more collected swans press quotes

colder than a witch's tit

Ben Ratliff/Sunday New York Times 9/5


I SAW just a little bit of a Swans show in 1983, in their early days, during their period of slow-but-alert, theater-of-cruelty music. If I remember right, I had come to CBGB to hear Heart Attack, the fastest punk band I knew, and after that the tempos plunged. Sonic Youth played next: lots of strange tunings, innocently curious. Then came Swans, with violent songs that sounded as if they were barely moving.
Did they have one or two guitars then? One or two drummers? Certainly there was the tall singer Michael Gira, heaving out his nasty mottos. They might have played “Weakling” (“I don’t feel pain/I never escape/I’m under the bed/I’m licking the floor”). Or “Big Strong Boss” (“Blood runs black/Cut my throat/Kill me snake/Do what I say”). But I don’t know. I was 15, and this music didn’t seem to come from music. Maybe from literature, maybe from visual art. My ears hurt, and the whole thing seemed to require thought. As many did in those days when faced with Swans, I left early.
“Thought?” Mr. Gira asked me recently. “Really? My hope was that you’d just open up, and you’d be fine. It’s like reading Beckett. If you start thinking too much, you’ll never read it. You have to just let it flow through you and accept it.”
We were at a house in the Catskills, near his home. A friend of his had offered us a quiet living room, so that Mr. Gira, now 56, could talk about why he has re-formed the group, or at least revived its name, for an 18-month tour starting this month, as well as discuss “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” a forthcoming album that feels unusual for what could be called a reunion. (Mr. Gira, emphatically, rejects that characterization.) The record is partly an index of currents within Swans’ music over its 15-year history, from gnashing sound sculptures to serene art songs. And, partly, it’s a whole new equation.
Mr. Gira sat for 90 minutes, intense and polite, holding an unlighted cigar in his right hand. (He quit smoking a year ago.) He spoke rapidly, full of strong pronouncements; when challenged, he first responded vehemently, then laughed at himself.
Mr. Gira (pronounced jhee-RAH) ran Swans from 1982 to 1997. The band was the Miles Davis of postpunk: it changed its sound often and unrepentantly, moving away from its early minimal-brutal work toward the lush, ambient and even acoustic. (The last stand of their negative phase was a live recording from 1986 called “Public Castration Is a Good Idea,” one of the darkest records ever.) Mr. Gira stopped barking and moved toward a style of singing occasionally resembling Johnny Cash’s; he started collaborating with the singer Jarboe, his partner at the time, who had a fuller, more disciplined voice, a female balance to his.
At their peak Swans could fill Irving Plaza — a 1,100-capacity hall — and sell 20,000 copies of a record. But in their afterlife, as Mr. Gira has made a steady stream of records with his new project, Angels of Light, the old group’s reputation has persisted and expanded, here and around the world. Not long ago Mr. Gira played one of his solo shows in Russia — these are simple events in which he sings in his planing baritone and strums acoustic-guitar chords with his thumb — and 2,000 people showed up.
He has become a folk hero, essentially, to a coalition of musicians from indie-rock to grindcore to electronic composition, from million-selling bands to metal and the art-pop underground. Tool, Neurosis, Big Black, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Godflesh, Xiu Xiu, Battles — bands and musicians to whom power relationships and confrontation in sound verge on philosophy or religion. Perhaps the spectrum is so wide because Mr. Gira isn’t part of any particular musical tradition. Literary, artistic, maybe. Musical, not so much.
By his own account, for Swans’ 15 years Mr. Gira worked hard and burned bridges. “I was negatively networking, going around the country making enemies,” he said.
He remains unsentimental but kindly. A few years ago he told an Italian magazine, “Thank God I am no longer me.”
Here and there “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky” could be another Angels of Light album — there is the new calmness, the new transcendence in his music, and even the love song “Little Mouth” for his wife, Siobhan Duffy — except for a few elements. One is the drumming. On “No Words/No Thoughts,” the album’s first track, you hear the kind of slow, slammed, wobbly pattern that was all over early Swans. The group’s original drummer, Jonathan Kane, played in blues bands as a teenager; he told me that he and Mr. Gira loved the emptied-out, half-time shuffle from Howlin’ Wolf’s song “Evil.”
And here or there, the words on the new Swans album sound as if they were lifted from an earlier phase of his life, especially in “My Birth”:
Then I strangled your neck, because I love you too much.
Then I kissed your red mouth, because I love you to death.
Not surprisingly, those lyrics were written for Swans, around 1997, but left unused. Mr. Gira said he wanted to make lyrics that were impenetrable, like slogans or chunks of physical matter. “It wasn’t meant to convey a message,” he said. “It wasn’t meant to be about me.” More quietly, he added, “In retrospect I can see that it totally was.”
Mr. Gira had a bad adolescence in Southern California and Europe: an alcoholic mother, a businessman father who couldn’t contain his son’s self-destruction. He completed two years of high school and then dropped out, working in construction. By the time he turned 16, he had spent time in jail, in Jerusalem, for selling drugs. Returning to Los Angeles, he earned his equivalency diploma and enrolled at what is now the Otis College of Art and Design. He played in a punk band but aspired to be a visual artist, fascinated by Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden and various kinds of Middle European severity: Egon Schiele, Joseph Beuys, and the Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch, who brought his Dionysian multimedia happening, the “Theater of Orgies and Mysteries,” to Venice, Calif., in 1978.
He moved to New York in 1979, and a few years later he met Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth. (He had met that band’s bassist, Kim Gordon, in art school.)
“I played him ‘Confusion Is Sex,’ which we’d just finished,” Mr. Moore said in a telephone interview, speaking of Sonic Youth’s first LP. “And he played us Swans’ first record. And we were like, O.K., we belong together. Neither of us felt too much affinity toward any other contemporary bands.”
Though Swans and Sonic Youth are now linked in that New York, post-No Wave moment, Mr. Gira said the two bands had little to do with each other musically. And though he credited some West Coast punk, he couldn’t relate to the hardcore scene in New York at all. Hardcore, he said, was a “namby-pamby” genre. “It was just a way for people to belong,” he said. “And that’s the last thing I think people should do.”
For 11 years Mr. Gira lived in a rear-storefront apartment with one window in the East Village, where Sonic Youth and Swans both rehearsed. For a few years they shared bills, at CBGB and the Sin Club. They toured the South and Midwest, to small and vanishing audiences. Back then Mr. Gira performed with a noose hanging above and just in front of his head. “I’d throw my body on the stage, get up, throw my body on the monitors, break my ribs, and I didn’t feel it,” he said. “It was like making the world into a whirlpool, lifting you up. It was exceptionally wonderful. It wasn’t negative in the least.”
To a disbelieving look, he added: “I guess in the lyrics it might have been a touch negative. But it went with the time.”
Mr. Moore recalled: “We spent a lot of time together. He was completely opinionated and negative about things, but also very generous and respectful. I think, because his family history was somewhat problematic, he wanted to hold on to being wise and educated and smart, and he took offense at anybody who would play dumb, or dumb themselves down, or settle for what they were offered.”
When Swans finally penetrated Europe, the British media wrote excited reviews about how Swans were the loudest band in the world. This revolted Mr. Gira. “I got so tired of people walking out on me,” he said. “In ’84, ’85, we did some shows in Europe where we’d turn out the lights and lock the doors and play. Like, just take it.” At the same time he said it depressed him to see “lunkhead metal kids” in the audience — the kind of kids, perhaps, who might have been conditioned to just take it, and like it.
But wasn’t there a macho element in Swans? “No,” Mr. Gira said. “There might have been a manly element. But not a rooster thing.”
The last Swans tour was conceived as such, and the live album resulting from it was “Swans Are Dead.” Mr. Gira runs Young God Records, a one-man operation that has released 43 albums, including three by Devendra Banhart, the label’s breakout success. Mr. Gira threw himself into steady music making, his own and others. He moved to the Catskills four yours ago and has two children with Ms. Duffy; he has become a singer-songwriter, essentially, although one who claims to have no aptitude for writing narrative songs.
As late as 2006, when a journalist asked Mr. Gira, “Would you ever consider re-forming Swans?,” he replied: “Absolutely not, never. Dead and gone.” But he changed his mind. It was while on the road a few years ago with the band Akron/Family as his backing group that Mr. Gira felt something like a Swans feeling again.
“The songs got longer and louder, and we entered into this kind of swaying slave-ship rhythm, and I lost myself in it.” Swans, to him, is less a particular band of players than a physical experience: “being completely overwhelmed in sound,” as he put it.
The new six-piece version of Swans includes a few members from different incarnations of the band — the guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn and the drummer Phil Puleo — as well as the bassist Chris Pravdica and the percussionist Thor Harris, from other parts of Mr. Gira’s working life. (It does not include Jarboe, with whom Mr. Gira has not spoken in 10 years.)
The band will play in bigger halls than it ever did the first time around; its two New York shows are at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene on Oct. 8, and the next day at the Bowery Ballroom on the Lower East Side. It will even play a few rearranged older Swans songs: “Raping a Slave,” “Your Property,” “Beautiful Child.” “The harder things,” Mr. Gira said. “What I think of as the blues stuff.”
Mr. Gira is hoping his voice holds up during the tour. He has a more psychological concern as well. “I guess the hardest thing will be not to let the” — he tapped the table nervously — “destroyer aspect of myself take over, and make the audience into my victims.”
Ben Ratliff/Sunday New York Times 9/5


Sasha Frere Jones/New Yorker 10/24
(Abbreviated version of full print 2 page article) POP MUSIC about Swans. After a thirteen-year hiatus, the New York band Swans has released a new album, “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” and begun an eighteen-month world tour. Michael Gira, the band’s fifty-six-year-old leader, now lives in upstate New York with his wife and two young children, but in the early eighties he was the standard-bearer for a certain kind of confrontation in the downtown New York scene. The new version of Swans is more musically adept than the original, slightly terrifying incarnation. The question is whether you want plain old music from an artist who has put so much faith in transcendence and physical experience. Do you want Swans to play great music or to erase you? Swans came together in New York in a cultural context that evaporated almost twenty years ago, owing to the twin spectres of AIDS and financial solvency. By the 1983 album, “Filth,” Gira had found his focus and one of his muses, the guitarist Norman Westberg. Traditionally conceived music was replaced by something approaching pure motion, though the tempo was rarely fast. With two bass players, two drummers (one of whom hit various metal objects), and the uncanny howl of Westberg’s guitar, the band sounded as if it were aiming to drive something into the earth, or into a body. As the eighties ended, Swans’ records mutated toward beauty. Gira took Swans through several incarnations in the nineties before retiring the act; he also started a band called Angels of Light, with new musicians. Gira decided to bring back Swans during an Angels of Light show five years ago. On the new album there are few fancy harmonies or syncopations in his work. The pace is generally slow, though the material becomes energized when pounded hard enough…Sasha Frere Jones/New Yorker 10/24


Like a supernatural weather system from M. Night Shyamalan's stable, Swans are no ‘ornery' 80s underground phenomenon. There's more presence, less bluster to their sound than meets the eye. Gira and co. have mastered these clichés by styling themselves as soothsayers rather than purveyors of novelty, continuing to tell it like it is no matter how unpleasant. Swans fans tend to stick around like cussed villagers who won't leave town in spite of imminent disaster, and their standard defense goes something like this: "It's headwrecking — but yeah, that's the point." Yet however relentless they may seem, Swans have evolved over the years. My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to The Sky retained the distinctive keyboard percussion of their last album, 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind, but made it new. From the standout track "You Fucking People Make me Sick," featuring Devendra Banhart and Gira's young daughter on vocals; to the subsequent descent into Lynchian hell, where the track scraped rock-bottom with a demonic brass section writhing like a reptilian tail; to the album's finale "Little Mouth," which shuffled and barked in a crippled sub-country dialect; Swans' latest created a lush, swampy sound redolent of Gira's Angels of Light or Trevor Montgomery's Lazarus. But this didn’t stop Gira from knocking heads together on tracks like "Eden Prison." Swans fans: They had it comin' to them.
Jessica Monk/TinyMixTapes.com December

“Once again, Pop Montreal comes out on top by hosting Swans. Expectations ran at a fever pitch but within the first half-hour of the crawling crescendo drone, this just had the skin at the back of the neck tingling. Swans leader Michael Gira was truly letting his inner demons run free as he completely attacked the band’s classics with newfound vigour, while keeping the pummelling intact. True musical ascension in its purest and most primal form—feeling bad never felt so good.” Jonathan Cummins/Montreal Mirror 12/23
1. I hope songs like "No Words / No Thoughts" and "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" are sign posts for where Swans might go on the next album. Seeing the band live was much more exciting to me than listening to the album, mostly because the album felt a little predictable and the live show was stupendous, exhausting, and volatile. In fact, Swans at the Middle East Club was easily the best concert in Boston all year long. The bonus disc is the direction I think Gira will eventually head, and I look forward to hearing him apply his talents to longer songs and more abstract ideas. - Lucas Schleicher
This threatened to be a let down, hugely influential band coming back at a time when everyone seems to be scrabbling for a cut of the reunion market. However, all fears were unfounded as Michael Gira and comrades made an album every bit as classic as any other Swans album. - John Kealy

If it weren't for Swans, 2010 may have been the year that music turned narcoleptic. Gira sounds just as angry and vital as ever. - Matt Spencer
While not a perfect album by any means, and not my favorite in their discography, the simple fact that Gira resurrected Swans with same intensity he finished it off with over a decade ago makes it my favorite of the year. While some of the songs sound more like they'd fit better on an Angels of Light album, the intensity of "No Words/No Thoughts" and "Eden Prison" are clearly Swans, and bode well for the next album. - Creaig Dunton
I can't say that I was especially blown away by this album, or that I am entirely on-board with Michael Gira's "apocalyptic bluesman" vocals, but hearing these songs live damn near caved my head in. Gira remains a primal and vital creative force. -Anthony D'Amico Brainwashed.com

Swans disbanded way back in 1997, only to reform in 2010 to record a full length LP of new material entitled My Father will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. In the interim, their members have been involved in various projects. Frontman Michael Gira has performed with some of the other members of Swans, as well as with various other collaborators, in the band Angels of Light and as a solo artist. Despite these and other creative outlets (Gira is also an accomplished writer and label head of Young God Records), one can readily understand why he might want to return to Swans, albeit a version that features core members of the group but also includes some new faces (including a guest appearance by Devendra Banhart). The material on My Father will Guide me… is tailor made for the collective’s sonic approach.
That approach is an unusual combination of strenuous, sometimes assaultive, noise and experimental rock elements coupled with a dystopian, disturbing, yet often poignant delicacy. Here, as on their previous recordings, these two patterns of music-making frequently coexist in the same piece. No-wave signatures and blistering distortion is sculpted into incendiary, powerful climaxes. Dulcimer, vibraphone, trumpet, and strings provide a counterweight to the heavily amplified guitars. When the latters’ torrential waves of sound recede, one is left with faint vocal echoes or the gentle tintinnabulation of chimes: unnerving reverberations that seldom provide a real sense of repose.
With My Father will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the Swans and Gira demonstrate that they are still fully capable of creating powerful and unnerving music. Is it strange that the renewed presence of this band’s gloomy and portentous sonic world seems reassuring? Maybe it’s because now we no longer have to wax nostalgic over Swans LPs from the distant past. Instead, listeners can revel in a venerable band that’s still creating formidable work.
Christian Carey/Sequenza21.com 12/28
Swans are not dead. That’s what the band’s MySpace account states, and from their new CD, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, they thrive, pound and astonish. Singer and writer Michael Gira wants you to know this is not a reunion. The lineup this time around features two founding Swans members Gira and Norman Westberg, plus bandmates from Gira’s other project Angels of Light. If I were going to make a list of my favorite CDs of 2010 My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky would surely rank way at the top. It’s unsettling in ways that Swans’ earlier music is. Gira’s vocals are low and terrifying. I like that. I talked with Gira (who’s got a wicked sense of humor) about the new album, how he decided to have his daughter sing on the track “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” and his experiences as a tearaway in Europe.
How did you decide the songs you put on this CD were Swans’ songs?
Michael Gira: It wasn’t so much the songs themselves as the way that I decided to record them and arrange them. Just getting a song together is a miracle these days. I had this collection of songs, say ten songs, and I had this band for a long time called Angels of Light. I’ve been thinking, over the last five years or so, of wanting to make more overwhelming, static, electric guitar music. And I used the songs as fodder to reactivate Swans, which is what I wanted to do in my secret mind. The first song, “No Words/No Thoughts,” that’s written specifically as a Swans song. “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” that’s also a Swans’ song – but the others were just sort of written along the way.
You have your daughter singing on “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. How did that come about?
MG: Yes she’s singing on that. Devendra [Banhart] is singing the lead vocals. That song had an odd genesis. It’s a collection of random loops and sounds. I was going to make a transition piece on the record, with no title or anything in mind or anything, and the more I added to it I thought, this is becoming something. All it needs is a little nursery rhyme in the midst of this. I went home and I was distractedly staring at the computer, looking at these fancy music websites. I started thinking about how I’d like to either murder or rape most of these children. So I wrote the lyrics from the point of view of an obsessed stalker. I was singing it and I thought, it doesn’t sound like me, I sound like Devendra. I called Devendra and told him the title and he laughed and asked if he wanted to sing it. He said sure. So I had him sing instead of me.
How’d you find him?
MG: Under a rock I guess. A while ago my wife was playing drums in a band called Flux Information Sciences and they were in LA. This was a loud, noisy band and somehow Devendra was the opener. My wife’s an aficionado of Americana, and heard his voice while she was smoking a cigarette outside when they were soundchecking. She went and talked to him and got this CD-R which is barely audible. She brought it home to me and I was astounded. It’s like going up into someone’s attic and finding this hidden trove of 78 recordings. I wrote him a long letter and he moved to New York to be on the label.
What’s pleased you the most about the new album?
MG: I like that it’s leading on to something else. I have trouble hearing my own music when it’s done because it’s reversed in so many ways. It’s like a dead cow in the middle of the road. It’s not really vibrant anymore. When it’s finished it’s exciting – I can recite in my head and I don’t have to listen to it anymore. It goes from writing the songs, working on them over and over, and thinking about how to arrange them, recording them, then mixing. By the time you’re done editing and mixing them it’s just a cycle. I become more interested in how to arrange and play the songs live. I’m not very faithful to recorded versions.
I read an interview with you where you talk about the audience as victims in a live show.
MG: I’m a victim too. You create a beast of sound and I just want it to pummel your body into submission until you see God. The audience comes along for the ride. In the early ‘80s there was quite a hostile relationship between us and the audience. We were met with either indifference or scorn for the first five years. It was not a love-hate relationship, it was a hate-hate relationship. In a way it’s a source of energy too.
You ran away to Europe as a teenager?
MG: I was living in Germany, working in a factory when I was fifteen. My father had placed me in this factory as sort of a test to discipline me – if you’re not going to behave you’re going to work in a factory. He was in Germany – his second wife was German. He was a business executive. I could go to this school in the Swiss Alps or work in the factory. I did that for a year and then he said, you’re going to school. And I ran away. I hitchhiked through Germany down to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey – I was running out of money so these older hippies I was with knew some people in Israel. We spent our last money going to Israel. I spent a year in Israel panhandling, selling my blood, working in a copper mine. I finally got arrested selling hashish and spent three and a half months in jail. Then they booted me out of the country.
The song “Jim” is just beautiful. What’s behind that song?
MG: Thanks. I was thinking about my friend Jim [J.G. Thirlwell] from the band Foetus. He sent me some of his music. I was overwhelmed by what a genius he is. It was an inspiration to keep going. He’s a similar age and we came up together. I wrote it based on memories of us and our time together. It’s an homage to him.
Have you had any vocal training?
MG: No. I know how to sing from my stomach and not my throat. Jarboe taught me that. I used to destroy my throat every night. I used to smoke two packs of Camels unfiltered a day. I have a lot of lung power just from singing in really loud rock bands. I do vocal exercises but I don’t really have any training.
The portrait Simon Henwood made of you is amazing.
He’s one of my very best friends. I’m proud of him. He’s having a show in Paris and London. It’s a two-person show with portraits by Francis Bacon.
That’s a wonderful combination.
He took a headshot of me after we’d been carousing all night. That’s how I looked the next morning.
Do you have any memorable injuries from performing onstage?
MG: When I was younger. I knocked out half of my front teeth on the microphone. I used to break my ribs. I used to have to wear an ACE bandage. I was always throwing myself on the ground. You don’t really feel it when the music’s inhabiting you – and then later you pay the price.
No jumping into the crowds.
MG: I never did that anyway. [One time] in Chicago everybody else was listening and moving but they weren’t slamming into each other. There were these four imbeciles moshing. I almost stopped the song but I got their attention and grabbed one of them by the hair and yelled at him to stop. He finally stopped. I don’t want to be a party to that – it’s so ludicrous. It’s such a knee-jerk, Pavlovian reaction at this point. It means nothing
Dagmar/BackBeatSeattle.com 1/6
Ever since I was a teen (actually, a little bit less), attending concerts has been my only real “hobby.” During my highschool years my mom would drop me off at the doorstep of the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat several nights a week, where I would wait on the sidewalk for hours so that I could be front row for whichever hero I had access to that night. By the time I was 18 I had seen Sonic Youth 6 times, kissed Kim Deal, and been onstage with Iggy Pop… twice. I had almost literally seen it all. I’m now a music journalist who continues going to upwards of 75 shows per years, except now it’s all free of charge. At this point it has all gotten a little blurry, a little less exciting: seeing indie rock, alt country, and synth pop bands every night that are legitimately good, but that honestly are somewhat interchangeable and that are definitely not going to change the course of music history. Yes, there are exceptions that make me as giddy as I was when I was 14, yet it’s pretty rare that I have a “Whoa, Fuck” moment. This was my “Whoa, Fuck,” moment of 2010.

On September 28 the 140-year-old Trocadero Theatre housed sounds that likely won’t be accessible to the masses for another 140 years. Legendary NYC avant art rockers Swans played their first show in 13 years. The venue was filled with freaks of all ages and walks of life: punks, goths, metalheads, queers, the people who are yet to embrace a culturally “valuable” identity, the people whose lives resemble a series of scars but are yet to be broken. Swans’ discography is as fluid and varied as their fans, but the one thing that remained constant is that it was always something that the mainstream wouldn’t fucking get. Those several hundred in attendance may have embraced different subculture identities and may have had their closets and record collections stocked differently, but the one thing they had in common was that they remained aliens, much like the band onstage. If this all sounds a bit lofty and pretentious, it’s because it is.

