of dynamics and a different sonic world. So, I guess that would have been the influence that Pink Floyd had on Swans.

RD: What’s your next choice?

MG: I guess to include something more recent…this record was released posthumously. It’s a record that David Byrne's label released recently, of Alice Coltrane, and it’s called The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. I love Alice Coltrane, but this one is something that I kind of refer back to as a template for what’s possible in music: not technically—but for what’s possible in terms of how it can lead you towards something greater than yourself.

She retired from the music industry and went to live on in an Ashram in Northern California and as part of their ritual they would play music. I presume that these recordings were not made with the intent of releasing them, except maybe on a cassette among the followers of the Ashram.

But they’re snapshots into these transcendent group experiences that were taking place with chanting and building spiritual music that leads you to a higher place. And it's interesting musically in that it had obviously Eastern influences in it because she was a Hindu, but it also has gospel! It’s mixing the best of both worlds, and then obviously her jazz influences.

She sings on this record too, and it’s all just yearning and reaching for a higher place. I think it's quite beautiful for that reason and it serves the purpose of what music should do in my view, which is that it should lead you to a higher place.

RD: Do you try to achieve that through your own music as well?

MG: I hope that it has an entirely positive effect on people. Certainly, there are the so-called “dark subjects” involved, but there's also a lot of positivity in the music too, I mean it’s not maple syrup. So, since the late 1980s I've been trying to create soundtracks, you know, music that’s like a film where you can fall into this place and go through different aspects of the world and lose yourself in it.

Swans' latest album leaving meaning. is now out on Mute (Young God in North America) and the band return to the UK in spring 2020 for a tour that includes EartH London

Metal Hammer leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:46:00-05:00

Record Collector leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:45:00-05:00

Uncut leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:43:00-05:00

The Seahawk leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:35:00-05:00

https://theseahawk.org/24216/lifestyles/swans-review-a-wonderfully-melancholic-listen/

Swans review: a wonderfully melancholic listen

William Becker, Staff Writer
October 30, 2019

Going through the entire Swans discography is one of the most interesting musical experiences I have ever had, which is somewhat unfortunate, considering the fact that unless you are a die-hard fan of Anthony Fantano (The Needle Drop) or really like experimental music, you have probably never heard of them. Formed in 1982 by lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira, the band has released 15 full-length albums across a variety of genres. Gira has been the only consistent member, with his deep, crooning vocals being one of the only reoccurring elements.

“Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments,” Gira explains, perfectly capturing the entire idea behind the band.

To really understand Swans, one has to understand just how much their sound has changed with little mainstream attention. “Helpless Child” from 1996’s “Soundtracks for the Blind” focuses on the painful, melancholic and beautiful elements of the band. Personally, the song is one of the most soul-crushing I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. Their 13th album, “To Be Kind,” is how most modern fans came to discover the band, being one of the only albums music critic and journalist Anthony Fantano has given a perfect score to.

The album has only ten songs, yet it is nearly two hours long. On the other end of the spectrum, 1982’s “Filth” is one of the most unpleasant and atonal listening experiences one can have. It lacks in melody, structure, but instead fills each second with screaming, bass, noise and lyrics about extreme violence. It could not be classified as metal, but as something that could only be categorized as filth. “Leaving Meaning” is the band’s 15th album and the third “iteration” of Swans. Gira is 65 years old and is surrounded by another random assortment of collaborators. The current iteration of Swans is characterized by songs that are behemoths in scale, repetitive and meditative. The songs seem to build and grow with their drones, creating gothic soundscapes that sound like a misty day in late October.

Standout cut “The Hanging Man” features an intimidating bass line and gently pulsating drums that become so entrancing that it is hard to believe the track is nearly 11 minutes long. Gira’s vocals are drawn out, sensual, and pained. “Cathedrals of Heaven” sounds like a soundtrack to depression and loneliness with its nominalistic droning synths, gentle guitar strumming and lyrics like “Run your hands through my soil/feed your blood through my skull.” The second half of the interestingly named “Sunfucker” is another album highlight and seems to continue Gira’s weird obsession with the sun (other fun examples from the discography include “Bring The Sun,” “God Damn The Sun,” “I Am The Sun” and “Song For The Sun.”)

However, the album is not without its flaws. It is 90 minutes long and only has 12 songs, most of which are long, depressing and drawn out, which begins to feel somewhat taxing on the listener after “It’s Coming It’s Real.” Each song on the album feels unique enough to stand on their own, but it is a bit tough to make it through the album in one listen. Gira does not do a ton to change up his voice, which does not help with the taxing sensation that the album provides; nonetheless, in the right place and the right time. “Leaving Meaning” is a wonderfully melancholic listen.

Music OMH leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:33:00-05:00

https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/swans-leaving-meaning

ALBUM REVIEWS

Swans – Leaving Meaning

(Mute) UK release date: 25 October 2019

by Sam Shepherd

Another new chapter in the enduring career of Swans sees Michael Gira enlist the help of a host of collaborators for the latest incarnation of the band. Having cleared the decks by dispatching the line up that delivered the incredible run of albums that began with 2012’s The Seer and ended with 2016’s The Glowing Man, it’s inevitable that the Leaving Meaning would sound somewhat different to what came before.

The result is an album that retains Swans’ expansive and threatening approach, but for the most part sounds much closer to a stripped back M Gira solo project. It doesn’t beat you over the head, or pound you into submission (like Cop, for example), but instead slowly unfurls in a series of hypnotic, almost post-rock inspired, songs that coil themselves around your brain, letting repetition and mood do the work.

