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Swans | Die Tür Ist Zu / Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
Your Flesh #35
perhaps their most seductively accommodating music
"Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily; being extinguished. Not as a function of a death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition. ...the refrain itself is the content of music. The refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it.... Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.Yet again, SWANS brilliantly isolate the element of music which is its limiting factor—the refrain. Taking repetition to its extreme aberration, music ceases to represent a "song" and becomes dissipated fragments. Here, perhaps their most seductively accommodating music, SWANS close the door on their long-running project to shatter musical forms. And far from exhibiting the "brutal antipathy" most writers seem to associate with their music, SWANS are a celebration of life to the point of annihilation.