Swans, alongside Sonic Youth (their more fortunate musical siblings), rose from the ashes of NYC’s No Wave movement. Building on the noisiness of art rock, they added the Post Punk of Joy Division and what can only be described as slow-motion Heavy Metal and melded it with an audible (in addition to lyrical) manifestation of Genet and the Marquis de Sade for their aesthetic, still largely unlistenable and indefinable to the majority of Earth. They later gained a reputation for shows with a (sometimes literally) vomit-inducing volume. Later, in order to shed the band of any particular reputation, band leader and sole constant member Michael Gira, toyed with brilliantly bastardized takes on Folk, Blues, Ambient, and Industrial. Earlier this year Swans released My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, which your humble narrator has described as “the scariest fucking folk music you will ever hear” and an attempt at “skullfucking American country and blues.”

The audience at the Trocadero Theatre that night lacked a consensus not only on what Swans’ music was, but how it was to be reacted to. Some banged their heads, some overdramatically swayed to the hypnotic feedback, and some motionlessly stared upon them as a piece of performance art which they wished not to disturb.

The notion of considering Swans’ set as a “performance,” would probably be insulting to the band. Gira is one of music’s greatest anti-performers: it was a song-and-a-half into the set before he turned to face the audience. Toward the end of the night, when he could no longer avoid acknowledging the praise that was almost half as deafening as his music, he spit, in his William-Burroughs diction “Don’t try to love me or else you’ll have to suck my cock,” before offering a gruffly quirky apology (this anti-hero is just as well conceptualized as Genet and possibly more so than Charles Manson).

What the band played seemed to matter less to the audience than simply that they were playing. Tracks from their latest, like “My Birth” and “Eden Prison” were accompanied, by nonsensical selections from their catalogue (it’s not like they had “hits” after all). There seemed to be little reasoning or motivation behind these particular choices, but that was the beauty of it. While they’re just about the least likely band in the world to pander to their audience, even if they wanted to, I’m not sure it would be possible. The electro-tribal “I Crawled” sounds more authentically “Gothic” than anything to be produced since and “Sex, God, Sex” still sounds like a hymn from the edge of the Apocalypse. However, the night’s scariest, and therefore best, moment was likely 1987’s “Beautiful Child.” The song seems to drone on forever, yet it gives you the distinct feeling that once it’s over, it’s all over.

Swans are not a band to be “enjoyed” in the traditional sense. Like the Marquis de Sade, they are here to break down all that we know of their medium and prophesize our approaching demise. Hearing Gira and his horrifically beautiful Swans in concert may be the closest one can reach to hearing the world’s end. – Izzy Cihak/ /izzy.iamhighvoltage.com 1/4
If you are unaware of the band Swans or Michael Gira, now is a good time to change. Swans were a band based out of New York in the early 1980’s “No Wave” scene that spanned a career all the way up until the late 1990’s. Michael Gira continuing his musical career into the 2000’s under the names Body Lovers/Haters and Angels Of Light as well as releasing several solo albums from his own record label Young God Records. Swans recently were resurrected and released their first album in thirteen years titled, “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” also released on Michael Gira’s Young God Records. The album is nine songs of beauty and heaviness intertwined in a new life of Swans both new and old listeners will enjoy. Below is an interview I had the privilege of having with Michael Gira, the singer, guitar player, and mastermind behind Swans…

Music Swamp -“How has the new resurrection of Swans gone over with the record and touring thus far?”

Michael Gira –“It’s the best we’ve ever had, in terms of reception and musicially I love doing it. It’s an utterly transforming and really powerful experience, for the audience, and as well as for us. Touring the songs have expanded, some of the songs have become thirty minutes long, and it is an intense psychic workout.

M.S.- “Being based out of Los Angeles, I have not yet seen the resurrection of Swans but I’ve witnessed some of the performances for the new record via YouTube and some of the performances seem quite hypnotic?”

M.G.-“It is hypnotic in a way…we’re certainly hypnotized. It’s a total focus between the band members, where the audiences have to come along for the ride or not. We’re focused on playing and creating something bigger than ourselves happening.

M.S.-“ I preordered. “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” I received an email and then proceeded to see that on the Young God website, that due to a massive amount of orders shipping was delayed from all of Young God…

M.G.-“It really was a massive amount of work putting that together, we don’t have interns or workers, just myself and my wife helps out when she can, it takes a huge amount of drive…” Michael lets out a chuckle. “It’s actually something I won’t be able to do any longer, getting off this really arduous tours, coming home and there is seven hundred orders to pack up, and that’s not just one CD, people order several different things, packing them and signing them… I’ve been working since I have gotten back from tour about ten days ago and only had one day off. It has been ten or twelve hours a day just packing things up. I’m going to have to hand it over to someone else, where I will still be signing them but at this level since I’ve started up Swans again, it’s just not possible…”

M.S.-“ It seems to me that Swans with the progression of the internet, time, and the new record are larger than they ever have been…”

M.G.-” It’s good because within the thirteen years or not doing it, it never went away, it kept building and a lot of young people discovered it and it kept growing to my surprise. I was doing Angels of Light and the record label, so I kept a profile out there but I wasn’t aware of the extent that people had discovered it, or the influence it had had. It was a really wonderful surprise… Were getting this huge amount of press, it’s ridiculous, it’s embarrassing.” He laughs.

M.S.-“ I actually purchased the acoustic demos, “I Am Not Insane,” that were released in order to fund the recording of the new record, and was amazed to hear the transformation of the demos into the full life of the record. The songs breathed new entities.”

M.G.-”It’s important. Everything is a stage and it’s never finished. I start the song then bring it to the band and we hash it out and then we work about twelve hours a day in the studio on it, building it out until it becomes a performance item. Then you have over dubs vocals and then the little landmark of a CD or a finished album and then you start to play it live and it transforms again. To me it’s a process that never stops… I would never try to play the songs exactly as they are on the record live, because it would seem boring. So they transformed into something bigger than themselves live, again. The first song on the album, “No Words/No Thoughts,” it probably thirty minutes now… Also an early Swans song, “I Crawled,” we added an intro to it and that songs thirty minutes long and the song, “Eden Prison,” keeps growing and growing and it goes on for about twenty minutes of something. It’s just become this sort of psychedelic ordeal…”

M.S.-“When you were writing and or recording the “I Am Not Insane” songs, at one point did the premonition of Swans exceed another Angels of Light or solo record?”

M.G.-“ It was a slow process but about four or five years ago I was on tour with the Akron Family, and there was this song with this sort of slow swaying groove and huge guitars and middle section and it really took off and started soaring and I thought this feels exactly like Swans and doesn’t feel so bad to do. So I decided to tour and thought about maybe doing it again. When I had gathered these songs together which I presumed would be an Angels record, it was underwhelmed by the thought, I kind of wanted to get into the sonic aspects and get into large overwhelming ascending sounds, and that to me fits Swans. So then I gathered the people I thought that could lead to that place.”

M.S.-“Are there plans for Swans in the future?”

M.G.-“I think the next Swans album will be more purely sonic orientated off grooves and waves of sound rather than having songs written first. I have a few written and I just want to go in and start working with people and building up these atmospheres and grooves, to me this is reinvigorating and it keeps music vital. The last Angels of Light record, “We Are Him,” was a really strong record but when I thought about doing another Angels of Light record to me it just didn’t seem exciting and I want to be challenged.”

M.S.-“In my opinion throughout your entire career, you have carried a certain intensity in your music, whether the music is loud, quiet, stripped down, there is an underlying intensity that is present both live and recorded. To me there are very few musicians whom have channeled this sort of intensity and drive throughout their career and Nick Cave is someone I draw parallels in comparison to you and your music. I have heard him mention his, “muse,” Do you yourself have a muse you follow?”

M.G.-“Well, yeah, In fact I wrote a song about him. Haha. It’s called “Joseph’s Song” and it’s on the record, “We Are Him.” That’s sort of about him… It’s the name I sort of gave to my demon psychic twin…”

M.S.-“There is almost a paradox within Swans’ music and lyrics. Where opposing forces are used to accent and portray the songs, the light in the darkness, the soft and the hard, the quiet and the loud. Is this a conscious effort to play on oppositions?”

M.G.-“I guess it’s conscious in the sense that that’s the arrangement. Everything has to have context to speak, if you’re locked in a room and there are very loud speakers screeching white noise constantly eventually it becomes like wallpaper but if you had for instance someone in the room whom was quietly tapping a rock and then suddenly the screeching white noise came on for an instance and then went off again and that person was mumbling to themselves both those things have added power to the context of oppositions.”

M.S.-“The record, “Children of God,” has a certain biblical heaviness and a sort of morality that lines much of your work. This is more of a personal question but do you, yourself belief in God?”

M.G.-“Well, that’s about as personal as you can get. I’ll just say that everyone as it should be, wants to evolve into something greater than themself and I’m not exception… and if you can accomplish that through honest love or sex, it can be a spiritual high as it does in tantric sex… With really pure, honest, protracted sex you can reach the same kind of state or also through music, or through opening your eyes and letting things experience in, whether it has to do with a particular god or not. At the time of the album there was certainly a lot of people mocking religion and sarcastic which disgusted me. The album, “Children of God,” was sort of taking on a persona of a televangelist named Jimmy Swaggart, who was kind of my muse at the time. He’s such a great “rock” performer. He was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin. He’d work up a sweat and just froth like a “rock” performer and I just saw the parallels and I’m certainly not the first to notice it and it developed into a theme on the record. I wasn’t mocking religion, I was taking that persona into me and occupying it just to experience it. It wasn’t about being ironic or cynical which a lot of people assumed at the time…”

M.S.-“What is “Eden Prison” to you?”

M.G.-“It is really ruminating on some early childhood experiences I had. When I was fifteen I was a runaway kid and I was in Israel and I was arrested for selling Hassish, and I went to prison for three and a half months and I was thinking about those childhood experiences and the song wrote itself. It had to do with the place I was sort of born as a person or a formed human being. It was the first time I read books seriously and the first time I thought about what it meant to be alive, a really important moment. Later I found out that there is a prison in New Zealand, called, “Eden Prison,” It’s a British convict prison when the British took the proletariat and the working class and dumped them over in New Zealand as laborers, and when they didn’t behave they sent them to Eden Prison and it was this really horrible place. ”

M.S.-“Your daughter sings on the song, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” on the new record, “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” How did this come about?”

M.G.-“ The song has a lead vocal on it by Devendra Banhart and at a certain point it felt like he needed some company and my daughter was singing in the other room and I thought that she would be a perfect addition to the song. It really was as simple as that.”

M.S.-“Can you elaborate on the Deluxe Issue of the new record?”

M.G.-“ I took all the instrumental sections and some solo instruments from the record and looped them, stretched them, mutilated, and mangled them and added some orchestrations on them with some horns and vocals and guitars and made it into a slow evolving piece of soundtrack music. I really enjoy doing that, the songs finished and you can just use it as raw sonic material.”

M.S.-“You mentioned that Young God Records, your label was going on hold for a bit. Do you have any releases planned in the near future?”

M.G.-“ No its actually all on hold but I do have a CD that just came out by this person James Toth, called Wooden Wand. That’s a tremendous record, a fantastic American songwriter, not in any Americana way, but in his ability to tell stories in a really vivid way within the space of just a few lines, really powerful, poignant, sad, beautiful, high end stuff. He’s really great.”

M.S.-“As a Willie Nelson fan, I have heard you mention Willie Nelson before as someone you really enjoy, What makes Willie Nelson stand out to you within his music?”

M.G.-“Everything, his ability to tell a story within a few lines, with really great poetry, rarely corny and writes just really great lines. Songs about love and loneliness where he can just paint a picture wonderfully and his singing is so fluid like a jazz singer. He’s a high end artist and I think he’s as good as Bob Dylan.”

M.S.-“I agree and too many people seem to disagree and past over him…”

M.G.-“ Well they just think country music is for schmoes and they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. It’s like someone dismissing Hank Williams, How could you do that?”

“My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” the new Swans record is out now. Swans have just embarked on the next wave of their tour as well probably coming to a city near you. Check Younggodrecords.com for further information on tour dates as well as on Michael Gira, Swans, and countless other great artists. Swans will be performing at the El Rey Theatre, March 2nd 2011. Mark your calendars.

- Kyle Flavin/TheMusicSwamp.com 11/25

“Fairly often while I was talking quietly with the Shaikh, the name ‘Allah’ had come to us from some remote corner of the zawiyah, uttered on one long drawn out, vibrant note…It was like a cry of despair, a distraught supplication, and it came from some solitary cell-bound disciple, bent on meditation. The cry was usually repeated several times, and then all was silence once more.
…Later when I asked the Shaikh what was the meaning of the cry which we had just heard, he answered:
‘It is a disciple asking God to help him in his meditation.’
‘May I ask what is the purpose of his meditation?’
‘To achieve self-realization in God.’
‘Do all the disciples succeed in doing this?’
‘No, it is seldom that anyone does. It is only possible for a very few.’
‘Then what happens to those who do not? Are they not desperate?’
‘No: they always rise high enough to have at least inward Peace.’
- from Shaikh Ahmad Al-Alawi: A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century,, His Spiritual Heritage and Legacy, by Martin Lings
Something more raw and real
Contemporary concerts are all too often facile exercises in dead culture; no alchemy, no vision, just genre and acquiescence to the limited expectations of the crowd. It’s rare and valuable when you encounter an artist able to invoke a more powerful experience, something more raw and real, bordering on ritual or the screams for self-realization that Lings encountered in his experiences with Sufi sects.
On March 4th, 2010 Genesis P-Orridge brought Thee Majesty to support the first Chicago showing of the William S. Burroughs documentary A Man Within at St. Paul’s Community Center. In a moldering Catholic church converted to an arts venue, a motley assortment gathered to witness Thee Majesty pour vitriol on the idea of blind acquiescence to ideology or organization.
A culture of individuals
I was surprised at how disparate the folks were in the audience. A guy dressed in a well tailored suit sits next to a man, apparently well into his 60’s, with a long, stringy white beard and a loose, rough cut, red tunic. This was a community of individuals, bound by active acceptance of each other and not a passive belief in unity.
“I have lied to you…” Genesis howls over the discordant drone of Bryin Dall’s guitar and the percussion. The sounds were acrid, melting away blind belief and calling for gnosis. To participate in this ritual was not to loose ones’ self in a hazy notion of the All, it was participation as a self-realized unit of the whole. An existential moment of responsibility that tore down the illusion of cohesion in order to place the individual into an unblinded view of their place.
Resurrection
This experience was repeated when Michael Gira resurrected the Swans at the Double Door on October 5th. Gira in a conservative haircut, collared shirt, tore apart the distinctions between raw sound and lush harmonies. Theatrics stripped away, here was the music itself, naked and real.
They were not there to support the expectations of the audience. Our place was as guests, we were invited to accompany him into a temple built of sound, where we could experience what he wryly referred to as his “poor man’s religion.”
An end to academic rituals
The audience had assembled for a concert in the classic sense. They were expecting what the academics think of as a ritual, with the expected cultural narrative and social interaction accompanied by some fitting genre music. Cat calls from the back demanded that the audience “Fucking dance! This is a Swans concert…” despite the fact that for 30 years of performing Gira has consistently mentioned that he hates the brute and group oriented elements of musical culture.
Gira is an advocate for the individual, with no interest in rituals like moshing that support group think. A Swans’ concert is not the place for the cheap parlour tricks of a Human Resource department, the street equivalent of trust exercises. When Gira is your host he is there to, in a very personal way, tear you open to reality.
Laying the foundation
The concert begins with the long, droning squeal of a distorted guitar. The tension builds, at first the audience stands in expectation, as time passes it becomes obvious that this sound is not an introductory element and will play for longer than most songs, the audience becomes nervous. People start to yell and cheer, needing some kind of release. They are not tantrics, the power of withholding doesn’t linger long in their mind.
Then the percussion begins, Thor Harris playing what sounds like rhythmic church bells over the continuing drone. All of this the audience interprets as showmanship, they’re missing the very simple fact that these sonic elements are serving to sever them from their daily routine, wiping their mind clean for what’s ahead. The ground is being laid for an architecture of sound in which the elemental drama will play out.
The architect
Gira’s focus, calm and fierce at the same time, Harris and Phil Puelo with alternate looks of agony and release as they hammer an impossible rhythmn. The entire band goaded on by Gira, whipped with looks and pulled forward by his own movement into the sound. If the audience was able they were welcome to come with. Even those left outside the inner chamber of the sound by their own expectations were throttled into submission.
William S. Burroughs compared Led Zeppelin to the Master Musicians of JouJouka, but they were still mired in mid 20th century Western culture. What Gira was able to summon had the immediacy of the Morrocan musicians, sound and vision cultivated from the ruins of Western culture. A ritual fit for the time, the music carrying elements of traditional narratives torn into an elemental experience of life in the 21st century.
Genesis P-Orridge and Michael Gira are both able to capture the true ritual elements of the concert experience. Untied to tradition, religious, musical or cultural, they pull out the most effective pieces out of the cultural drift and create temples of sound opening up the reality of our times.
David Metcalfe/TheEyelessowl.wordpress.com 10/31

Michael Gira returns with a newly imagined reincarnation of his seminal misanthropic noise rock act. I am avoiding using the word reunion, or reforming, because this new Swans is none of that. This new Swans is made up of Gira veterans and members from the Young God crowd, including Devendra Banhart and Shearwater’s Thor Harris. MFWGMUARTTS doesn’t feel like a lame attempt to recapture old glory, because what does Gira have to come back from? Angels of Light’s releases were solid and this newly minted Swans project strikes off on legs of its own, incorporating the apocalyptic folk musings and the terrifying sense of dread from earlier Swans releases. Gira laces his unholy din with moments of aching beauty, which are seven times more insidious because they no longer hold the listener at arm’s length with their abrasiveness, but settle in and burrow straight into your subconscious with their accessibility. –Ryan Hall/S.L.U.G. November