For those requiring the old style Swans, there’s a slight nod to the past with The Hanging Man, which finds Gira yelping over a relentless repetitious riff and ominous backdrop. Sunfucker inhabits similar territory, starting off as an almost ritualistic chant to surrender yourself on the alter of the Sunfucker. Once the drums kick in around the midpoint, it’s all too easy to get swept along with its incessant rhythmic groove. If Gira were at the head of a sun-worshipping cult, this would be the track he’d deploy to brainwash new disciples.

Elsewhere things are lighter in tone if not in theme. It’s Coming, It’s Real is essentially a spiritual, complete with a host of backing vocals that take the whole thing to church as Gira encourages us to face the inevitable. This is followed by Some New Things which could feasibly have been written by The Rolling Stones, were they ever lost in a desert in the midst of a feral drug haze.

Amnesia is a quiet acoustic number which, on the surface, appears to be gentle and introspective, but is packed with harrowing imagery and warnings of climate disaster. There are hints of Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western influences too, which adds to its sweeping cinematic quality. And it’s this sense of widescreen epicness that perhaps personifies Leaving Meaning. Even in its quietest moments, it is an album that feels positively huge. Gira understands how to use space and how to allow songs to breathe effectively. The result is an album that often manages to sound claustrophobic whilst feeling wide open. Cathedrals Of Heaven is a perfect example of this, with the musical accompaniment being barely there, but Gira’s droning vocals bring real dread to the table. Whilst asking “who made us like this?” he throws imagery of blackened tongues, terrible infections, and folded-back skin into the mix.

Sonically, Swans might well be different this time around, but some things never change. Gira’s ability to look at the world and show us how terrifying it is continues to reap rewards. It might not throughout be what we’ve come to expect from Swans, but it is decidedly relevant.

Spotlight Report leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:30:00-05:00

https://spotlightreport.net/music/swans-leaving-meaning-review

Swans ‘Leaving Meaning’ Review

Ladyfingers

The announcement of a new Swans album always raises the question: “What’s Michael Gira up to this time?” Even if you’re able to hear the acoustic sketches of the songs he provides on his limited edition fundraising albums, it’s unlikely you’ll have any idea what the finished product will sound like.

Leaving Meaning, Swans’ fifteenth album (not including their innumerable EPs, live albums, fundraisers, revised releases and the entire Angels of Light catalogue) is a surprisingly quiet evolution of the drones of The Glowing Man, and a return to an earlier lushness we haven’t heard from Gira in a while. The lushness in question derives from the massive supporting cast of musicians assembled for the project, including The Necks, a host of former Swans members and their companions from their other bands as well as people Gira summoned like Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, Ben Frost, Baby Dee and more besides.

Where the preceding trilogy of double albums The Seer, To Be Kind and The Glowing Man ratcheted up tension expertly with the promise that the band was about to explode into noise, Leaving Meaning employs a quieter sort of menace. The droning song structures of those albums remains, but his collaborators have changed the sound of the music into something both quieter and more vast.

Leading off with the ghostly, beautiful instrumental Hums, the first song proper is Annaline, a song previously appearing in skeletal form, but here taking shape into something cinematic, ready to join Untitled Love Song as one of the prettiest Gira ballads.

The Hanging Man returns to the menacing mantras of previous tracks like The Apostate, but is quickly counterbalanced by a re-imagining of 1992’s Amnesia. The weight and dynamics of the arrangement on Amnesia really have to be heard to be believed, with a simply-plucked verse that roars into an orchestra- and choir-backed recitation of the song’s title. The title track, Leaving Meaning, strongly features The Necks’ distinctive piano warbles, with Gira chanting quietly over a slowly modulating, ever-growing musical landscape. This mesmerising track is followed by one of album’s most aurally hostile, Sunfucker, which genuinely feels like the soundtrack to a ceremony that’s going end in a human sacrifice. Cathedrals of Heaven is a moonlight wander through a sinister desert, leading to one of the most striking tracks ever recorded by Gira: The Nub.

“I was playing this guitar part and, as is usually the case, I couldn’t come up with any fucking words and for some reason I thought of Baby Dee, who is a great cabaret kind of performer, and this image appeared in my mind of Dee in diapers floating in space and sucking on the stars for milk. And so the song just wrote itself and then I contacted her and she was delighted with the imagery and she agreed to sing it.” said Gira when I spoke to him. Deposing The Seer‘s Lunacy as the witchiest track the band’s ever put on a record, The Nub‘s atmosphere is so vivid it deserves to be the subject of a short-film.

It’s Coming, It’s Real is the obvious easy entry point to the album, but no less for it. If you’ve always enjoyed Gira’s “country” tracks, this is one of the best. Some New Things is a droning shamble of a song that doesn’t really stand on its own, but when the uncharacteristically optimistic (for Swans) What Is This starts playing, you’ll be glad you persevered. Finishing the album on My Phantom Limb, a piece beginning with a barrage of spoken-word hectoring climaxing in a tympani-driven chorus that sounds both happy and murderous.

A comedown, but not a letdown, from the last three explosive albums, Leaving Meaning is sure to worm its way into your Swans playlists. A partial return to the sonics of earlier records, it’s too sinister for many ears, but utterly rewarding for those with the fortitude.

Tinnitist leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:27:00-05:00

https://tinnitist.com/2019/10/26/swans-leaving-meaning/

Swans | Leaving Meaning

Michael Gira and his super-sized crew gaze into the abyss once more.

Darryl Sterdan

WHO ARE THEY? Singer-guitarist, founder, frontman, chief songwriter, sole permanent member and mostly benevolent dictator Michael Gira — along with the latest super-sized incarnation of his ever-changing experimental ensemble from New York City.

WHAT IS THIS? Swans’ 15th studio offering and fifth release since reuniting in 2010 following a 13-year hiatus, the two-disc Leaving Meaning continues Gira and co.’s sonic and stylistic evolution — while retaining the essential darkness and danger that have always been the hallmarks and trademarks of their subversive sound.

WHAT DOES IT SOUND LIKE? Staring into the bottomless abyss. Or perhaps drowning in quicksand. Anchored by hypnotic circular grooves, fashioned and fuelled by droning soundscapes and topped with Gira’s doom-laced lyrics, stark chants and relentlessly intense delivery, these post-rock monuments reach up from the depths, grab you by the throat and slowly but surely pull you down into their beautifully bleak netherworld. Consider yourself warned.

WHAT SHOULD IT BE TITLED? No title could possibly match the blackness of Gira’s worldview.

HOW SHOULD I LISTEN TO IT? While curled up in the fetal position in the closet at midnight after a traumatic personal loss of some sort.

WHAT 10 WORDS DESCRIBE IT? Apocalyptic, grim, gloomy, treacherous, dissonant, abrasive, confrontational, uncompromising, challenging, atmospheric.

WHAT ARE THE BEST SONGS? The brutal Hanging Man; the bad trip of the title track; the slowburning and irradiated Sunfucker; the haunting and haunted cacophony of The Nub, one of few cuts featuring Australian avant-garde jazz trio The Necks.

WHAT WILL MY FRIENDS SAY? ‘I never realized just listening to an album could be as physically and psychically draining as this is. When can we hear it again?’

HOW OFTEN WILL I LISTEN TO THIS? You’ll be back. You won’t be able to help yourself. You know you want it.

IF THIS ALBUM WERE A MEDICAL CONDITION, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Paranoid schizophrenia coupled with a messiah complex.

SHOULD I BUY, STREAM OR STEAL IT? It’s probably best just to give Gira whatever he wants and back away slowly.

Disposable Underground leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:25:01-05:00

https://disposableunderground.com/swans-are-back-with-new-album-leaving-meaning-review/

Swans are back with new album “Leaving Meaning”: review

Posted on November 7, 2019 by Editor

Michael Gira is back in town with a new Swans record. What’s different this time is Gira has a new cast of characters playing on the record, along with a few old-school Swans and Angels Of Light veterans that he brought back in after a long absence. Gira kindly detailed the list of musicians on and the mission of Leaving Meaning on the Young God Records website (where you can also order the record, but more on that below).

D.U. is partial to the tracks with more of an edge, which describes much of the record, like “The Hanging Man,” “Amnesia,” “Sunfucker,” “Cathedrals Of Heaven,” and “Some New Things.” Tracks that sounds out of place on this record are “It’s Coming It’s Real” and “What Is This,” which have sort of a pop-from-yesteryear feel. Still, besides that, current (as opposed to early) Swans fans should appreciate the expansive, delicate soundscapes, creepiness, and Gira’s twist on music in general found on Leaving Meaning. He has a way of writing with a structure that, while “repeats” from the last few records might not be the right way to say it, will be familiar.

Lyrically, it’s the surrealist, blunt expression that Swans fans are used to, with lines such as “I’m the avatar of your semen and I’m screaming” and “My tongue will turn black from tasting your spit” and “I am a dog, I eat the moon.”

Perhaps the best Swans record since the band reformed in 2010 is the second one, The Seer (of course that’s up for debate), but hear the new one for yourself. Decibel has the whole new record streaming as well as a Q&A with Gira. D.U. has been looking forward to hearing it. Bottom line is that if you like the direction Swans has been going in, Leaving Meaning is recommended.

Leaving Meaning is out now on Young God Records. You can get it on double vinyl or double CD with fancy packaging and digitally. At the former link there’s some photos and rehearsal footage.

No Rip Cord leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:24:00-05:00

https://www.noripcord.com/reviews/music/swans/leaving-meaning

Swans have had one of the most fascinating career arcs of any band in recent musical history. When I began mentally drafting out this review, I was struggling to think of contemporary artists in a position similar to frontman Michael Gira and his Company’s current state of affairs—I couldn’t come up with any substantial comparisons. Because at this point in time, they’ve almost seamlessly shape-shifted: from capital-B Brutal no-wave/noise rock in the early 1980s (Filth, Cop); to gothic psychedelia and neofolk around the turn of the ‘90s (White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, Love of Life); to hypnotic experimental rock and post-rock before the new millennium (The Great Annihilator, Soundtracks for the Blind). Fast-forwarded thirteen years after their dissolution in 1997 and freshly reformed with new members serving Gira’s vision, Swans fearlessly and peerlessly picked up from where they left off in 2010, building sonic skyscrapers of challenging, cinematic, breathtaking, boundless, bleak, blood-pumping, heartfelt, and undeniably demanding, but eternally rewarding, music.

This resurgence for the band, which launched with the release of My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, has paid dividends, both in terms of their artistic legacy and their success as a group, resulting in some of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s. I will say that my personal introduction to Swans was 2012’s The Seer, a watershed album that for me, upon first listen, left my mind reeling: “Wait, music can sound like this?”; “This song is half an hour but it doesn’t feel that long!”; “How the hell did they pull that off?” Then, of course, came the equally masterful To Be Kind in 2014, which more than matched my sky-high expectations set by the previous album; if you catch me on the right day, I might just say that Kind is better than The Seer. And I’d be remiss not to mention 2016’s The Glowing Man, a terrific, albeit slightly more patience-testing (even for Swans), album that even further cemented the group’s place as the premier experimental rock band of the ‘10s.