IYS: Listening to My Father as a whole it feels more aggressive than even a lot of the last few Swans albums. Was that intentional?
M: I don't know about aggression, that's a common word that's assigned us, it doesn't sit right with me. It's more about wanting to make a sound that's all consuming that just kind of obliterates you if you turn it up loud and that's an impulse, to me. It's a humble impulse because I want to lose myself in this mass of sound. That's what I hope my audience will experience too, experience something bigger than yourself, you know. So maybe there's more of that total commitment to reaching that peak than there was in the later Swans, is that what you mean?
IYS: Not that the later Swans albums were quiet or necessarily restrained, I just found that songs like “No Words/No Thoughts,” and “Jim” especially, much more immediately loud than a lot of stuff that I've heard over the last twenty years.
M: Right, well it's like my quasi religious impulse.
IYS: OK and you mention Swans has been labeled as aggressive in the past and that doesn't sit well with you, why?
M: Because it's never been about aggression. I'm not angry; it's more trying to reach a kind of total experience. I'm talking about in the louder parts, because there's obviously a lot of subtlety in Swans too, throughout the years there's been songs that are almost like little films that are cinematic in aspirations, if we're talking about the more brutal or whatever word you want, kind of sound, it wasn't really about trying to attack somebody: it wasn't punk rock, it was just about creating a space, making something happen.
IYS: So I also had a chance to listen to the demo and acoustic CDs you released before Angels of Light’s Other People. On My Father it seems like there are a few songs like “Reeling the Liars In” and “Little Mouth” that seem to be very similar to the demo versions, but then there's others like “No Words No Thoughts,” “Inside Madeline,” and “My Birth,” sound really reworked, do you think--
M: It's a Swans album. These songs, except for “No Words/No Thoughts,” were written over the last couple of years. I ultimately thought I would be recording them as Angels of Light, but once I started thinking about that, and getting serious about recording, it was a little underwhelming to me, since I'd been thinking about making more music with bigger sonic aspirations, i.e. Swans. I ... said I'll use Swans - these songs are the basic starting point to make a Swans album, and the sum of it incorporates, and almost remains, it remains ... a Swans album, so I took the songs to the group… [We] worked 12 hours a day on each song and then recorded it at the end of the day once we'd found spaces inside and stretched things and built it… I wanted things to be expanded, I didn't want in most songs, I didn't want there to be a replication of the demo version, just with more orchestration or something, I wanted them to become a living thing, so that's why I have the album. So you know with Angels of Light, normally the way I would work would be to go in the studio and record myself with acoustic guitar, singing or not, with a drummer keeping time and then I would just start orchestrating that performance but I didn't want to do that, I wanted to have the performance be the band itself.
IYS: So it's definitely a very different creative process recording as Swans than as Angels of Light?
M: Yes, even though I'll still use the performance that we recorded and stretch it and build on it, but [songs for Swans] needed to have more interaction with the musicians.
IYS: “No Words/No Thoughts,” when I was listening to it, brought up in my mind “Feel Happiness” from the last Swans live album. Has anyone else commented on that?
M: No, but I can see that for sure because…those songs, those long, longer, those very final Swans songs, were the kind of inspiration for, the starting point of, where I could go with this new album, so yeah, there are ways of working elements from that stuff that I wanted to take and build up on, so yes, I see that.
IYS: On the demo it's hard to make out words but the recorded versions have very clear lyrics, did the words have to evolve with the band or were they just not finished at the time that you recorded the demo?
M: I didn't have any words at the time of the demo. Every time I tried to put words on [“No Words No Thoughts], it seemed to ruin it. So that was a really difficult song to write because essentially it became this kind of vast sonic statement to put…words on it, specific words that is, it seemed to make it too literal yaw know? So…it was quite a struggle so the words I came up with were more describing, or just like making a mental space, rather than telling a story or a narrative. If it became too literal, like a story or something, it seemed to make the sound smaller. That was a hard thing to do, that song.
IYS: Do you typically write the words as you write the music or does one come before the other?
M: Usually I play my acoustic guitar and just sing some gibberish and come up with a melody and then over a course of days, or unfortunately over the last couple years, weeks, I'll come up with the words. Sometimes they are, like I said, just a mental space, other times a specific story evolves or a scene.
IYS: Has that been the way you've composed songs throughout your career? Or has that been more recent?
M: I've never written words first.
IYS: The song “My Birth” was performed on the last Swans tour, resurfaced on the demo CD and then on this album. Why was it discarded and why brought back from the dead?
M: I didn't remember that song existed and some collector sent me a live recording with that song…and I was like, oh that wasn't so bad, and that was recently. I searched through my files on my computer and I found the original and I looked at the words and I thought: ‘Oh wow those are really excellent words, they're not necessarily my mental space my view on life right now, but they are really excellent words and they deserve a chanc,’ so, because it was never recorded…I recorded it.
IYS: “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” I've read that you had Devendra Banhart and your daughter singing on that one?
M: Yeah.
IYS: But are you also singing as well?
M: No.
IYS: For some reason to me they actually start sounding like you, but maybe I just need to give it a closer listen.
M: Well I sang it for Devendra, I sent him a tape of it to sing, I sang the melody for him, and maybe he subconsciously ended up sounding like me a little bit or something. But I didn't want to sing that song; it didn't make sense for me to sing it. I was playing it after I'd just written it and I realized that I was sounding like Devendra, singing very high for my voice and it even had that kind of warble and I thought, ‘Well, Jesus, that's ridiculous, I sound like Devendra, let's get Devendra to sing it,’ so that's why.
IYS: “Eden Prison,” when I saw the title I looked up what Eden Prison was and tried to figure out how it had something to do with the song but I read you actually didn't know that there was an Eden Prison when you wrote that song, was that correct?
M: No. Yeah.
IYS: So where did the name come from?
M: I don't know. It was just part of the lyrics I was writing and that song just grew, I have no idea where it came from. It's based loosely on memories of being imprisoned very young man when I was 16.
IYS: What were you in prison for?
M: Selling hashish.
IYS: Where was that?
M: That was in Israel. In 1969.
Gira didn't seem to want to get into the story, so I left it there.
IYS: Another question about words, the title of the album: My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky, does that have any specific meaning or significance, I don't believe I heard that lyric in any of the songs.
M: It's actually a lyric from a song that didn't make it on the album, which is called “Oxygen,” and that song is about, one reason that song didn't make it on the album is because I think it was too specifically personal, it's a song about not being able to breathe, about asthma. laughs
IYS: You suffer from asthma?
M: Oh yeah, but not since I quit smoking, not as much. It's still there though, quite a bit. But it's something that's gotten worse over the last 10 years, but it's just a very specific sensation. In fact I did this show in Los Angeles, about a year ago and I was in the midst of an asthma attack and it was just the most horrific thing, because I was breathing in and I could sing, but my body was not getting oxygen. It was just really hard to do the show, obviously, and I finished and then I just coughed for the next three days and then I went to the hospital and all this stuff. But that was the inspiration for that song, and there's a particular line in there, my mother and by father both smoked about 3 packs of cigarettes a day and I'm sure that their deaths were related to that somehow, but my dad died of a stroke, so I thought of my father's cigarette smoke will guide me up a rope to the sky, where I'll go meet him in the sky, following the same path as him. But out of context, I like the line because it's very hopeful, laughs, a little different, it has a notion of reaching upward to heaven which is sort of what I try to do with some of the music.
IYS: So it has a hopeful title for the album but as a song the line is not really very hopeful?
M: Yeah, it's more of an ironic comment in the song.
IYS: And you mention that it didn't feel appropriate for the album because it's too personal, do you think you'll continue to record as Angels of Light for material that's more personal, or release solo albums, or do you think you're going to be focused on Swans for the foreseeable future?
M: I'm going to follow, pursue, Swans for the foreseeable future. I'm putting Angels to rest for, I don't know if for forever, but I just, I don't want to do it right now. I have ideas that have resulted from having worked on this new album that I want to extend into the next album, the next Swans album that is, I'm going to pursue it until I don't want to anymore and then I'll do something else.
Joseph Bogen/InYourSpeakers.com 10/7
Swans' music began to emanate from the stage in Outland Live last night after a 45-minute delay. It fairly snuck into the atmosphere of the fanciful club, which is rife with multicolored manikin parts, gold cherubs, Christmas tree lights and odd bits of free-form sculpture.
The venue's high, industrial ceilings fittingly received the throbbing guitar drone that went on for 15 minutes, accompanied only by frantically struck tubular bells.
It was a welcome din, rarely heard today but common parlance for noise bands from the band's late-'80s heyday, such as Sonic Youth and Einsturzende Neubauten, and very much like the noisy introduction to the band's new studio album, its first in more than a dozen years.
Over the half-dozen pieces - and nearly an hour - that this reviewer heard before deadline called, the group worked its dark, eardrum-puncturing magic with thick layers of feedback produced by two guitars, a steel guitar, pummeling bass lines and fevered drums and percussion.
Founder, guitarist and singer Michael Gira added monotone vocals to the cacophony in songs that tapped Christian imagery, personal pain and even a perversely colorful storyline in Jim from its new album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. Tapping themes the group's mentor has explored from its inception in New York City, it showed his vision to be steadfast.
But key in the band's exhaustingly hypnotic show was the persistent noise and the considerable catharsis it provided. Sometimes painful, seemingly without end, it created a kind of ecstatic peace.Curtis Schreiber/Columbus Dispatch 10/7
Michael Gira fans can be forgiven for being cautiously optimistic about the new Swans album. After all, he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was done with the group, and for the past 13 years has been recording more easily digestible material under the Angels of Light name. On his label’s website, he even seems defensive about reviving Swans, and the appearance of several musicians who played in Angels of Light but not Swans on My Father further confuses things.
The only name that really matters is Gira. A casual fan might not be able to hear much difference between My Father and the last few Angels of Light records, but Gira doesn’t seem to have many causal fans. You’re either along with him on his trip or else his flat baritone and dark atmosphere can leave you cold. But he’s managed to make a record that sounds like both an extension of Angels of Light and a return to Swans. Opener “No Words/No Thoughts” is a classic blast of late-period Swans bombast, the folky “Reeling the Liars In” and “Little Mouth” are Angels-esque, and the repetitious rhythms and buzzing guitars of “My Birth” and “Eden Prison” recall early, primitive Swans. Following the popularity of noise as a genre in the last decade, the once-jarring assault of Swans has been tempered a bit, but the group was always about more than volume for volume’s sake. Gira believes in the cathartic powers of extreme sounds, but he knows that to have a deeper resonance they must be used to express something beyond anger and frustration. With My Father, he’s surrounded his confessional lyrics with a fittingly dramatic, emotive soundtrack, creating music with a depth both aggro noiseniks and wet-noodle anthemic indie rockers often lack.
Eric Dawson/Metropulse 9/23
I don’t know if there is a ticket any hotter than this one. A reunited…excuse me…re-activated Swans touring in support of an incredible new album that encapsulates the numerous styles the band tapped into during their long original career is one very exciting prospect. I can imagine the new songs being doled out in segments played alongside their older style-cousins to make for a career spanning set-list; expect industrial blitzkriegs, noise-rock assaults, gothic dirges, and general sonic weirdness. Swans are notorious for their insanely loud, audience assaulting live shows. Band leader and creative force behind the group, Michael Gira seems intent on getting back to the live presence that made his band infamous in the first place.
I have read several interviews with Gira in which he doesn’t seem quite sure what to expect from a Swans concert in 2010. His interim project Angels of Light never really got very noisy, so it has been quite awhile since the master of disaster has instructed a band of musicians to totally unleash on a crowd. Their stop at Black Cat is only the second show in their global campaign of noise and darkness. I will be very curious to see what Gira offers up this early in the tour. Will he play it safe or let Swans fly so hard and fast that they break the sound barrier? I personally know a ton of Swans fans who are dying to find out. If Swans 2010 are only half as good in concert as their new album is when I crank the volume to 10, then this show is going to be hotter than Hades. Michael Darpino/WeLoveDC.com 9/28

For a moment, let us forget about music. Let us talk about imagery and visuals; photography to be exact. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But, did you know that two pictures are worth more than 2,000 words? In fact, they may be worth more than 200,000 words. When you see two pictures of a man, 23 years apart, the mind cannot help but draw the line of best fit between the two. Sometimes these lines are physical: lines of the skin, lines of the bone, lines of the flesh. Sometimes they are conceptual: the two sides of an ever-evolving coin and the motion in which that coin flips. Sometimes, they are not much more than parlor tricks, a simple sleight of hand.
One is is of Swans’ tribal leader Michael Gira in New York, circa 1987, full of heat and youth and rage and tar and piss and swill. The next is of the same man in the present or the near present, weathered by age and the dry, American winds. With a quick glance at the two photos, one would assume a natural progression from the young, sweaty Michael Gira to the old, hat-wearing version. But, what is present on the newest Swans album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, tells a different story.
Swans were a part of the No Wave New York Scene (pick up No New York immediately if you are interested in experimental rock at all in the last 20 years), and were one of the few bands to outlast the influential yet short-lived genre. In 1997, Gira attempted to put a final stamp on the Swans’ legacy, collecting all he had learned and all he had seen into one mammoth, experimental rock opus, Soundtracks For The Blind. Gira then dabbled in more traditional genres, following the precedent he had set while within Swans towards Americana and folk. He regularly donned a cowboy hat, possibly to help him think like a normal American singer-songwriter.
Above (as well as in their press kit), these two photos are placed side by side, as if they were told an evenly weighted story. However, a more accurate photo layout would be to take the picture of Gira as an old man, create an overlay (like you would find for one of those old-timey overhead projectors), and gently lay the translucent sheet over the young Gira. Where is the evidence for this conjecture? Exhibit A: Swans have reformed after a decade of definitive dead-ness (their last live/rarities collection was titled Swans Are Dead). Since the members are mostly new (including guest appearances from the likes of Devendra Banhart, R.E.M. drummer Bill Rieflin, and others), Gira himself is probably the mastermind behind this reunion. And while most reunions are motivated financially, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would argue that Swans are a cash cow.
Exhibit B: My Father Will Guide Me exposes Gira as the madman we all knew he was all along. The album is a dark, gothic affair; a heavy dose of noise and cow-punk, doused in kerosene and lit aflame. The burning rubble sounds like the death wails of a thousand saxophones, all attempting to play to Willie Nelson’s greatest hits. Gira weaves tales of anger and woe in world-weary tones that would swell Cormac McCarthy with pride. His favorite subject has been his “Emperor’s New Clothes” take on religion, My Father doesn’t find him shying away from that position. Gira made his business as the thinking man’s heretic, “Jim” and “Reeling the Liars In” displaying his very best at playing the dishonest preacher with a sly smile.
This is all in line with what the last couple Swans albums promised. But fret not, My Father is not a rehash of old noise-punk memes. There is continuation and development found within the new album; maybe not 10 years worth, but evolution nonetheless. By giving the rest of the world a 10-year handicap, Swans’ sound actually becomes more vital than it ever was during the 80s. Once genuinely frightening, Michael Gira’s abrasive tone and menacing stature now feel strangely at home in today’s varied and expansive music soundscape. What makes My Father stand out from all the pretenders is that Swans’ confidence in their genre-blending dynamics is not falsely manufactured by buzz or hype. They’ve been building this stage for years. Allen Huang/SeattleShowgal.com 9/12
Michael Gira knows the value of aural dynamics. His confrontationally driven and bluntly bludgeoning anthems are often exercises in exhaustive catharsis and thunderous release. Gira is like a shaman; a baritone oracle full of dark pronouncements and thunderous wrath. From the earliest inception of Swans, Gira has revolutionized sound in beautiful and frightening ways. Seminal albums like "Filth" and "Cop" and provocatively-titled songs like "Raping a Slave" established the group as a galvanizing and intense force and, throughout the better part of the '80s, Gira and Swans flew the banner as the vanguard of what was called "No Wave." Early Swans music is characterized by menacing, battering rhythms in repetitive, creeping assault; atonal squalls of sluggish, sludge-drenched tempos that are weighted with Gira's brilliantly obsessive and often disturbingly visual lyrics.
As the '80s were winding down, Swans incorporated the counterpoint vocalization of Jarboe and a new phase began. Slight hints of a haunting, melodic smoothness crept into Gira's dense compositions, adding comparative sensations of airy lightness to their thunderous cacophony. Subsequent releases saw the band branch into quieter, dirge-like material that was funereal and elegiac. While the addition of Jarboe brought new textures to an already established soundscape, Swans were no less visceral. Live, they were a force of unmitigated power; a machine-like outfit whose incredible volume was punishing and dramatic.
They continued through most of the '90s, releasing several LPs, EPs and live recordings before disbanding in 1997. Gira formed Angels of Light after the demise of Swans and kept up with running his Young God record label. He also dabbled in writing (his first book: "The Consumer and Other Stories" was published on Henry Rollins's imprint 2.13.61 Publications) while Jarboe embarked on her own solo career, working with diverse artists like Tool's Maynard J. Keenan and Jesu's Justin Broadrick.
The newly-minted version of Swans is as blistering and vehement as the earlier incarnations. Their latest offering, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky," is a therapeutic testament to this legendary powerhouse's ability to create mood and atmosphere while sustaining a rapacious capacity for provocation. Pummeling percussion, hypnotic droning, persuasive and derisive bending of aural soundscapes accompanies jangly and quiet acoustic numbers to create a pastiche of competitive sound. Densely layered and crafted with a madman's obsessive and articulate hand, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky" is pure Swans. This time around, Gira has enlisted the help of original Swans member Norman Westberg and mid-period Swans guitarist Christoph Hahn. Rounding out the lineup are Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica, and Thor Harris. Guests include Devendra Banhart and Gira's 3-1/2 year-old daughter.
The inscrutable Gira remains an intensely watchable figure. For all his sardonic brooding and vocalized sneering, the mysterious frontman is serene and cerebral, almost unexpectedly engaging and warm. The alchemy that produced these new Swans songs is evident in Gira's fascinating creative process.
"I had songs, and most of them were originally written without me realizing that I was going to re-start Swans," explains Gira. "The more I thought about doing another Angels of Light record the less interested I was. I'd been considering doing a record for a long time, so I gave these songs to the band in demo form with the idea of getting into the studio and expanding them. I had definite ideas as far as how the songs should go, but, thankfully, I have some pretty creative people to work with. But, within the context of what I want, they always surprise me. That happens a lot. And then incidental things will happen because I'll hear a sound that's recorded and it will inspire something else."
Lyrically Gira's writing has had a tendency to touch on the dark, almost perverse, side of expression. Themes of violence, depravity and a host of other not-suitable-for children motifs have always played a part in how Gira manifests himself artistically, though it is not the whole of his being.
"I don't know about the darkness thing... it doesn't really interest me. I don't even care about it. I just write what I have to write and I don't worry about how it's perceived. I don't necessarily agree with that characterization, but it doesn't really matter. I'm used to it. When I decide I'm going to write I sit down with a guitar and start playing. I come up with some chords and some details, just keep playing that over and over for days and then I'll squint and press and hope that perhaps some words will come out. After a few lines come out it starts building into a song. It all flows out and hopefully tells some kind of story.
"But I don't really sit down and try to extricate an idea before the thing evolves mechanically and becomes an idea. Often times I draw from life experience, of course, but I'll distort it. It really varies from song to song. Like the song "You Fucking People Make Me Sick". That song grew from a series of sounds that we made that were going to be an interlude on the record. But I just kept building on it, getting people to play things and add sounds and it grew and grew and it actually became a song in spite of itself. The words came while I was looking at all these terrible music websites. I was feeling a little bit carnivorous and a little bit homicidal and I had these words and I started singing them and I thought, 'Oh my God, they sound like Devendra [Banhart, who sings the aforementioned song],' and it just grew from there."
One wonders how deep Gira's anger runs these days. The man who sonically bludgeoned audiences with assault after assault full of rage and frustration is the impetus behind these songs and their inherent anger. Is he still the same rage-inspired mouthpiece?
"Not really anymore... well, yeah, I guess I am sometimes. Eh, I hate fucking people, basically, yeah. The anger is directed slightly more inwardly these days, but I'm certainly not as bad as I used to be. Most people that knew me back in the '80s would describe me as a pretty potentially violent, angry person. In those days there was an omnipresent rage. If you want to look at it as anger, that's OK. But I look at it more as running the sound to be completely overwhelming and obliterating. I look at that as a positive thing. It's the same notion that's in a religious impulse, trying to lose yourself in something. It's something to experience. I make a certain sound to be overwhelming, like a continuous crescendo. In the end, it is what it is and it's up for interpretation. It doesn't come from anger necessarily."
Constant visualization is a key element to Swans music. Off-kilter sounds inspire violently visual illusions that often play out like a movie soundtrack.
"It is definitely laid out that way. I grew up too young for hippies and too old for punk rock. Contemporaneously, I was listening to The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd's first three albums, which, to me, were total sonic worlds: statements. The kind of music you could totally lose yourself in. I spend more time thinking, tweaking, coming back and building on songs, on the idea of how to make the whole album work as a cohesive piece. I didn't sleep the whole year or so this record was being made. I was rearranging everything in my mind constantly. After the record was finished I was still thinking about how to build upon it. I made new segues and things. Not sleeping was a key factor in making this record."
The overflow of material led to a companion piece titled "Look At Me Go".
"It's a companion CD that goes with the album. It's a limited, special edition that you can get through the website and at live shows. I took the raw material from the album as a starting point and looped things and went back to the 24-track stuff and took out sounds, added more sounds and made it into one long piece of music that's about 47 minutes long. It's one long, constantly-changing piece."
And, of course, there is the live aspect. Anyone who has witnessed the fervid immensity of Swans in a live setting knows to expect the unexpected. The new songs from "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky" will be heavily featured and, as usual, they will be redefined and redesigned by Gira.
"We're just going to look at these recordings as the starting point. I intend on stretching things out. Songs will be much longer and will keep building. And also we're going to do some material from the early Swans. I can't see trying to sound just like the album, so we'll take those songs and see what happens with this lineup. I don't want to just try to perform everything like it's recorded, that would just be stupid." Steven DiLodovico/ChorusAndVerse.com 9/20
Started, as frontman Michael Gira has repeatedly said, not as some nostalgia act but from a need to do something different than what he had been doing in Angels of Light. The new Swans album logically begins where the last Swans album, 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind, and the last Angels of Light album, 2007’s We Are Him, left off. Immediately confrontational and explosive, the lead track “No Words/ No Thoughts” moves from quiet, incantatory opening instrumental lines into sounds that hammer, thunder, and gallop out of the speakers, with Gira’s bellow and howl like a preacher at the height of a sermon droning on about death, redemption, sin and love. In contrast to this, “Reeling the Liars In” brings an acoustic guitar to the forefront with a moment of spiritual reflection humming and chanting along, albeit with strangely unsettling lyrics (“Here is my hand/ And I’ll drive the nail in/ Here is my tongue/
And I’ll cut out my sin”). And so the album progresses, moving between moments of quiet reflection into fire and brimstone and back, a little like opening Pandora’s Box and waiting for all Hell to break loose. More often than not the music is best suited to the climax of a horror film, capable of raising the hairs on the back of your neck as you wait for the blade to drop. In other words, for those worried Gira and company would not be up to the task, this album easily ranks in among the best of their career, and this is no resurrection of the dead; this music is alive and kicking with the passions of Gods and Devils. Paul Morin/ AuxiliaryMagazine.com October

Summing up Michael Gira's 30-year career (so far) isn't easy to do in a few words. The man behind the utterly uncompromising Swans and the more evocative Angels of Light may have started off in New York's No Wave underbelly of the early '80s, but he was always more extreme a personality than Thurston Moore, to whom his trajectory is often compared. The founder of Young God Records, Gira is first and foremost a presence, a true original who has earned a large and very devoted cult following while taking younger talents under his wing and nurturing their potential. Highly respected within the punk, goth, industrial, and indie rock communities, you could say that he's a Tom Waits for the un-gentrified, or a more brutal and unhinged Nick Cave. Either way, Michael Gira is a murder balladeer who has channelled some of the most severe impulses of religion, sex and confinement into some of the more transcendental and, in several instances, beautiful recordings of the modern rock underground.

1954 to 1978
Michael Rolfe Gira is born on February 9, 1954, to a well-heeled family then living in the thriving suburbs of Los Angeles. "My father was what they used to call a business executive," says Gira now. "He worked at an aircraft parts manufacturing company. My mother was a very beautiful woman who graduated from UCLA." But the affluent life is not meant to last. "When I was eight or nine, things descended and he lost all his money, and it all went downhill from there and went through various degrees of decadence." While in his early teens, Gira's parents divorce, and for a time he lives with his mother, who has slipped into alcoholism. Soon after, he is sent to live with his father, whose work takes him across the U.S. and Europe. A problem child who proved too rebellious for his preoccupied parents to handle, it is during these years that Gira first runs into trouble. In 1969, while in Germany with his father, Gira runs away and hitchhikes across Europe with a group of hippies. "I ended up in Israel, and spent a year there. Three-and-a-half months of that were in jail for selling hashish. They put me in an adult prison. I was the youngest person there by far, and I had long blonde hair, an obvious victim. I was 15 when I went in jail, and I might've turned 16 while I was there." Those overwhelming feelings of duress, isolation and claustrophobia will later appear in the distinctive Swans sound. "I spent a month and a half in jail before anyone even charged me, just by myself, being held on suspicion of terrorism. People would come and leave, come and leave, and I was still by myself. Finally a Westerner who was there got out and sought out a lawyer who took my case on, and got me out on bail right away. After that I was out in Jerusalem for another month, panhandling and selling my blood for food. Then I got sentenced and spent another month in jail."
Looking back on those early years, Gira now says, "I think that episode has a lot of connection to what happened later. Just the experience of being confined makes you realize the urgency of time, and how much life is about how you use your time, and how urgent it is that you use that time in something that is adamant, in something that feels powerful and real to you. That's been a credo ever since. I've had a lot of shit jobs throughout my life, but I never got tied down in something that was crushing me."
With prison finally behind him, Gira returns to California to pick up the pieces of his life and get going again. "I'd been drawing since I was a kid, and it was just what I always thought I would do, be an artist. It was what consumed me completely. In the early '70s, I went to junior college for a couple of years and then went to Otis College of Art and Design, where I studied painting and what was then the dawning genre of performance art." By his early 20s, his interests shift away from visual art and towards L.A.'s nascent punk scene. "On the radio, I'd been hearing Sex Pistols and things like that, and I went to this concert in L.A. at an Elks' Lodge, and it was the Screamers, Ex, Weirdos, all these L.A. punk bands. I was pretty affected by it. It was so immediate and raw and vital. Very soon after that, I began to get involved in the punk scene. I started a fanzine, called No Magazine, did that for a while and then got sick of it. Then I started my first band in L.A., the Little Cripples. I did that for a while and it didn't work out, and it was then that I moved to New York City."
1979 to 1981
"I moved to New York with a guitarist friend of mine, and we started the band there. That was the genesis, working out some songs with a friend of mine in L.A., and then moving to New York, where we got it together." The band is first called Metal Envelope and then Circus Mort, and they play no-wave punk rock similar to other New York bands like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks and the Contortions, whose drummer plays bass in Circus Mort. Circus Mort is, by Gira's own admission, "not a very consequential enterprise. We played the clubs like Danceteria and all those places, but it never really took off. We made an EP. It was kinda new wave or something. In any case, it wasn't very good." The group disband in 1981.