So we arrive at Leaving Meaning (stylized: leaving meaning.), Swans’ most recent installment in this fresh line of boundary-shoving, brain-frying, feature-film-length albums. Though it was recorded with a “dynamic lineup,” with both past and present members of Swans--and loads of guest musicians--contributing instrumentation behind Gira (eternally at the helm), it marked yet another shift in the band’s makeup. No listener is going to mistake this new album for anything but another 2010s Swans album. And it’s a great one with which to close out this turbulent decade.

First order of business: how does Leaving Meaning stack up against the previous several albums? For one, it places a much heavier emphasis on balladry and atmosphere. Compared to the nightmarish, in-your-face tone of The Seer’s Mother of the World, To Be Kind’s She Loves Us, or even The Glowing Man’s mammoth title track, much of Leaving comes off as hazier and more flaccid, though not necessarily for the worse. Even the longer, more groove-oriented tracks like Hanging Man, Sunfucker, and Some New Things sound noticeably murky and misty, like Swans filtered their usual abrasive, plodding brand of experimental rock through an ambient, free jazz lens. And sure enough, when I went to check this album’s list of featured artists, three prominent guests were none other than Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck, and Lloyd Swanton of Australian avant-garde jazz outlet The Necks. Their presence on Leaving’s title track and The Nub completely shift the sonic dynamic of those songs—and, in a way, the album as a whole, from terrifying to (slightly more) inviting.

It’s impossible to deny that this new LP is less caustic than their last four albums, which raises a question that I dare ask in hopes that no one reading this takes offense: did Swans get tired? After three decades of making absurdly extreme music, have they accepted the joy and peace in fizzling out, in letting your music dissolve into a sea of smoke? Because after spending time with Leaving Meaning and letting it sit with me for as long as I reasonably could, I’ve come to the conclusion that Swans’ more reserved approach to their usual sound here doesn’t make it any less powerful or, well, meaningful. It’s still haunting, and it’s still beautiful. It’s like a soundtrack to exploring some abandoned, centuries-old mansion in the middle of a desert, now filled with ghosts, lost memories, and cobwebs weaved around expensive furniture.

31 October, 2019 - 22:42 — Jackson Glassey

WUOG leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:22:00-05:00

http://

wuog.org/index.php/2019/11/05/featured-album-review-swans-leaving-meaning/

FEATURED ALBUM REVIEW: SWANS – LEAVING MEANING

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

Spearheaded solely by frontman and cult-like leader Michael Gira, Swans have returned to destroy conventions and reinvent their sound once more. The industrial/experimental rock collective first emerged from the New York no wave scene in the early 80’s, and have since accounted for some of the most overtly brutal, horrifically intense, and cacophonous compositions in “rock” music throughout the past 4 decades. In true Swans fashion, Leaving Meaning breaks all the rules, and solidifies that the words “Michael Gira” and “boring” will never be used in the same sentence.

Leaving Meaning marks a new chapter for Swans. Exiting a decade that brought a behemoth trilogy of albums, this newest project, which marks the groups fifteenth studio album, feels like an epilogue of sorts. Far more placid than the free-fall into chaos of The Seer or To Be Kind (two essential Swans listens), this 93 minute double LP is based primarily around unhurried structure and beautiful builds. This album is a marriage of sorts between the familiar, cavernous Swans sound and Gira’s acoustic folk group “Angels of Light”, and it creates a sound of atmospheric unease where percussions are shuffling in the background and guitars are gradually layered in scattered arrangements. In the middle of the ambiance, Gira’s vocal delivery is more often in the form of crooning chants or spoken word verses that assist in molding the Gothic-Folk soundscape creating a twisted mix of bright yet disturbing.

The narrative on this album focuses around numerous different themes – which all encompass the overall lyrical tone: leaving meaning. Gira, with the help of a rotating cast of musicians including The Necks, Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, Baby Dee and more, beckon us to ponder reality, our perception of existence, and the fate of the unknown. With deep philosophical undertones, the title of the album sums up the desired motifs perfectly: a corrupted selfhood, dismissing any connection to meaning or purpose at all. Despite a more tame delivery than previous works, Leaving Meaning is not an ‘easy’ listen by any means. This album is long (albeit not as long as previous 2+ hour LPs); it challenges the listener to pay attention and interact with the music. Tension is often left unresolved, never quite reaching the grand crescendo that made previous albums so monolithic. But in a way that is the charm of this record – it is much more subdued and mystic, layered with sonic, trance-like spells that inch their way into the ears.

The album starts with a brief instrumental opener, ‘Hum’, and the first real track, ‘Annaline’, begins to unfold the new direction and sound with a soft, transcendental crawl backed by crisp piano and floating guitar. From there, Swans waste no time putting the foot down the foot down to deliver one of the most powerful tracks on the record – ‘The Hanging Man’. A dissonant, primal groove carries this song across the near eleven minute runtime as Gira constructs the album’s motifs as he shouts: “I am not what I just thought!”. A dark, Southern Gothic ballad follows with ‘Amnesia’ and the powerful choral chants of the von Hausswolff sisters float above the cold lap steel guitar foundation.

The mesmeric title track is a ten minute repetitious lullaby that is an ambient and acoustic pit-stop before another highlight track of the album – ‘Sunfucker’. If there was any hint or callback to the most recent past works of Swans, this track would be it. It’s a ghostly concoction that begins with tribal like chants whose imagery paints a picture of a civilization commencing some sort of rite or ritualistic sacrifice. It thrums about but breaks into a pounding groove at the midpoint. It hammers in a way that doesn’t crush, maintaining the ‘softer’ and more reflective approach to this record. We then transition into a nightmare-ish ballad when arriving at ‘Cathedrals of Heaven’. It is a remarkably delicate track where musical layers get peeled back more and more with each listen.

‘The Nub’, the longest track on the album (but still pales in comparison to some of the more lengthy songs on the back catalog), is a tense blend of jazz elements, drone, and noise where bass and drums take lead role to create a hauntingly cold atmosphere supported by Baby Dee’s necrotic vocals. It builds to a chilling climax well worth the twelve minute wait. The first single, ‘It’s Coming It’s Real’ follows with its Southern twang and, dare I say, upbeat harmony. The tension continues as the instrumentals slowly erupt into a huge-sounding, spiraling chorus that emerges from the depths. ‘Some New Things’ and ‘What is This?’ are a pair of palate cleansers that employ more straightforward guitar work and repetitive structure. The latter of which is unrelentingly repetitive with cryptic lyrics reminiscent of 1995’s “The Great Annihilator”.

The closing track, ‘My Phantom Limb’ is the end all be all for this album and bookends a successful journey through the newest reiteration of Swans. This is by far my favorite cut on the record – a dark, schizophrenic shift reminds everyone of exactly who they are listening to, and it demands attention. The rhythm section stalks through the night; the percussion pounds at each pulse; the strange and disturbing vocals clash between layers. This track offers the most brutal moments on the album, and is faintly reminiscent of “Filth” and “Cop/Young God” era Swans with the industrial and bludgeoning pace that churns along every beat, but still maintains the ethereal feel of the album.

Leaving Meaning is a beautifully haunting, atmospheric triumph both in content and execution. In their earnest and chilling spirit, Swans have closed 2019 proving they are still a seismic force to be reckoned with – something few bands are capable of (let alone after nearly 4 decades). Leaving Meaning is one of this year’s most ambitious undertakings and is an essential listen for old and new Swans fans alike.

– Calvin Childress

Tufts Daily leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:21:00-05:00

https://tuftsdaily.com/arts/2019/11/12/sinister-beauty-swans-leaving-meaning/

The sinister beauty of Swans’ ‘leaving meaning.’

NICHOLAS DARELL AND GEOFF TOBIA JR.

November 12, 2019

Across all mediums, effective art shares the ability to encapsulate and challenge our perceptions of what it means to be alive. Music is no exception: It is a universal language, and a constantly evolving reflection of the human condition. Plenty of artists create music that we can relate to, but few tackle the task of communicating ideas with the jaw-clenching rigor of Michael Gira and his musical project, Swans. Since 1982, Swans has ambitiously paved a winding route, cutting right through the center of music itself. Swans has developed 15 studio albums, especially since its reunion in 2010, but the mission and means of achievement have remained singular. On “leaving meaning.” (2019), Swans continues to use music nimbly as a tool of delight and horror in equal measure. This album is by turns euphoric and frustrating, but rarely ever boring.

If “leaving meaning.” feels like a sprawling epic of a recording project, that’s because it is. It is a double album, with several songs exceeding the ten-minute mark and a runtime of about 90 minutes (modest by Swans standards). The wildly unpredictable tracklist of “leaving meaning.” creates a listening experience that lives and breathes, and Gira has no problem reaching into your headphones to rattle you out of complacency. Following up the atmospheric and beautiful “Annaline” with the hypnotizing guitar riffs and bone-rattling drum arrangement on “The Hanging Man” seems to make little sense but simultaneously succeeds in keeping the listener in the swirling vortex of Swans’ music. Gira’s display of genius on this album is undoubtable, finding the perfect balance between beauty and malice.

A diverse sonic palette is brought to life by various guest contributions from new and old faces. Neoclassical darkwave composer Anna von Hausswolff and her sister Maria von Hausswolff provide chilling, atmospheric background vocals on tracks such as “It’s Coming It’s Real.” Singer-songwriter Baby Dee contributes haunting choral vocals and Australian experimental jazz group The Necks lays down an instrumental to help create the chilling cut “The Nub.” In terms of returning artists, previous Swans members such as Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica give instrumental help throughout the album, and Gira’s wife Jennifer sings on “Sunfucker.” The listener gets the sense that Gira chose these musicians to execute a vision he knew to be beyond personal reach, and it is an experiment that pays off in spades. Of course, relentless experimentation is what has defined Swans since their creation decades ago.

Both musically and thematically, “leaving meaning.“ is concerned with the idea of letting go. More specifically, lyrics like “A word is a thought / And a thought is a box” from “Annaline” refer to the futility of dwelling on our own thoughts — time better spent living in the moment. The album delivers to listeners an intimidatingly broad set of ideas, executed through a wide range of instrumental approaches. We see lush and low-key guitars on songs like “Amnesia,” which only amplify Gira’s visceral lyrics like “Our hands are two broken claws / We scrape at the ground for hours.” Sinister string arrangements are riddled throughout the record and highlighted on songs like “What is This?” Even instruments like sleigh bells and hammered dulcimer creep their way into tracks at perfect moments to increase the sense of tension or unease that won’t let up. This common thread proves critical to achieving the deep emotional weight that “leaving meaning.“ pursues.