1982 to 1983
"I decided I had to do something after Circus Mort," Gira recalls. "I borrowed a bass and learned how to make sounds from it. I wouldn't say I learned how to play or make grooves, but I did learn how to make rhythm and sound with the bass. I had a drummer who also in Circus Mort; we got a guitarist and then another bass player. So we had two bass players and two drummers, as well as tape loops going at the same time. We created quite a racket. It was a pretty excellent time." That band is Swans, an undertaking that would last the next 15 years with Michael Gira as its only constant member, orchestrating a revolving door of musicians. From the beginning, Swans pursue a different breed of music that separates them from the no-wave and post-punk that is the defining sound of New York. "I'd been influenced by groups like Throbbing Gristle and the Stooges simultaneously, so somewhere in between those two points I managed to pull something together," Gira says of the blend of industrial-music aesthetics and no-wave art-school brutalism that drives Swans. "It all came about rather instinctively. The idea of making chunks of sounds and rhythm as the way to make music, instead of using melody or a groove. I guess we had a groove, but at the same time it was static music, more just about onslaughts of sounds. And then of course I had to scream my guts out for some reason or other, and I guess it made something unique."
The band record their first EP, a four-song set entitled Swans that bears strong no-wave roots. By the time they go back in the studio later that year to record their debut album, only Gira and Jonathan Kane (of Circus Mort) remain. "The first album was recorded in a week most likely. We didn't have any money. It was a problem putting it out, even back then. Everything turned into conflict, but that was just who I was at the time."
The resulting album — 1983's Filth — proves to be a completely different prospect than what Gira has created before it. With ferociously heavy and static rock buoyed by industrial drumming, Filth presupposes post-hardcore bands like Big Black, Killdozer and the early Touch & Go family of bands. It isn't a direction that sticks for long, as Gira's lyrics grow more tortured and embedded with religiosity, and as the band's membership evolves.

1984 to 1987
With Swans garnering critical attention and a growing cult audience for the unpredictable theatricality and spontaneous violence of the live shows, the mid-'80s are a deeply creative and prolific period for Gira. Sophomore album Cop is released in 1984; it's a highlight from the early catalogue that features the band slowing down the punk tempos of Filth to a slow and doomy sludge. The twin 1986 albums Greed and Holy Money, as well as the single "Screw," are all recorded in the same sessions and showcase Swans as a constantly evolving entity, eager to grow and never make the same album twice. "I saw it as a natural progression," Gira says of that period. "One thing led to the other, constantly. We'd find something we did on a record, and then decide to pursue that for the next one. Something would occur on one record, and I would think, 'That's a very good thread to move forward with.' And that's what happened."
A significant part of the band's evolution has to do with the arrival of singer Jarboe in 1986. "She was a fan we met in New York. We began corresponding and naturally she became part of the group. Early on, she didn't sing very much at all. She just played this early sampling device that basically looped chunks of sound, producing this roar from beginning to end. When she slammed down the keyboard, this wall of sound would erupt. She began to step out and sing live, on tours for albums like Greed. We didn't start using her melodic abilities until Children of God."
As the relationship between Gira and Jarboe moves into romance, Swans gravitate to more melodic territory and Jarboe begins to assume a role as co-leader, leading to a more gothic texture to the group's output. Beginning in 1987, the pair would record three albums together outside Swans, first as Skin and then as World of Skin. Those outings drop the wall-of-noise brutality of Swans in exchange for a Jarboe-led ethereal moodiness akin to bands like Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil. All this productivity leads to a fundamental shift in how Swans should sound. "We had recorded as World of Skin together, and we wanted to incorporate some of the elements from that into songs," says Gira."I just wanted some more dynamics, and we began thinking of music as more of a soundtrack than just a band in a room." The resulting creative breakthrough is the 1987 album Children of God, which tempers the resolute anger of Swans' sound with brooding melody and a more prevalent emphasis on tape loops. The record is received as the band's pinnacle at the time, confirming them at the forefront of avant-garde alternative music in Europe and finally and delivering the band to larger audiences in North America, where even a marginal commercial breakthrough had always been elusive. The single "New Mind" reaches #47 on the U.S. college radio charts.
1988 to 1990
With Swans' popularity at a peak and the Skin side-project drawing further interest, Gira and Jarboe record two cover versions of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Meant to be a quiet one-off EP as Swans, Gira records a version with his vocals, and Jarboe does another with her own. Improbably, it become the band's most successful single ever, reaching #2 on the U.S. college radio charts and #85 on the UK singles chart. Soon after, Gira disowns the song and refuses to reissue the version with his vocals for many years. Its unexpected popularity leads to another strange situation: Swans sign to major label MCA for their next album. The Burning World is released in 1989, and signals a stylistic shift in the band's sound, away from the wall-of-noise agitation and toward the more stripped-down gothic darkness of the Skin side project. Though the record receives a mixed critical reaction, it does produce the semi-successful single "Saved," which reaches #20 on the U.S. college radio charts and, for the first and only time, #28 on the U.S. modern rock charts. Yet according to Gira, the album is the centrepiece of "a horrible time. It was a huge disaster, artistically and otherwise. There were some good songs on that record, but artistically it was just a nightmare. I had an ambition in mind, but I didn't quite know how to do what I wanted to do, and allowed a producer to get involved, because they demanded it. It was Bill Laswell, who's a great producer, but not for me. I just lost focus." In 1990, Gira and Jarboe released the third World of Skin album, Ten Songs from Another World, but with momentum abating, the record isn't as successful as the first two.

1991 to 1995
After The Burning World doesn't sell well enough for MCA, Swans are freed from their contract, and in 1991 Gira creates of his own imprint, Young God Records. Its first release is the seventh Swans album, White Light from the Mouth of Infinity; it's considered a return to form by many and sees the band returning to moody soundtrack work with greater electronic processing. But the album and the new label quickly run into distribution problems. "We were going through Rough Trade for distribution at the time, and we shipped out a huge amount of that record, and then they went under. It was a huge disaster." Swans are able to rekindle themselves artistically, but distribution problems in the early to mid-'90s would continue to plague Gira and the band, leaving several strong albums floundering in obscurity and unable to counter the negative perception left by The Burning World. Along with White Light, 1992's Love of Life and 1993's live album, Omniscience, are released via the obscure German distributor Sky. Much of the band's powerhouse rhythm section from the mid- to late '80s had moved on, and so Gira and Jarboe advance in a quieter direction, building more melodious songs about depression and death. "The music recorded in the early to mid-'90s was an extension of the idea of music as a soundtrack, moving further and further in that direction," says Gira. "We also began moving into really extended long songs — 15- to 17-minute-long songs — slowly building grooves." Though they continue to tour regularly, Gira and Swans don't release any new music for three years after Love of Life, as legal complications with Sky lead to more obstacles with distribution. Once finally free of any obligations to Sky, Swans return in 1995 with The Great Annihilator, a gorgeously dark and pulsing record that in retrospect sets up their grand swan song perfectly. That year, Gira also releases his first proper solo album, Drainland, billed as a "Swans Related Project" companion record to Jarboe's Sacrificial Cake.

1996 to 1997
After 15 years of Swans and a wall of business-side complications seemingly always in the way, Gira, who is in his early 40s now, begins to wear out. "I just couldn't take it anymore, physically or mentally. I was completely exhausted, and just didn't have the audacity or the strength to continue anymore. It had never been easy. It was always a struggle. Music was often great and very elating, but the process itself was never easy. At a certain point it just felt easier to stop." Swans have effectively come to an end. Gira and Jarboe decide to release one last album under the name and follow it up with a farewell tour. Triumphantly, the resulting album — a massive, two-disc set entitled Soundtracks for the Blind — is the most ambitious and best-received album of their career. Quieter and more delicate, Soundtracks builds its epic-length tracks out of tape loops and field recordings to form a bristling and often coldly beautiful swan song for the wall of noise and depressive tendencies that preceded it. With their label troubles behind them, the album hits the kind of heights and their final tour is one of the biggest of Gira's career.
1998 to 2000
Michael Gira doesn't slow down, nor does he stop working with many of the same musicians. The primary reason for Swans' demise is to upend the creative obstacles that have grown out of a particular way of working, but post-Swans, Gira says, "I took less on my plate. The records were simpler. After being involved in so much overwhelming volume and masses of sound, the primary method of working had to be a song I could play and sing and have it be an effective performance just by myself. That guided what I would record, and then things would grow from that." The first post-Swans project is the Body Lovers' 1998 album, Number One of Three. Featuring Jarboe and a few other late-period Swans alumni, the wholly instrumental record showcases Gira indulging the more experimental fringes of his musical output, as well as collaborations with Pan Sonic's Mika Vaino and experimental guitarist James Plotkin. The Body Lovers is a one-off project, with only a second limited-edition companion disc by the Body Haters emerging in 1999. But the project does signal a strong relaunch for Young God, which grows exponentially in stature over the next years, as Gira's new projects emerge and as a series of posthumous Swans collections and reissues flesh out the label. The most significant of Gira's post-Swans outings is Angels of Light, a revolving door collective of musicians, many of whom had contributed to Swans. The first Angels of Light album is 1999's New Mother, and it introduces Gira's more melodic sensibilities, blending in elements of folk music with a taste for both murder ballads and dark soundscapes. Though the album is a logical progression from Swans' final records, Young God and Gira are seen as leading lights in the early 2000's neo-folk movement, which sees a younger generation looking back to the foreboding and moody catalogues of obscure acts like Current 93, Jandek and Swans.

2001 to 2004
Angels of Light's sophomore effort, How I Loved You, is another peak in a particularly creative and fruitful period in Gira's career, in which the constraints of style and industry are still loose enough for him to record as freely as he'd once managed back in the golden 1982 to '87 stretch. The Angels of Light tour continuously, producing 2002's stellar live album We Were Alive!!!, and 2003's equally impressive studio album, Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home. Young God is doing better than ever. Gira also releases a run of well-received solo albums under his own name, including 2000's Somniloquist, 2001's Solo Recordings at Home and What We Did, 2002's Living '02, and 2004's I Am Singing To You From My Room.
Gira also plays godfather to some leading lights in the neo-folk movement. "It felt like I was able to use all the things I'd learned on young victims," Gira says. Young God Records becomes home to several non-Gira projects, among them Devendra Banhart and later Akron/Family. "I was able to usher in nascent talent and help it realize itself, and that's what I think my role was with Devendra and Akron/Family," says Gira. "I tried to get them to realize their strengths and give them confidence. Of course I helped with the producing of the records and the way things were orchestrated and recorded, but it was more a way of ushering them into the world."
Between 2002 and 2004, Gira produces the three first Banhart albums, which establish the young singer as one of the most talented voices in new music. Oh Me Oh My… (2002), according to Gira, is composed of "recordings that were done sometimes on friends' answering machines and little hand-held recording devices. The idea at first was to try and record those in the studio, but the more I listened to those demos, they had such a magical quality. We decided to just release those." Gira takes Devendra Banhart on tour as well. "He opened for Angels of Light in Europe, but he also played guitar in the band. This was one of the ways I had to bring him to an audience, put him in front of the audience I had and then let it evolve and grow from there. He's immensely talented. He didn't need much. Just some confidence and some focus. By the end of the tour, he had a bigger audience than we did." 2004 sees the release of Banhart's second and third albums, a companion set entitled Rejoicing in the Hands (widely considered a creative peak) and Niño Rojo.
2005 to 2007
With Devendra Banhart's runaway success opening up unimaginable opportunities, tension grows between the rising protegé and his mentor. "I felt very protective of him," says Gira, "and I didn't want him to make the same horrible mistakes I'd made. As a result, I was probably very domineering and very threatening, and we fell out after a while." Banhart leaves Young God for indie label XL. But Banhart's exit from the Young God family is offset by the discovery of Akron/Family. Small-town Americans who'd moved to New York in search of music careers, Gira discovers the haggard troupe of young musicians plying their trade on stage. Soon after, Gira and Akron/Family begin playing music together. "They were my backing band and they also opened, which is a Herculean effort," he says. "It just went over great. To me, they were at that point in time the best rock band in the world. Stomping, wild, unpredictable vocal harmonies."
Between 2005 and 2007, Akron/Family record four albums with Gira producing. He developes his new protegés as studio musicians, and they in turn reinvigorate their mentor's spirits at a time when Gira is quietly approaching another creative dead end. Among the highlights of the Young God discography is 2005's Akron/Family and Angels of Light, a country-tinted collaborative album where Gira sings, backed by the band. That year, Gira releases The Angels of Light Sing Other People, which sees him indulging a more straightforward and haggardly country drawl, earning him comparisons to Johnny Cash. Once again, Gira's alienating protectiveness begins to push away Akron/Family, and 2007's Love Is Simple is their last record together.

2008 to 2010
I had written these songs over three or four years," says Gira of the material that eventually leads to the reformation of Swans in 2010. "It's embarrassing that it took that long, but I had a horrible case of writer's block. I guess I just wasn't interested in doing an Angels of Light record." No reunion for old fans, this is a continuation of the journey into more abstract and minimal soundtrack aggression. For a person so principled about not looking back, he is confident about which elements from the past ae worthy of re-ignition. "It is a new project," he says. "I'm just calling it Swans. A lot of elements from that band, threads of that, bleed through into what we're doing, and I don't see any reason not to use that name. I built it." As has been the case throughout his career, the new Swans is an amalgamation of longtime musician friends who've all played together in the past. "Because everybody lives in different places around the country," he says, "we couldn't rehearse three or four days a week, so we had to get together and work intensely. So we were in the studio for ten to 12 days total, and we would take one song per day and play it for about 12 hours straight. It would open up and become fresh and interesting in the way only this whole group together could make it grow and expand. And then we'd record that and move on to the next one the next day. Everybody knew who everyone else was, and so there was no getting to know personalities. It couldn't have worked out better." The resulting album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, is definitely of its time and, as always, a bold push forward for Michael Gira's creativity. Jarboe hasn't returned to the group, but there are some of the stronger melodic elements that bled into Angels of Light. Even Devendra Banhart makes an appearance, and the two are back on good terms. In 2010, Gira's authenticity, his uncompromising history and visceral music, sound more necessary than ever in a world of mostly disposable music for the internet. He is that increasingly rare breed of career musician that fans can believe in. Swans have just hit the road, and their live show establishes them without doubt as one of the most intense performers currently on tour. "Look at the attention we're getting," Gira muses. "I think it's great. If it was some kind of reunion record, where we played some old style, then that would just be really embarrassing and horrible. But we're really pushing things forward, I think." That's all he's ever wanted.


Essential Michael Gira

Swans Filth (Young God, 1983)
The violent and sludgy beginnings of a band that would later veer into more ethereal landscapes. But Filth is equal parts Throbbing Gristle and the Stooges, and 27 years after its release it holds up remarkably well, given how much bands like Big Black and Melvins have upheld that particular sound.

Swans Soundtracks for the Blind (Young God, 1997)
At two discs and two-and-a-half hours, Soundtracks for the Blind is about as epic as Swans would ever get. Michael Gira produced this more as a collage of field recordings, tape loops, and session music, weaving it into an incredibly complex structure that would exhaust him completely of what Swans had become. It's a masterpiece.

Angels of Light How I Loved You (Young God, 2001)
One of many impressive recordings from the very prolific 2001 to 2005 period, in which Gira had broken free from the creative dead ends of Swans and reinvented himself as a songwriter not afraid of melody. This record especially establishes him as a musician who is going to age very well, still bristling with new ideas. By Dimitri Nasrallah/Exclaim 11/1


Swans are back from the dead with a heart-pumping “No Words/No Thoughts” is an appropriate Swans refresher, and a great opening track. After over four minutes of a steady buildup of well-orchestrated(and briefly deafening) bells, guitars, drums, and screeching saws taking flight(well, sounds that way, at least), Gira rears his consistently baritone voice. And, in case you were unsure who you were listening to, the song ends with a hypnotic brutality that will force your focus.

The spotlight of this album shines on “Jim”, which sounds like a bluesy murder-march to “strangle the man at the top of the stairs.” I can’t help but to think of the People’s Temple’s final moments-pastoral rants and all-when I hear this song. But, according to Gira, this song is a tribute to an old friend of his, JG Thirlwell of Foetus and Wiseblood fame. Any way you view it, this song will guide you(no matter how much you kick and scream) to some higher place.

“Eden Prison” is a heavy, dredging hike out of the “choking hold” of Eden. While the message of the song is fairly uplifting, Gira’s vocals and the loud, droning music make you feel the ponderosity of the ball and chain still attached to your ankles.

“You Fucking People Make Me Sick” features Gira’s three-year-old daughter assisting with vocals. Just thought I should mention that. The song opens beautifully, and ends with a barrage of pounding drums, (equally pounding)piano, and sliding trumpets that sound like attack aircraft are right over your head waiting to pound you.

There are obvious sprinkles of Angels of Light on this Swans album, including “Reeling the Liars in”, “Inside Madeline”, and “Little Mouth”. These songs all have a western, campfire feel, but seem to fit extraordinarily well with their border songs-even though the former follows the loudest song on the album.
This album may very well be Swans’ guiding rope up to the sky. Throughout its first fifteen years of sonic exploration, Swans were classified as No Wave, Experimental, Avant-garde, Post-rock, Art-rock, Noise-rock, Industrial, Folk, ad infinitum. “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky” checks the All-of-the-Above box while, at the same time, comprises a surprisingly accessible eight tracks that should please even the slightest of Swans fans. Michael Faries/coma-online.com 9/14
Sad-sack Swans super fans the world over have been re-wearing out their copies of Young God and Filth since the New York proto-industrial act announced their reunion and accompanying new album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, but band leader Michael Gira insists that the group’s current crop of shows, their first since the late ’90s, aren’t intended as some sort of nostalgia trip.

In an interview with the National Post, the brooding rocker explains that while reforming Swans has got him back in touch with his dark side, his intent wasn’t to rehash the past, which explains why beloved co-vocalist Jarboe isn’t in the current incarnation.

“I love her. I think she’s tremendous,” he said, “but … I think to bring her into the picture would be some kind of nostalgia thing.”

He continues on to say that people’s expectations of the group had him unsure of the concept of reforming, delaying Swans’ return for several years.

“I resisted it for a long time, my own impulse, because to me, finishing Swans in the first place years ago was such a tremendous relief. It was like taking a hair shirt off. But now I want to face my demon brother. I want to embrace an aspect of myself which is very true, but try to do it in a way that’s maybe not so self-destructive, and try to use that as a way to move forward in my music and my life.”

The long-evolving act’s current blackened mix of arcane Americana, dour goth and occasionally ethereal moments of beauty sways from a so-called Swans purist’s point of view, but Gira doesn’t care. He believes his vision has always been well ahead of what the crowd wants.