It is decidedly difficult to generate criticism for a band that feels completely severed from popular music standards. It’s also worth noting that the long length of some tracks on “leaving meaning.” will make the record appear inaccessible to large audiences. Gira allows his songs to occupy space and instrumentally bloom to often hypnotic effect, but this approach will not resonate with everybody. In order to fully appreciate its creative vision, Swans asks for your patience. You must test your own mental endurance to listen to the entire album, but the work almost always pays off. While not quite as gratifying as the band’s recent trilogy of albums — “The Seer” (2012), “To Be Kind” (2014) and “The Glowing Man” (2016) — “leaving meaning.” highlights Swans’ incredible attention to detail and ability to create a musical ambience like no other. If you are open to joining Swans on a climb through beauty and brutality, you’ll find “leaving meaning.” to be an extraordinarily rewarding journey.

Aural Aggravation leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:11:00-05:00

https://auralaggravation.com/2019/09/26/swans-leaving-meaning/

Young God / Mute 25th October 2019

Christopher Nosnibor

On receipt of the new Swans album, I posted on Facebook that I was ‘too excited to download it.’ This wasn’t sarcasm or bathos. The arrival of a new Swans album is always an event of no small magnitude, and with a certain sense of duty to deliver a review of a band I’ve revered my entire adult life comes a certain weight of responsibility to do justice. Swans have always been more than merely a band, standing as a sonic entity with almost infinite capacity to overwhelm. And they haven’t lost that.

Their last three studio albums, The Seer (2012), To Be Kind (2014) and The Glowing Man (2016) redefined epic and over their course took extended improvisational forms to a logical conclusion, each with a duration in the region of two hours.

Given the tone of Michael Gira’s statement about the end of the iteration of the band who produced these albums, Leaving Meaning brings two substantial surprises, the first being that many of the personnel from the previous incarnation remain present, and the second being the speed of its arrival. Kristof Hahn remains in the latest lineup, which also features eternal mainstay Norman Westberg – arguably as integral to the band as Gira himself – albeit only on some tracks, and Thor Harris, Phil Puleo, and Christopher Pravdica. They’re joined by an immense cast of contributors including The Necks, Baby Dee, Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, and Larry Mullins.

Leaving Meaning sees Gira take a slightly different and more openly collaborative approach to the realisation of his ideas, and it’s a more concise record in comparison to its predecessors. It’s all relative, of course, but in context, ninety-three minutes is concise.

Because of its sheer enormity, Leaving Meaning isn’t an album it’s entirely appropriate to dissect, and it’s constructed in such a way that it is very much best experienced as an album rather than dipped into. That means its effect is optimal when experienced in a single session, but that also means – as was the case to an even greater extent with its predecessors – that it requires a significant commitment of time in a time-pressured world. But then, Swans’ music has the capacity to lift the listener out of time and into another zone altogether.

The longer tracks are considerably shorter than even most off the shorter tracks on the last three albums, with the twelve-minute ‘The Nub’ being the album’s longest track.

Intro segment ‘Hums’ is appropriately-titled, consisting of just two minutes of cascading, hovering drones interwoven for create a soft ambience. ‘The Hanging Man’ revisits the nagging, dizzying cyclical bass motifs of numerous extended workouts from the last trilogy, and grinds it out for ten minutes. Anyone who’s familiar with the band’s extensive back-catalogue will be aware that this style of composition harks back to the band’s dawning and has remained a trademark of theirs, as well as Gira’s solo work. Paired with Gira’s vocal delivery, which switches from a monotone drone to a maniacal holler of elongated vowels and jabbering ululations and monosyllabic barks and yelps, it’s vintage Swans that threatens a climax around the mid-point but saves the real intensity for the finish. It’s less about volume than plain, bludgeoning repetition.

‘Amnesia’ is not the same ‘Amnesia’ as on 1992’s Love of Life. Perhaps Gira’s forgotten about it. It is, however, a brooding acoustic-led folk song. At heart. One of the things that constitutes a significant point of departure on Leaving Meaning is the return to sparser structures: gone are the immense sustained crescendos and pulverising explosions of discordant noise. There’s an altogether more mellow feel about Leaving Meaning. That said, there are orchestral and choral surges which punctuate both here and elsewhere.

‘Sunfucker’ is another classic Swans composition built around endless repetition, and with its backing vocal chants serves as an apocalyptic counterpart to ‘I Am the Sun’ from The Great Annihilator. Tapering off to drones in the mid-section, it suddenly explodes into a stomping glam bash. It’s bewildering, unexpected, everything all at once and probably the most daring and adventurous thing Swans have recorded in their entire career.

‘The Nub’ is gloomily funeral. Ethereal, haunting, but ultimately bleak in mood; ‘Some New Things’ is mantric, looping, hypnotic, while ‘My Phantom Limb’, one of the album’s standouts, has stronger echoes of Greed-era’s tortured pounding. It sits at odds with the rest of the album, but then so much of the album sits at odds with itself it feels right in a perverse way.

So what do we take from this? More or less what we’ve take from Swans over the last thirty years: with their ever-shifting parameters but constant core focus and the creative vision of Michael Gira always the driving force, Swans never cease to evolve, but never cease to be Swans, and are immediately identifiable as Swans, however far out they go.

Riot Material leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:11:00-05:00

https://www.riotmaterial.com/swans-leaving-meaning/

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

OCTOBER 11, 2019 BY JOHN PAYNE

Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which he formed Angels of Light, Gira re-formed Swans in 2010 and proceeded to release a series of exceedingly, brutally beautiful double-CDs of mental mayhem-catharsis.