“The first five years of Swans, whatever tiny audience we had would leave. Right away, too. We started playing and they’d be, ‘Good God, what is this?’ And then when people started catching on… I was already over it and moved on to something else.” Gregory Adams/Exclaim 10/1
NY “No Wave” scene and gained notoriety as the loudest and noisiest in a catalog of musicians that included the likes of Sonic Youth, Suicide, and Lydia Lunch. Their live shows pummeled into audiences like a jackhammer on stage with drones, noise, chants and crescendos that often brought down the house (if not the police). Despite “mellowing out” a bit in their later years, they continued banging and crashing their way through the 80s and well into the 90s. Front man Michael Gira called it a day in 1996, proclaiming, “swans are dead,” shortly thereafter, and went on to form his apocalyptic folk band Angels of Light. Cultivating a small
but extremely loyal cult fan base through the years, Gira has managed to release a steady stream of albums as well as running a label (Young God Records) that includes on its roster such diverse names as Devendra Banhart, Lisa Germano, and Calla. In early 2010, apparently bored with his acoustic guitar, Gira announced the reformation of Swans, bringing the noise back with a vengeance and insisting this was no sissy-nostalgia act dragging a corpse along the road to reap the benefits of a new generation of fans raised on the post-rock tension-build-release sound they coined, but rather as the rejuvenation of the spirit of loud. Auxiliary Magazine sat down with Mr. Gira to discuss the past, the present, and the future of Swans.
You’ve said that reviving Swans has allowed you to move forward. How is it doing that and where do you see Swans going in the next few years?
Michael Gira : I guess it’s moving forward because I’m not doing Angels [of Light] anymore. Angels had its own particular way of working, which was kind of a relief to do at the beginning because I would just base things on my acoustic guitar and my voice and my words and think about the orchestration after I was sure that the song itself was really strong enough to be performed just on acoustic guitar, and then record it by itself and just start orchestrating. Of course I could have taken these songs and made them louder or had more guitar in them or added open, building sections and called it ‘Angels’, but it just didn’t make any sense to me to do that. So I decided, you know, I want to call it ‘Swans’, because I’d been making bigger sounds anyway. So I did that. And it’s kind of freed me up because for a long time I’ve been trapped in this little world of writing everything on an acoustic guitar and staring at my computer screen endlessly trying to come up with words, and they get less and less as time goes by. So now what’s opened up for me is that, for instance, on the new album there will be long instrumental sections. And I think that’s where I’m going to start with the next record – is with making these long instrumentals then worrying about vocals later.
How do you approach writing in Swans and how is that different from how you approached writing in Angels of Light?
MG : Well, just that. You know, if you look at the history of Swans, it’s different all the time. Like in the early days, I had a bass and I’d bash out a rhythm, and I do mean ‘bash’ because I didn’t really know how to play, and work out some vocals, kind of as the band worked out the rhythm into something. So it was mainly based on rhythm and sound. Then later along the way, I guess ’86 or, yeah it was ’86, I started writing songs on acoustic guitar, and then taking them to the band, and the band would build them up. Later I started using loops and other thing to generate a sound to begin with. It’s just been all varied. But now I’m thinking more of Swans
as this kind of open-ended sonic ambition. I’m thinking less about songs per-se, at least for the future.
How did you choose this particular line-up?
MG : Just friends I wanted to work with again. I hadn’t seen Norman [Westberg, original guitarist of Swans] in a long time. Then he came to a solo show I did about a year ago, and we got along really great. I’d already been thinking about making louder music again, I guess ‘loud’ is a really bad word because it’s not about being loud but being more all-encompassing and developing sounds, and once I started contacting Norman again the idea of Swans made more and more sense, so I got Norman involved. Everyone else is just people I know and love that have either been in Swans or Angels of Light.
The new Swans album is due to be released at the end of September.
MG : September 23.
It has eight tracks, seven of which we got sort of a preview taste with your solo album, I Am Not Insane. Where did that last eight song come from, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”?
MG : [laughing] That came in the middle of the sessions when we started recording little vignettes, little bits because I wanted to have a segue way somewhere in the record to give sonic relief to the rest of the record and it gradually just developed. Different sounds would be added to it, different loops and things with no intent, really. Then gradually I was listening to it and I realized, ‘Oh this is really neat, there’s a little acoustic guitar song in there.’ So I went home and I recorded the song. I was just kind of looking at these horrible music websites, and those words came out. I was singing it and it was really odd to me the way I was singing it, the natural way I was singing to this little riff I had, and I realized I was singing it like the one and only Devendra Banhart. So I called Devendra and had him sing the song. And that’s how it grew.
This album wasn’t recorded in the traditional everybody-get-together-and rehearse kind of way because everyone was spread all over. Is this the first time you’ve done an album where everyone is remote like that?
MG : You’re mistaken. [laughs] Everybody lives in different places but I flew the people that were necessary to fly in, and we got together in the studio, in a large basement in the studio, which had fifteen or eighteen foot ceilings and about a 2,000 square foot space, and we set up in a semi-circle very close to each other and we started playing songs. We played each song, there were ten songs under consideration to begin with, for about twelve hours a day until it just grew and grew and grew and grew until it was something that was completely unique to this line-up. It was very loud in there and the sounds were swirling around, and it was
like going to church or something. It was a really ecstatic experience. So when we had reached a certain point with the songs where I thought they were truly alive, we had the engineer push record, and we recorded those. Then we started doing overdubs after that and I gathered other people, friends and compatriots I know around the world, and had them contribute.
There is another album called Look at Me Go that will be available during the tour as well, is that right?
MG : That’s a companion CD to a special double CD version of this album that will only be available on the tour, the website and at a few select stores around the country.
What’s on that?
MG : I took all the instrumental passages or the instrumental passages I thought were evocative, certain solo instruments and things I liked on the record itself, and went back to the multi-tracks and I put them into a computer and looped them. Then I added other further overdubs on them and extended sections. For instance, that growing, building tension in the middle of “Eden Prison” goes on for like eight minutes now, with strings coming in and lots of different guitars and horns. I had a lot of extra people play extra things on it and just built them up and made a 45 minute piece of music out of it.
How do you approach the music you play on stage versus in the studio? What can audiences expect to hear on tour?
MG : Well, I look at the songs as just a beginning point for live. I imagine that things will be even more intense live and that certain sections will be a lot longer and that we’ll just… uh… wring the blood out of it. I don’t like the idea of just trying to replicate the songs. I’ve never done that.
How do you juggle running a label, Young God Records, and a full-time music career?
MG : I don’t. I pretty much don’t sleep at all and go insane most of the time. I’ve been spending most of my time for the last two or three years on other people’s music, aside from doing the touring that I do and things like that, but I’ve come to a point where I want to focus on my own music now, so I’m winding the label down for now. The certain artists that are already on the label of course I will continue to release their music, but otherwise I’m not going to keep pursuing the label.
Are you doing anything outside of music? Like writing?
MG : No. This is what I do.
Do you think that you’ve accomplished what you set out to do on the new album?
MG : No, but that’s good. Because what I set out to do was change in the wrong way. I was surprised by accidents, by mistakes, by input of other people (of course), and I was sort of like a film director taking care of or taking advantage of other peoples’ improvisations. You know, like when someone does something that I think enhances the original concept then of course I go with that or if there is an accident that happens that I find more interesting than the original intent, I go with that. So it’s always a work-in-progress. I don’t know if I’m happy with the way it came out or not. I can’t really hear it anymore because I’ve worked on it for so
many hours and spent so many hours running the record through my brain at night as I try to arrange it and thinking about overdubs that had to take place and thinking about what song goes where or how the whole album should be arranged… I can’t really hear it anymore. In fact, all I need to do is just lie down and I could think the whole record through Tim Windsor/Auxiliary magazine October

Swans formed in New York's early 1980s' post-punk scene, and until their original disbanding in 1997 were renowned for their consistent, uncompromising originality. In January of this year, their singer and songwriter Michael Gira announced that Swans would be re-forming for a new album, released September 23, called My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. The Daily spoke with Gira on the phone about Swans' past, present, and future.

The McGill Daily: What made you decide to reform Swans?

Michael Gira: What made me decide? It was time. I had been making these highly orchestrated, more gentle cinematic records under the guise of Angels of Light for about 15 years, and I had been wanting to participate in or be enveloped by or engulfed by louder, more physically brutalizing music for a number of years. When I came to begin recording these recent songs, I was thinking I was going to record them as Angels of Light, but as I began to do so I sort of lost interest, so I just thought, “Why don't I restart Swans?” So that's what I did, because I wanted to make something that was physically demanding and something that was sort of monumental sonically.

MD: Are you planning to return to the Angels of Light moniker, or have you discontinued that?

MG: I don't have any spare time right now. I want to pursue Swans, for the foreseeable future, so that's what I'm doing.

MD: So there will be more albums and more tours coming from Swans?

MG: Yes, this is not a one-off nostalgic reunion clown-act tour.

MD: What motivates you to write your music, what is the drive or impulse behind it?

MG: The way I used to answer that question, which I think is still apt, is that nobody asks a butcher why he cuts meat. So I dunno, it's what I am, it's what I was made to do. You know, I did a lot of years of working in construction jobs and doing some pretty awful work, and I was, you know, either an artist or a musician and so I just pursued that in a headstrong way so that I could make a living out of it. That's just what I'm meant to do, I don't know what motivates me.

MD: What are your lyrical inspirations for the current album, what are your themes?

MG: Oh I don't know...I guess the main theme is the desire to dissolve, like putting a spoonful of sugar in water and stirring it, that's what I'd like to be. So, I guess that's what [my themes] are about – they're about the desire to atomize, to dissolve, to rise up to heaven in a cloud of diamond dust.

MD: In the early 1980s, how did you see Swans and yourself as fitting into the New York downtown art/music scene?

MG: I didn't really see us fitting. I don't think we fit at all.

MD: Were you popular among that crowd?

MG: I think we were sort of a phenomenon. It was like we were roadkill that people came to look at. The only band that we really had any affinity with was Sonic Youth, and that was mostly because we were friends and we toured together just to help each other. …The whole great “No New York” moment had ended, and New York was comprised of these fake jazz bands and a lot of really trendy music, and the most popular stuff was this horrible English dance pop that was coming in. We were just the underbelly, the underside of that sort of thing, really divorced from it really. Sonic Youth and us didn't really have much in common musically, but we were protective of each other for a while. But that didn't really last long and I didn't see Swans as being any part of the New York scene or anything. I'm not a very outgoing, social person anyway. ...What Swans is is its own thing, it really doesn't relate to other people very much.

MD: One final question, what should we expect from your shows?

MG: I suppose that you should expect to feel like a fly inside a washing machine.

MD: So it's going to be loud, then.

MG: Yeah, I suppose.
Tim Gentles/McGill Daily
When Michael Gira broke up Swans almost 15 years, he cited the music industry and people’s preconceived notions on what the band should sound like as major factors in the break up of the band. He went on to form the quieter Angels Of Light and regularly insisted that Swans would never get back together. Last year he changed his mind, bringing back players from different eras of the band’s original existence, including original guitarist Norman Westberg to reform Swans. “THIS IS NOT A REUNION” Gira stressed in a press release, “It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past… If you have expectations about how Swans should be, that’s your business, but it would be a disservice to both of us if I were to make music with your needs in mind, and the music would certainly suffer as a result.” Thankfully for us, Gira carries through.
The album opens with the sound of bells ringing in the background before launching into the off kilter stomp of “No Words/No Thoughts”, which is also the longest track on the album coming in at nearly 9 ½ minutes. Drums start to stomp on and off and noises buzz in the background as the whole piece crescendos, until dropping off into a single drone as the single guitar picks up behind it. Percussion and bells fill the background until a snare march kicks in and Gira’s vocals finally kick in after the 4 minute mark. The album immediately steps back in volume with the next two songs, the gentle folk of “Reeling The Liars In” and the almost waltz of “Jim”, until kicking back into full force with the pounding “My Birth”. The album’s centerpiece features a guest appearance from Devendra Banhart, the mandolin driven “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. Banhart’s voice works well with the band, a simple sing-songy tune which his lyrics are later echoed by a child (Gira’s 3 year old daughter) until it abruptly stops in a sea of pounding pianos, drums and horns.
“Eden Prison” is a highlight, immediately kicks the album back into a more classic Swans stomp with a repeating rising guitar line from Westberg. The song reaches its thundering mid-section stacking instrument upon instrument into the stomp before dropping back into the original. “Little Mouth” closes out the record with another acoustic based number with backing vocals until it eventually drops out with Gira singing the last minute of the record accapella.
Through their years as a band, Swans covered many different ranges of sound, from the brutally minimal violence of their early albums to the dark folk of their later years. Anyone expecting a return to the early sound is most likely going to be disappointed because this record picks up almost where the band last left us. Gira’s Angels Of Light is also a close reference for some of the material, but the album is pure Swans. Not many bands can come back over a decade later and create a truly new and unique document that doesn’t try for some sort of past nostalgia, but in the case of “My Father…”, Swans are definitely NOT dead.– Adam Bubolz/Reviler.org 9/23
…For Swans, ten minutes of loud, deep strings on tape gave way to each musician taking the stage, first Shearwater's Thor Harris on percussion and finally the rest of the band and lastly, Gira. He stood stoically and surveyed the crowd and as the noise began to swell he donned his guitar and rocked back and forth before the band broke into blaring instrumental, face-melting, rock mode. Even with earplugs it was deafening. It was mesmerizing and devastating and sounded great in such a cozy, old theater like the National. "Holy shit, I still can't hear!" said one kid as he bounded out of the venue before the set was over. He was certainly not alone and any questions about the reboot of the band were settled. Dominick Mastrangelo/BrooklynVegan.com 10/5
Swans new album is incredible beautiful noise! After a long wait, with "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky" they have made a record today which is rare in it's brilliance. Current music in the cultural void it is, this clash and clang voices of little children strange intense sounds record comes as a welcome thrilling surprise comparatively. Enter another world with songs like "You People Make Me Fucking Sick" and "Reeling The Liars In." This is our music. Thank God for Swans! Michelle V./DeadCoolshop.com 9/28
The Swans is a group I formerly found difficult to make my peace with. Having heard one LP—which one, I forget—I didn't much care for it even though the group was enjoying very good word of mouth and critical review. I still have a copy of another slab, Holy Money, though, because it's such a strange collision of Einstuerzende Neubauten, a barbed-out Killing Joke, touches of Merzbow and Last Exit, basically morphined diabolical high drama that just didn't connect with my own ears, still doesn't, and I'm not sure why. I always hang on to music like that, figuring I'll one day sort it out. This release, however, resolves the dilemma, and it may well be that the very label they're now releasing under, Young God (not coincidentally run by Swans' honcho Michael Gira), is the most effective agent of polemic in that regard, as YG has been home to quite a few very good cracked-art discs of late.
My Father emerges far more darkly melodic than Money and inducts Lou Reed, an ugly Legendary Pink Dots, and a welter of obscurer sophisticated influences I can't quite identify while following the kind of thick classicalist structures Glenn Branca and James Blackshaw might create. In other words, Gira has entered a new and far more mature phase I suspect will now indisputably mark him as force to be reckoned with well beyond past acclaim. The lead cut alone, No Words / No Thoughts is a powerhouse of oscillating lakes of calm and fury that's going to tear holes in the ears of Crimson-oids, Joke-sters, and Velvet-eens. However, a number of sessioneers come in through the side door, the enigmatic Devendra Banhart among them, so it isn't surprising when folk ruminations prance about as well, but with arch intent, dripping with leashed anger and righteous indignation (Reeling the Liars In).
Gira's almost a drop-dead ringer for Iggy Pop in the voicebox department, a trait that helps tremendously here as noise and chaos factors run rampant, the only controls centered in his measured conductive paces leashed just barely enough to prevent the studio from exploding. This is intense fare, not for the weak of heart or nerve, and one must suspect that the Swans have matured in the intervening years in ways even they didn't quite suspect. My Father is most likely the beginning of a whole new chapter for this band, and art rockers would do well take note, bend an ear, and ponder what their own next moves will be. A decent percentage of post-punk is showing a disposition to contend for territory. Mark Tucker/ AcousticMusic.com 9/3

OK, so I’m aware that it’s been a couple months since this record was deployed on us, so why am I even bothering to review it like, years later? Everyone must have an opinion on it already; Pitchfork and Stereogum and their ilk have already spoken! You know what to think! So I should sod off, quit while I’m far enough behind to evade any mobs. Well, hold it, bub! I am not an idjit! I know what I’m doing; I’ve got an angle. And it’s an angle that, having had much longer to live with this album, really analyzes it right down to the coagulating dirt under its fingernails. All the other bum-rushed publications couldn’t have approximated this feeling in only one week of courting the monolithic My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky.
I already tried many times to write this review from the perspective of someone who has adored the iconic iconoclastic Swans since the tender and ungainly age of twelve. So why didn’t I just bash the sucker out and hand it in on the due date like a good freelance student? Because I was being disingenuous; I only feel like I’ve loved Swans since I was twelve. I actually only delved into them last year during an inconsolably dour period in my life, and I actually had to postpone becoming familiar with them because they were just enticing my breakdown. So I really only got into them after I heard the early release of “Eden Prison” and was reminded that I’m in a better place now. I can get into them without being persuaded to cut out my heart, burn it, then eat it (actual instructions from “Raping A Slave”).
So I dug in and boy did I dig! Their first four records, that is. Especially Greed / Holy Money. I had no idea monotonous, ruthless cacophony could be so emotionally arresting. I never thought some creep repeating “I’m worthless, I love you” ad-nauseum over a stupid booming beat could be so appealing. I never thought the voice of Ed Gein singing “I wrap your flesh around my face, when I wear your flesh I love myself.” (”Young God”) could be a sentiment I empathize with. I ate it up. Engorged upon it. Almost put myself back into the sorry state I was in when I discovered Swans. I didn’t mind. I was just so ebullient (if, as a musician myself, a bit envious) to hear such sordid, abominable emotions set to such compelling music. Of course, I didn’t want to exhaust my affections on records that I will still want to appreciate years from now, so I moved on to their other records.
I gave the Great Annihilator a whirl next because I met the guy who had bought that album’s master tapes from that tricksy pixie Jarboe. I instantly adored Annihilator and we went steady for a while. Then we grew a little weary of each other and decided to see other people. So I moved on to Soundtracks For The Blind and found my new favorite afternoon philosophy reading incidental music. But I had made my way through all Swans had to offer, and I was more than a little bummed (I actually felt the same as when I watched the last episode of Twin Peaks…). I had exhausted their catalog in search of more of that gloriously oppressive sound. And all I wound up with were those first three records, plus inspired flashes from Annihilator, Children and Soundtracks. Was I missing anything? Were there prospective stones still left to turn over? Of course there were! So I listened to the sundry rarities compilation (Body To Body, Job To Job) and found a stale helping of what I was craving. I turned to Public Castration Is A Good Idea and discovered the most raucous live album of all time (f*** Live At Reeds, f*** No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, f*** Arc/Weld; this is everything louder than everything else). But these protracted Holocaust Section versions of Greed / Holy Money songs didn’t exactly hit the spot either. So I excavated feverishly. I tried Godflesh (apparently, they’re considered Swans’ progenitors?) and found a mediocre grudge-metal bland, I mean, band. I tried Michael Gira’s solo work and Angels of Light and found some gorgeous dirgef-olk that will appeal to me every Autumn. I perused through the No-Wave files and found many bands I will fall madly in love with this summer, when I am finally living in the city (fingers crossed). I searched low and beyond low (for that is where you find music like early Swans: at the very bottom), but dredged up no desirable results. Where could I find something, anything, in the same festering vein as Filth and Cop and Greed / Holy Money?
Then I remembered that Swans released three albums between Children of God and Annihilator… That must be it! “Eden” was proof that they are still capable of that power, so maybe they wielded it unrestrainedly on those three records? I looked them up and descended upon them like a famished buzzard. And that was when I found the three most disappointing records since I discovered what really lay beyond Disintegration when I delved into The Cure all those years ago. Now, that’s not to say that period of Swans bears no merit. I will listen to Various Failures years from now and become enamored with it. But for now, those records did not deliver that rawr powa, so they sound like the most shamelessly major-label-courting dreck since Scott Walker’s “wilderness era.” Because of that, I put tremendous pressure on this new record to deliver the spoiled goods I sought. And I divulge all this to convey just how it informs my review.
So what is my review of My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, a miraculous record that we are blessed to have witnessed the release of, and Swans first in about THIRTEEN YEARS? I despise it. Absolutely abhor it. It is such a disappointment to me that I will not even consider buying the deluxe edition a year from now when I am emotionally willing to shell out the preposterous fee the eBay seller is asking. This is hardly a Swans record. It is more like a disturbed Gram Parsons record. There is a mandolin that is mixed louder than the damn guitars, damnit! And what in Jesus’ ethnic name is Devendra Banhart doing on this record? Who let him sing a duet with Gira’s daughter? And for that unnerving matter, who let Gira’s daughter in the studio? Swans is not for children! Swans is a man’s band! A big, scary man who would eat people alive if he weren’t actually so compassionate inside! Why is this beginning to sound like nu-metal lyrics? Swans could devour all of nu-metal in one gulp, and they wouldn’t even have to chew. They would then spit out the soft bits because they have no nutritional value. Becuase Swans are men. (Except Jarboe.) But she’s gone now, so Swans are just men! Big men. Tough men. Scary men. Etc.
The point is, this isn’t Filth Swans, Cop / Young God Swans, Greed / Holy Money Swans, Children of God Swans, Annihilator Swans, Soundtracks Swans or that unsightly altpop period Swans, thank Mammon! This is a brand new era, folks. And it’s not really all that exciting. For me at least… See, I wanted to hear Gira howl and growl and trash about all disconsolate like he used to. With the departure of Jarb, I thought the days of scary-Gira yore would be ushered in like the opening track on Sun O)))’s Flight of the Behemoth! But Gira hardly raises his voice. Even on “Eden,” the most Swansy track, he mostly croons. Croons! Come on, Michael! “Be Hard! Flex your muscles!”
I took so long to write this, then took so long blathering before I got to the actual review section because… honestly, I don’t know what to think of this record. It’s not actually a disappointment. It rocks speaker cones into dust! Sometimes… It kinda vacillates between these vociferous uptempo drone dirges and these spooky little folk ditties. I adore the loud tracks, but of all the folk ditties, I really only like “Reeling The Liars In” and mostly just for its sardonic smirk. Otherwise, Gira has done folk much better with Angels of Light. Or Drainland. Remember that magnificently morose record??
I insist that the real appeal of My Father… is in those cataclysmic, gloriously mawkish songs. That’s what I’m listening for! And judging by the press release, that’s what Gira resurrected Swans for! That’s where this record’s life is.
“No Words, No Thoughts” opens abruptly with a din tintinnabulation of bells, then strides into that classic lurching, squalling Swans. It is life-affirmingly good. Such an adrenaline rush. After all these years, they still regulate dynamics like a storm deity. Lordy, how do they build so high? Explain this to me, Frank Black Francis.
For all the racket, these songs are unique in the Swans oeuvre in that they are really, really catchy in a tradpop way. And what with the analogue instrumentation as opposed to their signature electronic manipulation, this is essentially the loudest folk record ever. It is organic, as though a highschool ensemble could perform it. Of course, the ensemble would have to be taught by Glen Branca and Blixa Bargeld, but you get the endearingly bizarre picture.
OK, so maybe I really like this record. Upon second listen, it was already an old, dear friend. That seldom happens with implicitly “challenging” music. Like good IDM, it is terrestrial, but otherworldly. It is strident and irascible, but fragile and empathetic. Actually, I’m just being flowery. We like it because it is bold, weird and f***ing LOUD. Who cares if Banhart and baby Gira sing on it? The most frightening stentorian use of a piano ever interrupts their duet! From a visceral standpoint, this record is mostly awesome. I guess that is my official appraisal: mostly awesome.
This record should appeal to that persnickety demographic of hipsters and indie kids in a way that none of their other ones could. Early Swans gets pegged as mostly just for the kind of people who study serial killers with a heartbroken sort of empathy. People who have never been able to forgive the way they’ve been mistreated, people who have maybe at some point felt they could say, “Someone weaker than you should rape you.” (”Time Is Money (Bastard)”). New Swans is more for anyone willing to listen. Though the lyrics to “Reeling…,” for instance, are quite morbid, there is no overlooking the change in perspective of 2010 Swans. They have evolved into a much subtler, more graceful creature. Of course, they’re still quite disturbing, but not in that insufferable 90s almost pseudogoth way. The years of vying desperately to clamber out of his dingy pigeonhole public perception have taught Gira restraint. Instead of just obliterating entire craniums with a sonic barrage, instead of just spattering his entrails all over a canvas, he evokes emotions with dexterity, sometimes with gentle strokes. Not genteel, mind you. He and faithful sideman Westberg are pushing 50, but they still kick ass.
While The Cure releases the abominable 4:13 Dream, Swans releases this. If I get over the part of me that just wants to hear the discordant strains of nihilistic enmity, My Father… is one of the most auspicious comebacks ever. It is immediately accessible (well, if you listen to such music regularly), yet will grow on you like your first beard after years of being cleanshaven. It is almost perfect, for what it is. And apparently, this is only the beginning…
Michael Gira: “Long may he live.”
I give this record four fingers. The thumb is deducted for the appalling dearth of screaming. Otherwise, a full hand.
Michael Freund/Pop-damage.com 12/15
Swans have had innumerable lineup changes throughout their existence, and have likewise also taken on a nearly endless array of genres, from their beginnings in noise terror to post-punk, industrial, folk and ambient. And up to their dissolution in 1996, Swans maintained only one constant: frontman Michael Gira. Resurrected after a 14-year absence, Swans once again took new shape with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, an intense, albeit melodic new excursion for Gira and his newest cast of players. Neither as abstract as Soundtracks for the Blind nor as belligerent as their early material, Father is a work of rugged beauty, lining up highlights such as the metal stomp of "My Birth," the bluesy folk of "Reeling the Liars In" and the malevolent dirge of "Jim." This is nothing and everything like the Swans of yore; it's exquisite. - Jeff Terich/Treblezine.com 12/15
Most '80s nostalgia paints the decade in neon as an "Oh, Mickey You're So Fine," kind of time, but no one captured its underbelly quite like the Michael Gira-led Swans. Formed in the early '80s in New York City, they were kindred spirits with Sonic Youth. Gira's menacing baritone sang of sex, death and violence in dirgelike rhythms drowned in a punishing wall of sound, setting the scene for future goth and industrial movements and yet sounding nothing like them. Through various lineups, the band expanded its sonic palette before splitting in 1997. Now a regrouped Swans returns along with transgender singer/songwriter/pianist/harpist Baby Dee. Jon Takiff/Philadelphia Daily News 9/24

They’re back! Michael Gira, founding member of the Swans and Young Yod Records maven, has decided to utilize the Swans to further his musical vision. He’s emphatic that this is not a reunion and it is not a “dumb-ass nostalgia act.” Indeed, this is new, and it’s epic. It also could be the most musical Swans album yet. “No Words/No Thoughts” opens the album with bone-crushing power. It’s ominous, it’s evil. During the first few minutes, you can even hear the power saw cutting through your soul. “Reeling the Liars In” sounds sort of like a cross between Johnny Cash and a sacred hymn from the old West. Except it’s not very sacred, because their tossing liars onto the fire to keep wam. “Jim” starts out a little jazzy, but then lumbers and thuds, continuing the old time sound, this time sounding a little like a warped chain-gang work song crossed with gospel. I mean, the description doesn’t do the track justice. It’s brilliant, it really is; it’s exploding with power. There’s some incredible guitar work from Bill Rieflin (from the Revolting Cocks & Ministry), in which he’s rapidly plucking the strings on multiple acoustic guitars to create a hammered dulcimer sort of sound. “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” is an interesting track, starting out pleasantly enough, with jaw harp rhythms sounding very ethnic. This yields to other instruments, including guitar, piano and electronics, providing a sort of shimmer, and then the mandolins come in, and we get vocals sung by Devendra Banhart and by Michael Gira’s 3 year old daughter. It’s quite delicate, until the vocals complete, and some violent acoustic instruments begin pummeling us, including piano, percussion, and slide trombones and trumpets. “Eden Prison” pounds and drones and swirls. Halfway through the track, the vocals end and the track starts pounding harder and stops swirling. Every instrument pounds, guitars, percussion, chimes, everything. About a minute before the end the pounding stops and fades, and there’s a moment of silence. And then the vocals and swirling returns. The album ends with a track called “Little Mouth.” It’s a fitting closer, sounding like a bit of an ambling song – like something that might be sung ambling through a forest or something. It even includes whistling in the background. The track ends nakedly, with Gira’s acapella vocals. Overall, this album can best be summed up as sounding like the soundtrack to a movie western written and directed by David Lynch. There’s lots of western folk music influence in here, but there’s a darkness, something sinister in the music, something twisted. You know what I mean? Another reviewer for a different publication used the word “grizzled” to describe the sound, and it’s so apt a description, I’ll steal it. The band sounds like it’s been in the desert for years, working in the mines, alternately baking and freezing, walking through sandstorms. An interesting note – if you look at the track times, they seem kind of long, averaging around six minutes each (some are around three, the opener is more than nine). But they don’t seem nearly that long. These are not self indulgent wank fests, on these tracks, every note, every sound is just where it needs to be. Ugh, I’m gushing too profusely. Let’s just say I really like this, and am seriously disappointed that the Swans’ tour won’t take them to Southern California, or anywhere near the west coast, for that matter. A candidate for my best albums of 2010 list, and certainly one of the most anticipated of the year. - Paul Silver/JerseyBeat.com 9/1
After 13 years in limbo, The Swans have come back to life as a band, healthier than anyone could imagine.

Michael Gira put his band to bed in 1997 and moved on to different musical projects - mainly forming the band Angels of Light and running his own label, Young God Records.

This year, Gira decided to bring Swans back to life. The result is a new album, "My Father will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky" (released this month on Young God Records, and a tour that comes to Philadelphia tonight at the Troc.

In addition to the album and tour, The Swans have released a deluxe edition of the new album with entirely different artwork that includes a 46-minute companion CD of reworked material from the original recordings, with additional orchestrations and overdubs.

Gira's new work is loud, brutal - lyrically and musically - and not fodder for casual listeners. And Gira has made it a point that this is a part of the evolution of The Swans and not just another regrouping of artists to cash in on a name.

In a message on his website, Gira wrote, "THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It's not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After five Angels of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that."

Got that? It's a revivication, not a reunion.

"For me, bringing Swans back was just a personal decision - wanting to stay vital," Gira said during a phone interview last week. "I did Angels of Light for 13 years. That was more of an orchestral songwriting project.

"Over the last few years, I wrote the songs that are on the new Swans album. At the time, I assumed they'd be Angels of Light songs. But it was highly charged, physically demanding, overwhelming music. It didn't fit with Angels of Light. I thought, 'I have this name Swans, so why not go with it?'"

The current Swans lineup features Michael Norman Westberg on guitar (original Swans), Christoph Hahn on guitar (mid-period Swans/Angels of Light), Phil Puleo on drums, percussion and dulcimer (final Swans tour/Angels of Light), Chris Pravdica on bass and "gadgets" (Gunga Din), Thor Harris on drums, percussion, vibes and dulcimer (Angels of Light/Shearwater), and Gira on guitar and vocals.

The new album, the first since 1996, kicks off with "No Words/No Thoughts," a song that begins with church bells and grows into a 10-minute sonic assault.

Gira keeps the pressure on from the album's opening note to the very end. "Reeling The Liars In" suggests that every liar on earth be collected and thrown onto a funeral pyre. Another track is titled "You (expletive) People Make Me Sick."

"I originally disbanded Swans because, after 15 years, I was just fed up with it," Gira said. "With Swans, we changed - not totally changed, but morphed. I loved the music but it was tough getting the funds. And it was hard dealing with people's expectations. So I killed it.

"Now I have lots of ideas. The next album will focus on long instrumentals. I enjoy it when things sound uncomfortable. For me, the best place to be is an uncomfortable place."

Gira's current mindset includes the live presentation of songs from "My Father will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky."

"What's happening in our live shows, the songs from the album are morphing into something completely different," Gira said. "They're getting stretched out. Three of them are longer than 20 minutes now. There's so much sound. The music now sounds transcendental. People need to experience it."Denny Dyroff/Daily Local News 9/28
Quietus.com has posted a track by track preview with Swans frontman Michael Gira of their upcoming “My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky”, their first record in 13 years. Included in this is a stream of a song from the album titled “Eden Prison”. Clocking in around 6 minutes, the track is an epic droning stomp with a middle section that Gira states “Inevitable, the middle section will be extended to 20 minutes until the last drop of blood and light is strangled out of its body.” Adam Bubolz/Reviler.org 7/30
In their heyday, Michael Gira's NYC-based noise-punk outfit Swans were pretty fucking loud. Gira's gotten a new lineup together to restart the project, and the newly-revitalized Swans will release a new full-length, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, October 5 via Gira's own Young God Records.
Stereogum has premiered the album's penultimate track, "Eden Prison", and the Quietus has a Soundcloud stream of the song, which you can check out above. "Eden Prison" is a six-minute dirge featuring torrents of guitar noise and Gira's unmistakable droning menace of a voice-- and, yes, it's pretty fucking loud. Hey, it's Swans -- what did you expect? Larry Fitzmaurice/Pitchfork.com 7/30
We kick off this week’s round-up with the first single from the new Swans record, the cheerfully-titled, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It is the first album in 14 years from the legendary Michael Gira and his merchants of misery. It’s always tough to judge a Swans track until it’s played at its suggested six billion decibels, but it’s a promising start, as Gira’s voice is as powerful as ever and the track builds up to a devastating crescendo.Daniel Alvarez/Crawdaddy.com 8/16
What compelled you to start Young God Records?

What compelled me to start the label? Well I guess, initially, it was just a venue for my own music in Swans. I started dealing with other labels, and inevitably there would be conflicts. They wouldn't pay, or I’d get dropped, or every time we'd make a record, we'd be on a different label. It was just a constant headache. It was like that for ten or eleven years until the time I started Young God Records. So I did that for several years and released my music that way. And then around the late ’90s, when I stopped Swans, I started Angels of Light, but I also wanted to release other people's music, so I did. I put out Windsor for the Derby, then Calla, and then the wonderful Devendra Banhart, and things really took off from there.

Does the label ever detract from time spent on songwriting or performing?

Uh, yes. A great degree. It takes up a tremendous amount of my time. I'm actually winding down the label. I'm going to keep working with the people on the label, but I'm not seeking new artists because the economic situation has become so dire. It just doesn't make any sense to invest money and time, huge amounts of time, into an artist trying to build up his or her career and no one feels it necessary to buy the product. I just want some time for my own music again, you know?

What was your inspiration to essentially start a noise band in the middle of the New York “No Wave” movement of the 1980s?

Well, I wouldn't consider what we were doing “noise,” I guess. Noise, to me, implies an annoying scratchy sound. Swans made very physical chunks of sound that were hard to hear. You felt them more than heard them.
The No Wave movement was pretty much over by the time Swans started. I did have some No Wave influences, like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and I guess Glenn Branca, but also huge influences were The Stooges, Suicide, and Throbbing Gristle.

So could you say Swans was a leaping-off point of all those influences?

Yeah. At least in its intent, I suppose. But you know, Swans changed over the years. I mean, the first incarnation existed for fifteen years. What it started as and what it ended up were two completely different things. And that's as it should be, because it would have been silly to sound the same after all those years.

Absolutely. It makes sense from the artist's creative standpoint, but also the audience and record buyer's standpoint as well. They might not be as supportive if you've been churning out the same record for more than two decades.

Yeah. That's right.

You disbanded Swans citing a disgust with the music industry. Now that you've reformed the group, have you come to terms with its modus operandi?

Yeah, well, it wasn't really the music industry, per se. It was just, like, the whole phenomenon of it. Fifteen years of pretty much thankless struggle, you know? I just got fed up, and I just wanted to scale things down so I didn't have to bash my head against the wall anymore.

But I've been doing Angels of Light and running the label for thirteen years. And now I want to make expansive, all-enveloping, transcendent sounds, and that naturally leads me to make music as Swans again.

So you've come to terms with music then?

Yeah. It’s kinda deciding to face my demons once and for all. Like coming to grips with it. And it is who I am. The impetus, the impulse that made me want to make the kind of music I made with Swans is me. That is who I am. I don't want to deny it.

Swans Are Dead my ass, right?

Ha, yes. Definitely my favorite Swans album, by the way.

So you explicitly mentioned in your recent open letter on the reformation of Swans, “This is not a reunion. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act.” What path do you see yourself taking with this new version of Swans?

Well, it's taking elements I want to see continue in Swans and moving forward with those, also incorporating elements I developed in Angels of Light. Now that I've done this first album, I hear things that make me want to do the second album in a new way as well, like taking some of these long instrumental sections and use ideas like that as a starting point. I think that's where the direction will go on the next record.

So this really isn't a reunion, then? You're not going to hit the festival circuit and play your seminal records in their entirety?

No, nothing like that. It really would've been a nostalgia act if I had gotten Jarboe involved [we both laugh]. She's great, and I love her forever, but we haven't talked in ten years. To involve her would have been silly, even though I think she's great. The songs now aren't written around her, by and large, as they were in the past. I just got the people involved who I thought could carry this material forward in an interesting way.

And you don't think people will see the reconvened Swans as nostalgic with co-founder Norman Westberg and previous members Kristof Hahn and Phil Puleo in the lineup once again?

Well, everyone except Norman has worked with me in Angels of Light, so I'd have to say no. Truth be told, I just want to hear Norman's guitar work again. I love his sound. It's like a symphony of guitars with just one guitar. Ultimately, I can't care what people think because I'll just be second-guessing myself.

Throughout your career with Swans, what do you consider to be the standout songs or albums? What makes them memorable to you today?

Ah, I couldn't really say. There were many highlights along the way. There were definitely some low points. I could tell you the low point.

Well please do.

One of them would be The Burning World. It was such a terrible record, a huge mistake. I was always changing and trying new things. And when you're , maybe you're not so sure of yourself. Like when was I trying to write Swans songs on acoustic guitar—it took a while until it made sense, but I had to learn how to do that. Before that I wrote songs on a bass guitar. It was primarily rhythm-based. It just took a while to learn a new method.

When you decided to record as Angels of Light, was there a conscious effort to differentiate the older and newer incarnations of Swans?

Yeah, for sure. The main thing I avoided was the reliance on volume or big sounds, and work more on orchestration and detail. But also the words, the voice, and the basic song.

So you took a more minimal approach in a way?

Yeah. An Angels of Light song would be recorded with acoustic guitar and voice first and overdubs added later. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm intrigued by the method of funding the record you employed . . . making and selling a different record. What made you arrive at this decision?

Well, it was born from necessity. Basically I was on the verge of being broke, but still wanted to make a new Swans record. It's all a symptom of the record industry and people not being the physical mediums. It's just how it goes.

So I made these handmade CD/DVD packages. I started with a drawing and transferred it to a woodblock. Then I hand-printed each of the 1,000 pieces and, with a black pen, then a red pen, and then a gold pen, signed each piece. It was tedious, to say the least. It took hundreds and hundreds of hours. I offered it up for sale as way to raise money for the new Swans record. At that point I had only made two hundred in advance because I thought it would take six months to a year to sell out, but people bought it, and it sold out in two weeks. It was really great, really gratifying. There was a lot of intense interest, which was great. It meant I had to work my ass off to try to get this thing done. It still ended up costing more to produce, and now I'm almost bankrupt, but it'll pick up, I'm sure.

Funny how that works out.

Yeah, Swans records always eat up any available time and money.

Living the artist dream, I suppose.
[No response.]

What was the inspiration for the song “You Fucking People Make Me Sick?” Sounds like a throwback to the ill-feeling Swans we all know and love.

Well that song started out as a series of loops and noises that was going to be transition between other songs. Gradually I thought it needed to be its own song, so I wrote something on the acoustic guitar and called Devendra to sing on it. It just sounded like he should be on that song. My daughter, Saoirse, sang too.

[Laughs] It was actually inspired by some of the popular music websites [laughs . . . a lot].

Certainly not this one, right?

Sure! Anyway, it was kind of a combination of lust and hatred.

Hey, two of my all-time favorites! Well thank you for taking time to answer my questions, Michael. Look forward to seeing the show in Chicago!