The new Leaving Meaning, as the title might indicate, is a study in ambiguity and its cousin obliqueness, while not quite touching on ambivalence. To achieve the album’s sonically spectacular sagas, Gira drew upon several excellent “other music”-type players and thinkers, “selected,” he says, “for both their musical and personal character.” Participants include past Swans mates Kristof Hahn (guitars, vocals, mixes) and drummer/Mellotron-ist Larry Mullin (a.k.a. Toby Dammit, ex-Silver Apples, Residents and currently Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds keyboardist); Thor Harris on percussion, trumpet, clarinet, sounds, bells, vibes; electronics wiz Ben Frost; Anna and Maria von Hausswolff on choral backing vocals, and the incredible neo-cabaret singer-pianist Baby Dee.

Well, it’s expressionist, maybe. Leaving’s songs are only songs per se, the majority of them structured as repeated verses, without a traditional chorus or bridge, etc. The verses can be confessions, which become incantations via much repetition. The often Gregorian or Tibetan chantlike pieces are mostly long-ass things that build and build, accumulating volume and density, or bursting out in explosive surprises, like revelations. Gira flirts with boredom or irritation, but it says a lot about his and his players’ imaginative choices of tonalities and especially their judicious mixing that the resulting sonorities really are mesmerizing, not hectoring and tedious. In the best new music, after all, to create a third entity is the idea: 1+1= 3. Throughout the album, Gira and co. employ their many streams of sound to equate with any “meaning” to the songs at all. The basic gambit is to mix tonalities so that they confer and clash with other tonalities, creating overtones, microtones and such in the process.

While the brief opening track, “Hums,” is a morning glow / toward-radiance place, its shimmering, flickering multi-guitars and electronic drone feel misleading, like things can’t be this simple. The floating tenderness of “Annaline” (the Velvets’ “Sunday Morning” redux) follows with more of this shimmer of guitar/piano twinkle/strings. Gira croons in a space of mellow gold redemption, where he has stripped down for a cleansing. Everything on these opening tracks feels post-something, post-trauma of existence. There’s a creeping tension stretched to snapping in “The Hanging Man,” which at almost 11 minutes long is a cinematic epic of mass, density and intensity. Circular eighth-note string strums suggest forward motion (inevitability) as chugging, clip-clopping toms pound like Gira’s heartbeat. He snarl-sings “I am the hanging man!” in that sardonic, theatrical tone of his. And he’s not remorseless. This hangman is condemned to endlessly loop choice / no choice, i.e., What was it that made him the hanging man? Flies and crows and impassive faces fry in the sun. “I am –” “I am not!” “We are not!” Snare rimshots like a guillotine…

The Jodorowsky-like atmosphere of this buzzard chant is so visual, circles circling circles of orange/yellow/brown/beige/black/red. And Gira’s core belief/disbelief can’t possibly be in your imagination. “Sunfucker” at 10 mins. 43 secs is a drone of looped organ and clanging church bell and chorus vocals: Its chant of “the rainbow” over and over inevitably grafts onto his query, “Why am I on the cusp?” and descends to, whatever, “I worship sunfucker” again and again and again. He and the song plod forward, swelling, linear to the point of madness. While the overall sonic and lyrical austerity itself suggests semi-suppressed violence, methinks it’s the sound itself that leads Gira forward on, determines his words and their possible intent. The album’s intriguingly orchestrated settings’ main instrument is vast spheres of empty space that can inflict a useful sort of claustrophobia. He’s painting with shards of sound, forging oblique and deeply resonant harmonic effects along the way. Starfalls of celeste, guitar/other swells/saws the size of ocean liners, slow waves of double bass, rolling snare, piano tinkle, sustained spectral chords: rolling thunder, imminent danger.

Along with “The Nub,” with guest collaboration by Australia’s superb the Necks, tracks such as “Amnesia” posit that post-something/I am a ghost sensation amid gentle acoustic guitars in repetitive figures, drifting along at an easy pace. Boom! It breaks into gargantuan multi-instrumental waves of rolling tympani, chorus and sundry other stuff. Great obscure textures, and not exactly gloomy or forbidding – resonantly oblique is more like it. “Some New Things” offers Gira’s white boy punky vocal lead over looped riff drums and other kinda-rock sounds to give us a bit of good groove, as if to recall another kind of Earthboundness.

Swans delineate a time and place, right-brained ones that synthesize over space, don’t analyze through time, despite the music’s severe linearity. Leaving Meaning is a reverbed hall of mirrors, or it’s a gathering around firelight flickering on crepuscular, summoning faces. Somewhere in the midst of all this, Gira says, “I’m naked and drifting,” “Who made us like this?” “How much time is left?” We too might have perceived the difference between terror and strangeness, or the connection: It’s whatever you want it to be.

mxdwn leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:06:00-05:00

https://music.mxdwn.com/2019/10/31/reviews/swans-leaving-meaning/

Swans – Leaving Meaning

DREW PITT OCTOBER 31ST, 2019 - 9:00 AM

A New Era Begins

Few bands have garnered the legacy, impact and critical acclaim that Swans have over nearly forty years. Even fewer have managed to consistently create intrigue with their releases over such an extended period of time. Where many are content to stay in their lane with a few shifts here and there, Swans have changed from No-Wave to Post-Rock and finally into something entirely unique. Their fourth album, Leaving Meaning, pushes them further along their own direction, while not greatly expanding on the ideas before. Instead, it rolls the emotions of those massive projects that preceded it into a closer, more intimate experiment.

Kicking off this journey is the one-two punch of “Hums” and “Annaline.” These two tracks don’t go very far to separate themselves, with “Hums” largely serving as an introduction to “Annaline,” but they do go a long way towards setting up the tone of the record. Both tracks are brighter and more lovely than nearly any Swans track of the past ten years, but there is an undertone of darkness. Something in the way the notes drone beneath the twinkling guitars, and the way Michael Gira drawls out the lyrics is ever so slightly unsettling.