You're welcome. Good talking with you. Andy Heater/KevChino.com 8/19
Swans have been terrifying audiences since 1982, when the band set itself apart from arty peers like Sonic Youth in New York’s no-wave scene with songs like “Raping A Slave” and “Money Is Flesh.” In their heyday, Swans were often hailed as the loudest band on the planet. While bandleader Michael Gira’s musical aesthetic has evolved over the past 30-odd years, especially since he emphatically declared with the title of their 1998 live album that Swans Are Dead, the band’s rebirth and their recently released album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky, prove that Gira’s bear-trap intensity hasn’t softened one bit. Sure, the brutality of the new album is often tempered by introspective folk leanings; then again, it also features a song called “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” Swans make their much-anticipated return to Toronto on Saturday (Oct. 2) Chris Bilton/Eye Weekly.com 10/2
MONTREAL - After more than a decade recording under the name Angels of Light, singer Michael Gira has revived his influential post-punk band Swans. The group has a new album – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky – and the first Swans tour in 13 years comes to Montreal on Friday, Oct. 1 at Le National, 1220 Ste. Catherine St. E., as part of the Pop Montreal festival. Tickets cost $25, available through Admission (514-790-1245; www.admission.com).
The Gazette’s Jordan Zivitz spoke to Gira just before rehearsals for the tour began. Here’s a transcript of the interview.
Gazette: I saw you a few years ago, and after the show I was talking to you for a few minutes and you said you would just be performing solo from then on – not under Angels of Light, and you definitely didn’t mention Swans …
Michael Gira: When was this?
Gazette: When you were here with Daniel Johnston, maybe three years ago.
Gira: Oh, right.
Gazette: So why did the idea of performing solo get abandoned?
Gira: I just changed my mind. (Laughs) It took me about three years to write the songs for this record, and suffering from tremendous writer’s block. I also had a couple kids in the meantime, so that kind of takes up one’s time. And when I went to start thinking about recording them, thinking about orchestrating them, I naturally thought I was going to do it as an Angels of Light record, and the whole prospect of it wasn’t really thrilling me. Because the way I record with Angels, for instance, is to go in, record the song acoustically and then start overdubbing on it and build that performance cinematically. And I had this notion of wanting to be inside really loud electric music again. Or overwhelming, I should say, because loud isn’t really the point. And that had been kind of nascent in my mind for several years, trying to do that again, but I hadn’t figured out a context. So I just thought after some point, why not just start Swans? So I did. So I took the songs to the band, the people I chose to work with as Swans, and we just used them as a starting point, basically, to build the record. And worked back and forth together as we performed them in the studio. And that’s sort of how it happened. It’s a necessary way for me to go to feel engaged and authentic and vital in what I’m doing right now.
Gazette: I might be remembering this wrong, but I think when you originally announced that you were reactivating Swans, you were thinking about doing a split Angels/Swans album.
Gira: Yeah. That started to sound like really terrible branding. (Laughs) Unclear and unspecific. I just said, let’s call it Swans. It’s my group – let’s call it that.
Gazette: Was the split Angels/Swans idea maybe a bit of hesitation to fully dive back into the Swans name?
Gira: Initially? Yes, initially there was a lot of hesitation. I resisted it for a long time, my own impulse, because to me, finishing Swans in the first place years ago was such a tremendous relief. It was like taking a hair shirt off. But now I want to face my demon brother. I want to embrace an aspect of myself which is very true, but try to do it in a way that’s maybe not so self-destructive, and try to use that as a way to move forward in my music and my life, and hopefully people will come along.
Gazette: Was there a period after Swans ended when you just couldn’t see any worth in what you had done? Where you had to put a complete distance between yourself and the band?
Gira: Yeah, there was a lot of self-loathing involved. I just figured that I was a complete failure, and I just wanted to put it aside and try to move on and make something new for my life. But as I’ve gotten some distance from it, I recognize there’s a lot of value in it, and the aspects of it that I’d taken from Swans and put on this record are the kind of threads that are going to lead me forward – the long instrumental sections and things like that. For instance, on the new album, the whole intro to No Words/No Thoughts and the middle part of Eden Prison: that notion, those kinds of sounds are what I’m going to start with on the next record, the next Swans record: rather than start with songs, I’m going to start with sounds and see if words come. If they don’t, that’s fine too.
Gazette: So there’s a possibility that it would be an all-instrumental album?
Gira: Well, maybe I’ll mumble a bit. We’ll see. (Laughs)
Gazette: How did you decide who to enlist in the band? Did you know right off the bat that these were the five people you wanted to be doing Swans with, or were there any who you wanted to take part but couldn’t?
Gira: No, fortunately everyone I asked said yes. Enthusiastically. Of course, I had the most trepidation asking Norman (Westberg, early and long-time Swans guitarist), because we hadn’t worked together since … god, ’94 or something. Maybe ’93, I don’t remember. We hadn’t been in contact, either. But he came to see me at a solo show, I guess about 18 months ago or something. And we started talking again and corresponding, and then this was lining up with my notion of restarting the band. Of course, restarting Swans, the first person I asked was him. And it was just really great and kind of moving that he was enthusiastic about it and wanted to do it.
Gazette: Was it important to you in a way to have somebody in the band who had been a presence in Swans very early on?
Gira: I didn’t think of it like that. It’s a plus, for sure, but I wasn’t thinking of it like a publicist or something. (Laughs) It’s just, Norman was a huge part of Swans for a long time. Well, Christoph (Hahn), too. Christoph was in the latter part of Swans, and he’s a really, really good friend and he played on the Angels of Light stuff. And I think those two fellows, the way they interact on this record and the way they’re going to interact live is really great. Like the best of both worlds. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m scared as hell, of course. It really is facing something very daunting for me. But it’s what I needed to do.
Gazette: I have to ask: Would you ever play with Jarboe again?
Gira: Oh, I don’t think so. It’s nothing against her, that’s for sure. I love her. I think she’s tremendous. But that whole aspect of my life and her life is over. I think to bring her into the picture would be some kind of nostalgia thing; it would really be going back. That’s not the intention of this. It just doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel real to do that. I didn’t even think of it, and when people started asking about it I was like, “Oh … God … yeah.” But we were in touch a little bit about it, and it’s just clear that it would be a little bit denigrating to her and to me to do that. This is not one of those reunions where you play the old album and that kind of thing. Personally, selfishly, I need a way to find new vibrancy in what I’m doing. So this provided it.
Gazette: Is that to say there’s no original-period Swans songs you would consider for the tour? It’s purely going to be My Father Will Guide Me live?
Gira: No, we’re going to do four songs from that, and I’ve presented to the band the songs I want to try to do from older material, but it’s not like we’re going to try to replicate them. We’re going to use them as a way to make something new happen. I don’t know if you remember … there was the song I Crawled on (the 1998 live album) Swans Are Dead …
Gazette: For sure, yeah.
Gira: That was a very old Swans song, and we revivified it and made it into something completely different with Jarboe singing. So that’s sort of how I want to approach the older material. But yeah, we’re going to do … I’ve got the list here in front of me … we can’t do all of these songs; our set would be three hours long with the ones we’re doing from My Father. The ones we’re doing from My Father I’m pretty sure are No Words/No Thoughts, Jim, My Birth and Eden Prison. And the ones I’m going to look at in rehearsal to try to work up from older Swans are Power for Power, from the album Filth; Clay Man, from Cop; Your Property, from Cop; I Crawled and Raping a Slave, from the Young God EP; and then from Greed and Holy Money: Another You, Anything for You, A Screw; and then from Children of God: Sex, God, Sex and Beautiful Child.
Gazette: I’m speechless at some of those titles. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be open to bringing some of those back.
Gira: They’re far enough away that I look at them almost as somebody else’s work, you know? In fact, Swans is far enough away now that I can look at it and think, “Yeah, that was good, actually.” There’s a lot of it that I think is pretty silly and not good, but these songs I think were successful. But like I said, I’m not going to try to make them sound like the record, or even sound like they were when we performed them live with the old Swans. And I’m certainly not going to devastate myself physically like I did in those days onstage. But I think it’s good raw material to choose from. I think it’s really good.
Gazette: What you just said reminded me of the historical revisionism of critics and fans with regard to Swans; people put so much emphasis on the extremism in the music and the performances, but forget that the band could also do things that were really beautiful.
Gira: Oh yeah. Well, the band changed completely over the course of 15 years. I mean, if it didn’t, that would have been really stupid. But yeah, the whole emphasis on noise and all that stuff – which I never liked anyway – it’s very silly. Certainly, these shows are going to be loud in places. Extremely. But that’s not the point. It’s not like some death-metal band. (Laughs)
Gazette: No, I never got the impression as a fan that you were striving just for volume for volume’s sake.
Gira: Right. Unfortunately, a lot of the press presented it that way. I’ve even seen some promoters pick up on that now: “Prepare for the loudest band in the world!” Oh, God. (Laughs)
Gazette: Yeah, even the festival here uses a blurb about how your shows were so infamously loud that they made people vomit.
Gira: (Laughs) Yeah, people have to sign a waiver form before they come in. Preposterous. But anyway, whatever.
Gazette: I noticed in that list of older songs you mentioned that there was nothing from the later-period albums like The Great Annihilator or Soundtracks for the Blind.
Gira: Yeah, for now I didn’t want to get into that stuff. I wanted to take the earlier stuff, I guess the stuff mostly without Jarboe. Again, nothing against her at all, but it’s the stuff that I can take and rearrange, revivify in a different way without having the baggage of her part in it.
Gazette: But later-period songs where she wasn’t as present, like I See Them All Lined Up, would you consider doing those in the future?
Gira: I have no idea. Right now I’m going to have to see … we start rehearsing next week and we’re just going to see how this list goes. Hopefully it’ll go really well. I think it will, with this group of people. It was a great experience recording … I don’t know if you’ve read anywhere, but we took one song a day and recorded for 12 hours a day. I couldn’t get everybody together and rehearse for three weeks or a month beforehand. For one, it would be too expensive – everybody lives all over the place. So I thought, well, we’ll just go into the studio – they gave me a really decent rate – and we’ll just work 12 hours a day on each song. And when it really becomes vibrant, we’ll record right then and then do some overdubs if we have time. So that’s what we did, and that’s why they kind of breathe and they’re bigger, and all these new aspects developed, because we just kept hammering at it. And it wasn’t like taking these acoustic songs and trying to orchestrate them. I wanted them to be the basis to make something else happen.
Gazette: So was part of the appeal of switching back to Swans simply being part of a group again? Despite the fact that Angels was a group in a sense, it seemed to be more you and whoever you were working with.
Gira: Well, that’s what Swans is too. But it’s more I want to be with these people who are my friends, all of them. And I want to be in the centre of a very large, overwhelming, body-destroying sound. (Laughs) I want to be completely pummelled by loud music again. Not in a negative sense. In the sense that … well, for instance, when we played down in this concrete room where we recorded, the sense of constant epiphany via cataclysmic rolling waves of sound was just incredibly gratifying. It’s really elating and uplifting. I wanted that again. Because that was never what Angels was about, and it would have been kind of silly to try to make that out of Angels.
Gazette: There were moments in Angels shows, though, where that definitely surfaced.
Gira: It’s still different, though. It’s not quite at the same level of that. But yeah, that’s what I always gravitate toward. I have more ammunition appropriate to that notion this time.
Gazette: Angels was equally intense in its way. Do you think people don’t understand that there’s more than one way to be intense?
Gira: Oh, yeah. I guess the goal is not to be intense, but it just happens to be that way if you’re touching on something that’s hit a nerve or that’s real or that finds something that you wouldn’t normally face. Yeah, if you listen to Howlin’ Wolf, it’s not like loud rock music; that’s really intense and great. Well, that’s joyful. I look at him as joyful. Or Robert Johnson – someone like that. That’s really super intense. Super beautiful, too. But when I learned how to finally perform well, just solo by myself, I thought that was pretty f---ing intense. (Laughs) It wasn’t about volume, that’s for sure. It’s just finding the core, finding the place.
Gazette: So did parts like the beginning of No Words/No Thoughts or the middle section of Eden Prison evolve within these 12-hour-long sessions, or did you go in with those ideas?
Gira: I had those chords and I had a notion of what I wanted to happen, but they were fleshed out and developed with the band. For instance, the first part of No Words/No Thoughts, I initially thought that it was going to be these kind of random downbeats of that chord voiced in different ways by different people, with the drums chaotic and pounding, but in really random places and it would just be this sort of swirl of sound. And we did that, and it sounded good, but I realized that it needed a centre. So I had the drummer make up the numbers. I said, just come up with a theme where we’ll each hit on the downbeat, say, eight times and then we’ll have a pause of a count of three and then we’ll hit on the downbeat 12 times and we’ll have a pause of five, and then we’ll hit on the downbeat three times and we’ll have a pause of one – just random sequences like that. And he did, he wrote them all down, and then the band played looking at those numbers, so we kind of forced this non-groove groove into the middle of the chaos.
Gazette: One of the ones that intrigued me a lot was You F---ing People Make Me Sick …
Gira: You’re the first person who’s said that and hasn’t laughed. (Laughs) Every time I say that, I laugh. It’s a preposterous title.
Gazette: Well, it’s also probably my favourite title on the album.
Gira: Oh, great! I’m sorry, go ahead with your question.
Gazette: It sounds like the second half of that song could have been designed as one of those instrumental bits that were on Soundtracks for the Blind…
Gira: Oh, yeah. Maybe. But the end section there with the piano and the drums and then the horns coming in, that was structured the same way. I had Bill (Rieflin) do random numbers, I had him just hit his toms for 10 and then pause for three and then hit it for four, just random – but written out, so that he could play to it in several layers and be right in time with himself. But not making a groove of any sort. So I had him do that same thing with, I don’t know, 12 tracks of piano and 10 tracks of the toms. Just playing that really intensely, so that’s how I had him build that. Because that song, it started from just vague loops and little incidental sounds. It was going to be a transition on the record. It wasn’t meant to be a song. And gradually we added more and more stuff to it, and I realized it needed an actual little ditty in there, a little song, so I wrote the song on acoustic guitar and then … maybe you’ve read this … I was singing and I realized I sounded like Devendra (Banhart), so I just called Devendra and had him sing it.
Gazette: How did your daughter end up getting on the track?
Gira: It just seemed like it needed something else, and she was here, so … (Laughs) Another tool.
Gazette: Was she easy to conduct?
Gira: No, my wife had to do it. (Laughs) I did this remix of the whole record, it’s a companion CD for a special edition that I’m going to be selling through the website and at live shows, and it’s like 45 minutes of music which … I don’t know if you ever heard the Body Lovers?
Gazette: Oh, yeah.
Gira: It’s like that approach. I take the sounds, the grooves from the record and rearrange them and then further overdub on them and make one 45-minute piece of music and extended things. I really like it. I might even like it better than the record. (Laughs) And I had my daughter sing the whole song on that.
Gazette: How much touring do you plan to do for this record? The run of North American shows looks quite short.
Gira: There’s a lot planned. So far the stuff that’s officially booked, there’s this first run and then there’s two weeks off and then there’s another 10 days in the UK, then there’s three weeks off and then there’s a month in Europe, then there’s six weeks off or something and then we’ll do the southwest of America and the whole west coast, and then we fly to New Zealand and Australia and Japan, and then we come back again and we go to Russia and all these different places. So yeah…probably a year to 18 months of touring off and on.
Gazette: That must have been hard to work out with six busy schedules.
Gira: Yeah, Thor (Harris) the drummer is in this great band called Shearwater. He’s juggling things around; he’s quite a he-man. So yeah, we’re going to do it and do it and do it, and once it seems like time to stop, we’ll record a new Swans album and do it again. And I’m going to do it until physically I feel like I can’t do it anymore.
Gazette: So are Angels and Swans running parallel now, or is Angels as dead now as Swans was in ’97?
Gira: Yes, it’s put to rest for a while. I don’t know if I’ll ever pick it up. We’ll see.
Gazette: I know it’s something performers can’t really think about, or else they’ll go mad, but in terms of the audience coming out for these shows: is it a worry that there might be a bit of an undesirable element, coming to see something that they think they missed the first time?
Gira: You mean metal-heads coming to bang their heads or something?
Gazette: Yeah. That, or people coming for a circus.
Gira: Yeah, that was one of the reasons that I stopped Swans: constantly contending with people’s expectations. So I don’t know, I’m just going to ignore it this time. I don’t care. If they don’t like it, leave. Yeah, isn’t it ironic, though, that the first five years of Swans, whatever tiny audience we had would leave! (Laughs) Right away, too. We started playing and they’d be, “Good god, what is this!?” And then when people started catching on to us and they’d come for that, I was already over it and moved on to something else. (Laughs) So they were pissed off about that. So I guess, except for the last two tours, there was never an audience that was there and on the same page. JordanZivitz/Montreal Gazette 9/29
It’s impossible to feel anything but an impeding sense of doom, or at least a severe case of the jitters, before getting on the phone with Swans’ Michael Gira. The 56-year-old bandleader has been terrifying audiences since 1982, when Swans set themselves apart from arty peers like Sonic Youth in New York’s no-wave scene with songs like “Raping A Slave” and “Money Is Flesh.” In their heyday, Swans were often hailed as the loudest band on the planet.
While Gira’s musical aesthetic has evolved over the past 30-odd years, especially since he emphatically declared with the title of their 1998 live album that Swans Are Dead, the band’s rebirth and their recently released album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky, prove that Gira’s bear-trap intensity hasn’t softened one bit. Sure, the brutality of the new album is often tempered by introspective folk leanings; then again, it also features a song called “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” EYE WEEKLY got Gira on the line from his home in the Catskill Mountains.

To fund the new Swans disc, you handmade 1,000 copies of I Am Not Insane, a limited edition demo version of the new songs which, for $100, earned everyone who bought it an “Executive Producer” credit on the finished album. It seems to have worked out well enough.
It wasn’t easy, though. It was a tremendous amount of work to do that and to get the money to record, but that’s the way it goes. [I Am Not Insane] was meant to be offered up weeks before it became available, but it was delayed. And then, recording [the album proper] started right when all the orders came in. I figured orders would take six months to come in and we could fill them as we went, but I sold out all 1,000 copies in 10 days. So the company that controls the credit card transactions freaked out and held all the funds because so much money came in and they thought it was some kind of fraud. It took like a month of haggling with them to release the money, as well as then trying to pack up all these packages and make these CDs. I made a couple hundred to begin with; I thought that would last for a while. And then I had to make 1,000 at once while I was recording. I was, like, “Oh my god....”

Were you surprised?
I was very surprised. Pleasantly surprised, of course. But it was overwhelming.
How does this compare to your brief experience with a major label, where you made 1989’s The Burning World?
Oh, god. That was horrible. [Signing to MCA] was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. I can’t even fathom it, it was so disgusting — just the kind of people that you had to deal with, and losing control over a lot of aspects. It was a disaster from beginning to end. [The only good thing that came out of it was that] it made me start my own label.

You once said that being in Swans was “15 years of being tortured mercilessly.” Was it really that bad?
[Laughs.] That’s a bit of hyperbole. It was an arduous undertaking; a lot of hardship. I love the music, but just being able to get the money together for another record and trying to survive in the meantime, it never let up. We never made money, and it was always a struggle. [By 1997,] I just couldn’t do it anymore, so I stopped.

On the last Swans records, Soundtrack for the Blind and Swans Are Dead, did you feel that there were some things left unfinished?
No, I thought Swans was completely dead at that point. But after going through 13 years of working on different music, I reached a very similar impasse with my band Angels of Light. There was this current that was running through my mind to make more propulsive or explosive music again. And so I thought, why don’t I just restart Swans and take these songs and rip them apart for that purpose. So that’s how this came about. When I made the demos, I already knew it was going to be Swans and that [the songs] were going to be altered significantly. And I had a lot of ideas of how to do that.
Thankfully, I was surprised when Swans started working in the studio together that things had changed considerably. At least in the music that I make, it’s good when you have a plan and then get surprised by what your cohorts come up with. Or, when accidents happen, you follow them instead of sticking to the initial plan — I think that’s the best way to work. In my case, I just try and be the director and just move this energy around rather than be a detailed composer or something.Chris Bilton/Eye Weekly 9/30
Have you ever gotten up close to a swan? They’re elegant creatures, really, but they have no problem showing aggression if you come too close. The band, Swans, led by frontman Michael Gira, seem to embody these traits as well. They blend together heavy, distorted riffs with sorrowful, yet moving songs. Originally forming in 1982, Swans is back on the music scene, recording and touring again for the first time since disbanding in 1997. Don’t look at their recent activity as a reunion though- – the band may be playing again, but they’re taking a new direction, as is typical with Gira. Some Swans’ fans complain that the new material is too much like Gira’s solo project, Angels of Light, and perhaps it has that feel, considering that at one point, Gira thought his new ideas could head that way. But, according to press releases and interviews, like in ATTN:Magazine, Gira wanted to revive Swans, so that these new songs could take another form.
Swans graced DC on Wednesday night with an hour-long set at the Black Cat, opening with “No Words/No Thoughts”, the first song off of their new album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. They took the outline of the ten-minute long studio version of the song and extended it on stage. A lot of phantom moments during the recorded version of the song didn’t transfer into live performance, but they pushed their physical presence into their instruments, giving their all and demanding the audience to do the same. With a few guitars, the band repeated a heavy and rhythmic progression, embellished by Thor Harris’ clamoring work on the tubular bells. Gira, with his back turned for most of the opening, turned and faced the audience, and then began slapping himself repeatedly. This just created even more tension as listeners waited for him to drop the first lyrics of the show. Finally, Gira stepped up to the mic, the intensity around him continuing, to sing foreboding lyrics like “to think is a sin, long may his world never begin”.
There’s dark subject matter in Gira’s lyrics, with plenty of references to hell and sin. During “Jim”, another new song with a slow, swaying feel, Gira sang about “riding a mechanical beast to heaven” and a “beautiful bitch to the ultimate sin”. In another song, Gira seemed to channel the energy of an enthusiastic reverend. His behavior was anything but heavenly as he bellowed the name of Jesus Christ.
Percussionist Harris was mesmerizing. His instrumentation provided all of the gentle transitions in between the oppressive chord progressions. To his right stood the vertical jumble of tubular bells, which added an ominous yet ethereal texture to some of the songs. He had a huge drum and a gong to his left, providing more rhythmic force to the already driving numbers. And then in front of him, was a set of vibraphones, creating delicate nuances. At times, Harris took a violin bow and rubbed it against the side and ends of the vibes for an eerie effect.
Every now and then, Gira would make gruesome expressions or dirty, crotch-grabbing gestures. He mentioned how he was on the internet, looking at pictures of all his young fans, and how he wanted to kill and fuck every single one simultaneously. Was he joking or not? It was difficult to tell…but it led to the inspiration of their new, haunting song, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. It would be impossible for Swans to perform that live, unless they had guest performances by freak-folk artists Devendra Banhart and Gira’s 3/12 year old daughter. If they couldn’t perform it live that night, it was at least nice for Gira to mention the song, even if he provided some vulgar background along with it.
The band went back and forth between new and old songs, but had a stronger focus on newer material. Like Gira has said before in press releases, “If you have expectations about how Swans should be, that’s your business, but it would be a disservice to both of us if I were to make music with your needs in mind, and the music would certainly suffer as a result”. Therefore, the band ended with the heavy number, “Eden Prison”. Gira’s voice, although distinct in his own right, crooned the whole night, almost like a cross between Jim Morrison and a later Johnny Cash, circa his Nine Inch Nail’s cover of “Hurt”.
Anticipation leading toward the show led to fulfillment from many of the audience members, content that Swans are continuing to explore new territory.
Raul De Leon AllOurNoise.com 10/2
Recently Swans’ Michael Gira has written that the current incarnation of Swans is “NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past…”. I’ll take Mr. Gira at his word and review this album as if “Swans” is an entirely new band that just happens to feature key members of a defunct band that also happened to be called “Swans”. If you want to know more about that other “Swans”, it’s called Google (or Bing, if you like the underdog). As for this currently active band called Swans:
If I were to pick a single word to describe My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, it would be “Grizzled”. Way, way fucking grizzled. Think of a recently released P.O.W. or a woman who has been muling for a Mexican cartel for over a decade. From the mercilessly unflattering press photos of the players involved included in the packaging, to the deep, bellowing voice of front man Michael Gira, this is a group of seasoned players who look/sound like they have lived. By “lived” I don’t mean just breathing, eating, shitting and sleeping: I mean getting the shit kicked out of you repeatedly by an uncaring world and converting all the heartbreaks and disappointments into the fuel for inspiration and ambition. Swans have lived and My Father… provides a document of that life experience that rings from the speakers with an undeniable authenticity. Impressive for a new band that has only been together since the beginning of this year.
The 9-minute opener “No Words/No Thoughts” provides something of an overview of what Swans are up to on My Father… The proceedings begin with percussion that resembles funeral bells, sounding like the troubled cousin of the clock chiming that begins Pink Floyd’s “Time”. After 40 seconds of hypnotizing bells, the song begins in earnest with Swans launching into a dark, heavy dirge. Don’t think metal though, because that’s not what this is. The best aspect of this song, and by extension the best aspect of this album, lies in the ability of the band to create dark, doomy drones that pile on the tension but, somehow, still radiate a sense of hopefulness. At no time does “No Words…” sound like a happy jam, but Gira and his cohorts seem to recognize that portraying complex and sometimes contradictory emotions will reap richer rewards than monotonic displays of anger and spitefulness. By the time Gira’s voice enters the fray over four minutes into the song, Swans have already destabilized expectations to the extent that each new section of the song becomes a welcome surprise. The final movement of this song in particular, which unifies the bells that open the piece and the main groove that propels us through much of its length, provides more listening enjoyment that pretty much any other song/album so far this year.
“Reeling the Liars In” offers an immediate departure from the foreboding atmosphere and lengthy run time of “No Words…”, replacing it with a sort of Western/folk vibe executed in a more concise fashion. It appears to be a song about burning liars on a campfire. I’ll bring the marshmallows. Gira’s delivery on this one is a little heavy on the drawly affectation for my taste, but repeated listens might smooth that out. Any reservations I had were immediately erased when “Jim”, my personal favorite track on this bad boy, started to play. Keeping a hint of the Western atmosphere of its predecessor but revisiting the more epic and haunting approach of the opening track, “Jim” exemplifies pretty much everything I like about this new band called Swans. The song even swerves into gospel music territory, sporting big, chanting vocals that pretty much mandate a sing along.
The winner for best named track, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” is also hands down the most ambitious song on My Father… Beginning with a lone mouth harp, Swans add on layers of instrumentation (sounds like a lot of mandolin going on) until guest vocalists Devendra Banhart and Michael Gira’s three year old daughter come in with some rather creepy lullaby-like vocals that are as captivating as they are unsettling. Then, in an instant the song shifts to an even more unsettling controlled cacophony of acoustic instruments. It sounds like realizing you are trapped in a nightmare. You know, but in a cool way. The penultimate track “Eden Prison” comes off like a gypsy march towards hell. Gira’s crooning on this jam has distinct hints of the both Elvis Presley and a down-on-his-luck lounge singer. It accompanies the instrumentals perfectly, adding a bit camp to all the drama. Second favorite track. The album’s closer, “Little Mouth” comes off like a murder ballad hybridized with a chain gang sing-along. The album closes, fittingly, with Gira, a capella, singing in his grizzled and weary timbre about love and hope.
Swans have made something to be proud of with My Father… It’s an album that requires patience, but rewards it in equal measure. Despite the lengthy run times of some of the tracks, there is no fat on this record. The production, though far superior to anything that other band that happened to be called Swans ever enjoyed, never comes across as flashy and always sounds natural and dynamic. This one will be on the Buddyhead Best of 2010 list, mark my words.
Kevin Hilliard/Buddyhead.com 8/3