The bulk of the record, which begins with “The Hanging Man,” is more reminiscent of records like The Glowing Man and To Be Kind. It centers around repetition and is noticeably darker than the previous two tracks. However, unlike its contemporaries from the aforementioned records, it refuses to build to a breaking point. Songs like “Just a Little Boy” or “Bring The Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture” would reach a maddening crescendo, and while “The Hanging Man” rises, it is more content to wallow in its darkness and craft an inescapable, sludgy atmosphere.

This continues over the next few songs, all of which are wonderful, but they lead into the insurmountable “Sunfucker,” which lords over the rest of the album as its absolute pinnacle. It relies on the same repetition as most tracks on the record, but it culminates in a delicious droning crescendo towards the center of the track. The crescendo breaks into a bouncing, rock section that carries the song towards its conclusion, but the excellent use of repetition and the varied layers set this track apart from the rest of the record.

Closing the record are two of the best Swans tracks in recent memory, “What is This” and “My Phantom Limb.” “What is This” is the biggest outlier on this record. It is a delightful, uplifting track, which is an unexpected turn for Swans, but they craft a lovely, dreamy atmosphere to wind down the record. Of course, they can’t leave you on too high of a note. It’s difficult to understand why “My Phantom Limb” closes out the record instead of “What is This,” considering the latter has a more powerful tonal shift. But, “My Phantom Limb” has the most to say of maybe any track on the record. With passages like “If there’s cancer in your blood/ it works its way through me too/ we’re all the same,” it’s clear that the track is focused on the interconnectedness of humanity, which does make for a fitting outro statement. But it’s still difficult to ignore the choice to end on this track, which results in the only notable misstep on Leaving Meaning.

Brainwashed leaving meaning. Review

2019-12-19T16:05:01-05:00

http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12182:swans-qleaving-meaningq&catid=13:albums-and-singles&Itemid=133

Swans, "Leaving Meaning"

Sunday, 27 October 2019 17:33 Creaig Dunton

Michael Gira may have announced that Leaving Meaning would feature Swans continuing in a different form after closing the book on The Glowing Man in 2016. The change has been comparably more subtle than the stylistic shifts of the band throughout their nearly 40 year career, but the progress is distinct. This record draws not only from the recent albums, but also Gira's work with the interim Angels of Light project as well. The album is the perfect blend of the past and the recent, but looks direction to the future as well.

Young God Records

The most significant difference between this album and the recent Swans catalogue is essentially Gira dialing back the intensity both in arrangements and performance. This is abundantly clear on a song such as "Annaline": shimmering accents drift above sparse piano and acoustic guitar, with Gira's vocals front and center. The sound is rather consistent with what he was doing with The Angels of Light in the early part of the 2000s: stripped down folk-y ballads with an experimental undercurrent throughout. On "What is This?," Swans go a bit further, melding those folk elements into an almost 1960s pop number that is brilliant, and somewhat out of character.

The folk sound should not come as a surprise, because many of the band members from Angels of Light are present. The core band here is Kristof Hahn on guitars (a member of Angels of Light as well as recent Swans), drummer Larry Mullins, who played with Angels of Light, and bassist/keyboardist Yoyo Roehm. There are also a significant number of guest appearances, and while this is nothing new for a Swans record, the list is particularly expansive. Most notably is a slew of Angels of Light and Swans collaborators: Thor Harris, Christopher Pravdica, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Paul Wallfisch, and Norman Westberg, who still contributes some guitar. Both Anna and Maria von Hausswolff supply choral vocals, and “The Nub” is a completely different line-up, featuring The Necks and Baby Dee on vocals.

Structure and composition is another point where Leaving Meaning departs from the recent works. For one, a quick scan of the song lengths show that Gira has reined things in a bit compared to The Glowing Man. There are no near-half hour songs here, and the longest ones max out around 12 minutes. This change also impacts the song structures themselves. I likened the other recent albums to a rock take on Hermann Nitsch's compositions: long, extended periods of repetition culminating is pummeling, intense outbursts of sound.

The repetition is still all over this album, but here in the more restrained context it feels more pleasantly hypnotic than tension building. At times it seems like Gira is intentionally toying with expectations of this. The reworking of "Amnesia" from 1992's Love of Life transforms the song from its original vaguely goth rock/industrial sound into an acoustic ballad. There is a symphonic build just before the chorus, but extremely short lived and quickly falls away, never giving the visceral relief it hints at.

At other times, the line between the other recent material is a bit more direct. "The Hanging Man" has that oddly funky, blues lurch and mechanical repetition so prominent on The Glowing Man and The Seer, but the intensity held back a bit, even when Gira goes into full "speaking-in-tongues" mode. The same style permeates "Some New Things," which is a hypnotically repeating but conventionally rock sounding piece. "Sunfucker" is another song that calls back to the last few albums, but with the von Hausswolff's choral backing vocals and Gira's layered chanting vocal delivery, the feel starts to drift into snake handling religious revival territory.

Given the relatively short time between Michael Gira's announcement of the reconfiguration of Swans and this newest release, it is not surprising that the sound is not too far removed from the sprawling trilogy of the most recent albums (The Seer, To Be Kind, The Glowing Man). The shift may not be as drastic as it was transitioning from Children of God to The Burning World, or Soundtracks for the Blind into My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, but it is clear that Gira does not want to fall into a creative rut. Those recent records were great, but to have stylistically followed the same trend into a fourth double album would have been a bit too much. Leaving Meaning manages to brilliantly retain the sound, but change things around to make it sound familiar, yet entirely new and revitalized and thankfully seems to hint at more to come.

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