While talking to Swans singer and band leader Michael Gira, I must admit to being more than a little taken aback to hear the man actually laugh. Not that Gira’s work in Swans didn’t cast a sliv¬er of light every now and again, but the man’s travels into music’s deepest and darkest corners have yet to be equaled. After Swans were put on hiatus in 1998 to make room for Gira’s project Angels of Light, their reputation has only grown exponentially throughout those dormant years. Gira remains adamant that the newest version of Swans is hardly a “reunion” and while their new record, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, does possess all of the earmarks that made Swans so devastatingly brilliant, it thankfully never panders to any past successes. The Mirror rang Gira up as he was preparing for Swans’ upcoming tour.
Mirror: When did you come up with the idea to, uh, reignite Swans?
Michael Gira: I guess I had a certain gnawing thought in the back of my mind of restarting the Swans project for quite some time. I was trying to make an Angels of Light record and I was highly underwhelmed at that prospect. I just had the urge to make this kind of propulsive and expansive music again, so it just felt natural to start Swans up.
M: A lot of people are wondering why integral Swans member Jarboe was not included in the current line-up.
MG: I love her and we suffered through some really hard times together, and had some beautiful times too, but to include her would’ve been a really nostalgic trip and I think it’s more important to move on.
M: Do you have certain songwriting parameters when you write for Swans?
MG: Only two songs were written specifically for Swans and the rest were written for Angels of Light, but when they became Swans songs, I had to really rip them open and make them into Swans songs. Even after we recorded the record, the songs started to expand quite a bit and now I’m already thinking of the next record.
M: Are you nervous about the huge expectations coming from longtime fans, as well as people who never got a chance to see you?
MG: I’m a bit on edge because I really didn’t anticipate this level of interest in Swans and this big demand to see us. I guess the music stayed out there and survived on its own merit, but I didn’t think it would be to this extent. For a long time, Swans really struggled to get money so we could make a record, and for seven or eight years, we would just clear rooms when we played. I think we never actu¬ally got an encore until the second-to-last tour.
M: Now that you’ve reacquainted yourself with Swans’ older material for this tour, has it given you a new perspective on Swans’ career?
MG: Yeah, I guess I kind of respect it now and I’m glad I did it, but Swans at the time was always about putting myself in an uncomfortable position, and I did it publicly. We did some good stuff but we did some really horrible stuff too—but I’m really happy with where we are now. Jonathan Cummins/Montreal Mirror 9/30
Don’t be deceived by the gentle introduction of “No Words/No Thoughts,” the nine-minute opener of Swans’ latest, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. As faint bells clamor together, creating the imagery of a breezy Sunday morning, chaos unfurls and a storm quickly settles in. The bells become muffled by a heavy and terse riff, which continuously cycles after each swiping cymbal movement. At a certain point, the song becomes more foreboding with a repeating, squealing pitch that resembles a cross between a screeching roman candle and an 18-wheeler speeding by on a highway. Then, everything except a lone drone drops out, only to pick back up with those haunting bells, which once sounded so innocent. From there, song continues to switch its dynamics from soft and sorrowful to harsh and stern.
With the exception of a few heavy songs like the first track and “My Birth,” however, most of the songs on My Father are subdued. This doesn’t imply a lack of depth; that element is definitely present. However, My Father holds more of a folk approach than the noisy reputation of earlier Swans material, resembling Michael Gira’s other musical project, Angels of Light. In an ATTN: Magazine interview, Gira says he first thought that these new songs would be more geared toward Angels of Light, but decided to seek out more development by turning them into songs for Swans.
There’s a small amount of singing on the first track, but it’s not until the second song, “Reeling the Liars In,” where Gira’s distinct vocal makes its mark. The song’s acoustic introduction sets a slow tempo and stays simple for the most part as Gira sings the tune’s title alongside a small choral of humming voices. “Jim” takes a while to build up and never really peaks in volume, but definitely establishes intensity with its words and tone, with lyrics like “ride your mechanical beast to heaven”, and “let’s walk along this thin carpet of air.”
The “less is more” approach to simple compositions continues with the mournful and barren “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” Backed by only the constant strumming of a guitar, Gira voice is soon joined in a duet with his three-year-old daughter. Although she has the intonation of a child, it creates an eerie effect as she repeats Gira’s lyrics, right before the song ruptures into a cacophonic dissonance.
Members of Swan, especially Gira, continue to say that the making of this record and the series of live performances to follow does not mean that Swans is reuniting. Perhaps this is visiting old terrain though, in order to develop new material. As always, Gira established the direction for this new album, and is already receiving ideas for future endeavors. Marian McLaughlin/StereoSubversion.com 10/5
In their heyday, the members of Swans played so loud that they made the audience puke. (No joke.) It’s not entirely fair to a band as accomplished as Swans that the first thing its name brings to mind is an image of people writhing in agony in a pool of their own vomit. But, well, you reap what you sow. Outside of that juicy tidbit, the ’80s/’90s post-punk band was known for its rotating cast of musicians, which was led by multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira and released more than 30 studio albums, EPs, and live records before breaking up in 1997. Thirteen years later, the band that made you barf is back, with a new album in tow: My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (released earlier this month on Gira’s own Young God Records) has been met with considerable acclaim, appealing to fans of both the band’s earlier, abrasive work and the later, softer side of Swans. Matthew Borlick http://thekey.xpn.org/ 9/28
During its Wednesday night performance at the Black Cat, the New York City-based sextet -- newly re-christened after a 15-year hiatus -- tried to wrest control of the audience's senses. Swans wanted the air-conditioning off, the house lights on, and the volume maxed-out. Song requests were not taken …If noise-rock has a political hierarchy, Swans would be the generalissimo.
It's a reputation the band worked hard to generate. Founded by singer Michael Gira in 1982, Swans set a new precedent for minimalism and brutality--song after song of abrasive guitars and lurching rhythms, with Gira's howling Old Testament-style fire and brimstone delivery. In 1997, Gira grew weary of the group's frowny-faced reputation and pulled the plug.
…In concert, the band stuck to unflinching intensity. For more than an hour Swans performed at jet-engine volume, drawing out songs from the most savage reaches of its back catalog, like "Your Property" from 1984's "Cop." "You deform me/ you own me/I worship your authority," bellowed Gira. He stalked the stage, slapped himself in the face, and clutched tightly to an electric guitar. By Aaron Leitko blog.washingtonpost.com 9/30
The genesis of a band is a hard order of events to explain. One band's influence over another is nearly impossible to quantify, which is why so many significant bands, particularly those born amid a wide variety of musical styles in the 1980s, seem to slip through the cracks of modern reverence.
Swans, the challenging no-wave and darkly expansive post-rock troupe, is one such band: seriously influential for numerous musicians, yet often unfairly overlooked in the mainstream. Newly reformed by creator Michael Gira and having released its first new album in 14 years, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, Swans set out on tour this year hoping to reclaim the striking grandeur of previous efforts. The New York-based band will play at the Black Cat in Washington tonight.
Although it's regarded with admiration in many musical circles, Swans has never truly been a very popular band. Making a living has been difficult under these circumstances, but Gira has long believed the freedom to do as he pleases was worth some hard times in the past.
"It takes determination and, I guess, stubbornness, maybe kinda stupid stubbornness," Gira said. "It's easy to give up. Swans has never been a commercial success, so to speak, so it's hard then finding ways to get the money to make records, and it's live in the meantime."
Gira, the mastermind behind Swans' often infinite depths of brutal sorrow, started his artistic ventures as a visual artist, painting and drawing at a Los Angeles art school. Gira's world changed with the development of punk in the late 1970s, and he dropped out and migrated to New York.
By 1982, Swans had formed, unleashing its own particular brand of sludgy post-punk that has often been compared to early Sonic Youth, perhaps more because of each band's individual originality. Swans gained a reputation during this period as one of loudest touring acts.
Over the years, the band played everything from 20-minute electric guitar dirges and sweeping post-rock meditations to somber folk rock and even a few standard covers, including "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division.
After the ethereal sound art and massive crescendos of Swans' last album, Soundtracks for the Blind, Gira moved onto another project, Angels of Light. He's been making records for the past 13 years while slowly, inevitably moving back toward his origins.
"When I stopped Swans way back when, my agenda was that I had to be able to write a song on acoustic guitar and perform it solo and have it be powerful in its own way," Gira said. "Once I had a song that fit, I would go into the studio and record it. ... Then I would start orchestrating it. After doing that for so many years, it started to become a predictable thing. I had written these songs that I thought would be an Angels of Light record, but when it came time to do it, it just was not what I wanted, so I took them and opened them up."
Joining the new Swans are some of the band's oldest collaborators, including longtime guitar player Norman Westberg, whose blaring chords were once a defining part of the band.
The new record focuses on the post-rock elements present in later recordings and emulated in part by bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Jesu. However, Swans' second most insistently present musician, Jarboe, whose input was invaluable to the last era of the band, is noticeably missing.
Once Swans' keyboardist, songwriter and Gira's partner in life, this seemingly integral piece of the band is not affiliated with the group's new iteration. While many fans may be disturbed by her absence, Gira contends that Swans has always been his project and that what people may want or expect from him isn't what needs to happen with the band.
"I don't care what they say," Gira said of fans' questioning Jarboe's estrangement. "I have tremendous respect for her; she was a big contributor to the band, an important one. But I can say, this is not a reunion - it's a reactivation. Swans is my project, always has been. I don't undervalue people's contributions by any means, but in this version, it doesn't make sense to have her - we haven't been in touch. That would make it into a nostalgic reunion act; that's really not what I'm interested in."
Instead, Gira wants to progress and continue pushing his band forward into new musical realms.
The only piece of the Gira puzzle not receiving complete attention is his record label, Young God Records, which features acts such as Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family. Writing, recording and touring is hard enough as it is without the added stress of a record label to control.
According to Gira, the media explosion behind Swans' new album has rocketed Young God sales skyward, forcing Gira to not only buy his first laptop but to temporarily shut down the record sales section of his website while he focuses on Swans.
By no means does this entail the death of Young God Records. Instead, it means a sudden surge in popularity for all its artists. Gira plans to work with music for the rest of his life, no exceptions.
"I'm always finding new ways to survive," Gira said. "I can't imagine - certainly it would be the end of my life if I had to work for someone, no way."
Always a self-described endless well of anger, Gira continues to try to push the boundaries of music, inclined by his own need for creation.Zack Berman/Diamondbackonline.com 9/29
After a 13-year hiatus, the industrial band Swans has a whole lotta touring to make up for, including Europe, more U.S. dates and a jaunt Down Under followed by, well, more tour dates.
The band’s rise to early fame illustrates a path less taken by most groups. Known for playing extremely loud during its early days, Swans is led by founding member Michael Gira, who got the band back together earlier this year.
And it’s been a pretty good reunion, what with the group’s first studio effort in 13 years, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky.
The tour gods have also been good to the Swans. With U.K. and U.S tours already behind them, band members embark on a Europe trip beginning later this month and just announced more North America and Euro dates for 2011 as well as shows in Australia and New Zealand.
A look at the 2011 routing shows the band in Texas at Mohawk Austin Feb. 18; Dallas at South Side Music Hall Feb. 19; Denver at Summit Music Hall Feb. 22; Vancouver at Rickshaw Theatre Feb. 25; Seattle at Neumos Feb. 26; Portland at Roseland Theater Feb. 27; San Francisco at The Regency Ballroom March 1 and Los Angeles at the El Rey Theatre March 2.
The band finds itself in New Zealand for a March 6 gig at Auckland’s Powerstation and then it’s on to Australia for shows in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney before heading halfway around the world for a show in Tel Aviv followed by more Europe dates.
Wooden Wand opens the newly added U.S. dates while Pumice supports in New Zealand, Necks in Australia and James Blackshaw in Europe. For more information, click here for the Swans’ Internet nest.
--Jay Smith/Pollstar.com 11/10
After some hesitation over whether or not I believed Michael Gira would be able to capture the caustic and chaotic glory of Swans after years of releasing equally great, though different music as Angels of Light, his marvelous success on My Father feels that much better. Right out of the gate, a slow burn leads to church bells knelling with guitars wailing and a driving rhythm section trudging it all forward. What follows is an incredibly multi-dimensional reinsertion of the legendary band within the musical dialogue. Gira’s very adamant in insisting this is “not a reunion, it’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act, it’s not repeating the past”—but the music he’s created is even more adamant in stating this. Swans are once again in the present tense, and thank god for that. (younggodrecords.com) david David Obenour/ Big Takeover Winter
By Chris Brunelle » Swans never do what you’d expect. They are a band of sonic liberation. They're unshackled from the rest of the music world and even from themselves. They don’t stick to a sound or style, as is the case on their latest effort, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. They embrace brash, violent, and heavy tonalities. They attack their music like it's their enemy, like it's the world around them for which they seem to have such disdain. But like any good paradox, with their music, they also find solace. There are many gentle numbers on this record that hold the same equilibrium of passion and worldly disdain.
The nakedness of the instrumentation on the softer songs yields to the vocals and lyrics, which ultimately give Michael Gira's sentiments a more immediate, direct power. Indeed, My Father Will Guide Me... includes many pieces written within a traditional structure that at their core recall some variant of the Nick Cave songbook.
The album opens with "No Words/No Thoughts", with chimes beautifully clanging like the dawn. Epic power sludge interrupts, conjuring the primordial soundtrack to the world's birth. As the heavy-osity dissipates, the verse pulses and builds and slowly returns to power drenched heights. "Reeling The Liars In" plays like a Woody Guthrie campfire sing-a-long with near religious solemnity, while Michael Gira ringing out like a march to the gallows on judgment day for sinners of the tongue. "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" centers on the interplay of dulcimer and call and response vocals between Gira and the voice of a child, which mixes with haunting effect.
The closer, "Little Mouth", plays like a sea shanty. The whimsical sway of the tide that drives the tune is a proper send-off for Swans, and reminds us that their journey is a tumultuous one. 

Chris Brunelle/ImposeMagazine.com 10/15

Strange sounds assail the listener as My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to
the Sky gets underway; with a starting track that comes in at 9:24 and is
riddled with bells, build-ups, brass, and strings, Swans¹ latest album
showcases a progressing band that hasn¹t stagnated despite (or maybe due to)
a 14-year hiatus and frontman Michael Gira being 56 years old. They¹ve
retained their fondness of dirge-like songs with complex/strange
instrumentation, but My FatherŠ is a more directed and cohesive album than
past releases.
When Swans began in 1982, they carved a new direction of goth-folk and now,
28 years later, they are straying from their own beaten path to explore
further. Each track has a unique continuity that marches towards some
unforeseen destination, one which may involve squeamish situations like
burning liars in a pile as a group stands around singing (³Reeling the Liars
In²), or eerie harmonies with Gira¹s 3 1ÂŽ2 year-old daughter which then
transition into doom-laden pianos with howling trumpets (³You Fucking People
Make Me Sick²).
What¹s truly impressive about My FatherŠ is how effortlessly the music
intertwines upon itself, mixing extremely complex instrumentation as Gira¹s
gravelly vocals act as the delicate thread that will pull you along in the
wake of the music. The band plans to be touring often over the next 18
months and, if the tracks on this album are any indication, that promises to
offer a must see performance. - Andre Estournes (Your Music Magazine - Issue
#82 - Oct 2010)

Swans are beautiful, graceful birds known for forming monogamous bonds. The Swans are a legendary noise rock band known for their violent, abrasive music. The avant-garde group formed in 1982 and broke up a decade and a half later. They're back with their first studio album in 14 years, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Released on frontman Michael Gira's own Young God Records, My Father expands on the Swans' uncompromising formula of unnerving, atonal, dissonant sounds. This ain't dinner music.
The opening track, "No Words/No Thoughts" is an epic nine-and-a-half minutes. The ironically-titled song is the most thoughtful and diverse on the entire record. The first few minutes could be described as the soundtrack to a snuff film -- what with chimes and violent chords pounded incessantly over swooshing guitars. Menacing marching beats provide a sturdy backbone a third of the way through along with more chimes and special effects noise. It's as if a possessed orchestra was playing all the instruments backwards.
"Reeling the Liars In" follows "No Words/No Thoughts" by being completely different in virtually every way except for one -- creepiness. Gira sings the demonic acoustic hymn in his trademark deadpan, "we are removing their face/ collecting their skin/ we are reeling the liars in."
The Swans sidestep any potential boredom from their relentless rhythms with intricate orchestration and confounding progressions. For example, folkie oddball Devendra Banhart (who released his debut album on Young God Records) and Gira's three-year-old daughter share vocals on "You Fucking People Make Me Sick." Awwwwww. The young girl repeats after Banhart "I love you/ I need you/ oh show me/ how to shine/ I love you/ young flower/ now give me/ what is mine" before the song descends into what sounds like a piano falling down a flight of steps amid a cacophony of out-of-tune horns.
To keep us on our toes, the Swans finish My Father with a "normal" love song. Hell, you could slow dance to "Little Mouth." Gira harmonizes over the same four chords and ends a capella with "may I find... " With his reformed legendary Swans and busy record label, Gira likely won't have to search long.
Lauren Pontillo/Ink.com

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When the setup for Swans was complete, a loud droning feedback started emanating from the stage and it went on for a full ten minutes before Swans member, Thor Harris, took the stage and started playing the chimes that formed the intro to “No Words/No Thoughts” from the new album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. After a couple of minutes of this, the rest of the band came on stage and they continued the song, which opened up into a massive sonic pummeling. The sound was insanely loud and perfectly mixed. The band was super tight, pounding on their instruments to make them emit sounds that were stunning and punishing at the same time.
Michael Gira is an intimidating front-man who demands attention and respect. He often has a stern look about him and at times you wonder if he is going to snap and kill someone. He channels this into his amazing vocals which are equal parts terrifying and beautiful. When the man starts yelling, it is fear-inducing and gets your attention, when he sings and things get melodic, he will lull you into a sense of peace that will soon be interrupted by the band breaking out into another sonic pummeling. Twice during the show, Michael Gira chastised a small group of morons in the crowd who were playing human bumper cars by randomly pushing and slamming into the people around them, most of them clearly uninterested in such a ridiculous practice. It was another highlight of an amazing show and more bands should follow suit.
The band played some new material, which is some of the strongest Swans material in years including, “My Birth”, and “Jim”. This was mixed with Swans classics like “Beautiful Child” and “I Crawl”. The greatest moment of the flawless performance came in their amazing rendition of “Sex God Sex” which was so intense it was chilling. All the songs were played incredibly and often extended to make them equal parts fresh and familiar.
They finished their two-hour set with “Eden Prison”, another song from the new album, and it was long, complex, and covered all the emotions, exploding in the middle with a sonic frenzy that was deafening. Anyone not wearing earplugs that night probably suffered a large amount of hearing loss. They came out for a very quick encore and left the crowd sweaty, with ringing ears, and completely satisfied. The rebirth of the Swans is nothing short of awe-inspiring and the world of music has just become a better place for their having returned. Mike Vinikour/Punkvinyl.com 10/7
It was just another beautiful late summer afternoon in Brooklyn when I wandered up to a Williamsburg street corner and greeted Michael Gira. It had been awhile since the days when we'd chat over a pint of Brooklyn Ale at the bar across the street from my old place in Park Slope. Gira used to walk his dog around Happy Hour, and between brews he'd slip outside to puff on one of the cigars he always carried.
Since then, he'd relocated upstate and started a family, but now here he was, back in New York City, rehearsing with a brand new edition of the Swans – a legendary outfit that had been out of circulation for 13 years, and now was prepping itself for a return to the stage. The lanky Gira, a congenial gent for all his vaunted intensity, shook my hand and led me back to a vending machine behind the warehouse where the band was practicing. He handed me some quarters and invited me to grab a beer, as the box was stocked with ice-cold Yuengling cans for the mere price of $1.75.
"Come on inside," he said. "We want to play you a song."
Sandwiched into a rehearsal space that felt about as claustrophobic as a prison cell, the six members of the Swans each had exactly enough room to stand, their backs to stacks of imposing amplifiers lining the walls. I barely squeezed in by the door when Norman Westberg made a humanitarian gesture.
"Have we got some extra earplugs?" he asked, electric guitar already crackling.
"No," said Gira, who has been fronting some variation of this band, off and on, since 1982. He smiled, a cowboy hat lending him a touch of the desperado. "Let him suffer." And then they all leaned into a swirling, relentless piece of music that started loud and grew exceptionally louder, an overlay of guitars, bass and percussion generating a mysterious cloud of overtones, floating above a vertiginous drone. Gira, who eschews cochlear protection himself, intoned the lyrics in a baritone a bit north of Johnny Cash as the drums crashed concussively.
The song, "Eden Prison," belongs to a whole new repertoire that Swans have hammered into shape for its tour, bolstered by a new album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (on Gira's independent Young God label). Even as I struggled, in vain, to shelter my ears from stabs of pain, my body warmed to the embrace of the vibrating air. Even in the din, there was something transcendental going on.
"I was done with volume, I thought," Gira, 56, said during a rehearsal break, firing up that cigar outside a nearby bar called, in true Williamsburg hipster fashion, Bar. "But, lo and behold, fate intervened." The songs that he finally put together for the album are richly imagined and painstakingly executed, evoking everything from campfire songs to the dissonant ritual horns of avant-garde Viennese composer Hermann Nitsch. There's a colorful dynamic range, and darkly poetic lyrics that reach from the gutter to the stars. It's one of the best albums Gira's ever made, at once blasted and beatific. And, once again, it was happy hour. The pints were at hand and I punched on the voice notes function on my cel phone.
What brought you back to the Swans?
When I first ended the Swans it was a tremendous relief to leave it behind. It was 15 years of just real intense struggle. A lot of elation and joy, too, but it was really hard. I was sick of all the expectations. It seemed preposterous that I would ever do it again. But after doing all these Angels of Light records, and facing the prospect of another one – I had enough songs – I felt underwhelmed by it. I wanted to hear this kind of music again and be inside it. One way to do that is face your demons and starting going.
It sounds like a new page...
I couldn't do some nostalgia piece. I'm reasonably intelligent so that would be to me anathema. To keep myself vital, I had to do this. I've been pretty gratified, touched, to see how over the course of the last 13 years the audience has actually grown. Young people discovering it. It seems to have lasted.
How did moving upstate and having kids change things?
It was one source of my writer's block, having a kid. We have two now, but the first one was no sleep, trying to run a label, trying to raise money for this ridiculous house and all this shit. I never had time to even write. And then when I tried to write I felt like a piece of fuckin' salami. I had nothing to say. It took me three years to write these measly songs for this album.
How would you describe the process?
Sitting down with an acoustic guitar and waiting for words to arrive from heaven. Certain songs came really easy, like the felicitiously titled "You Fucking People Make Me Sick." Those words came right away. "Eden Prison" was really easy. But generally it was really difficult.
One of your kids is on a song.
Yeah, she sings with Devendra [Banhart] on "You Fucking People." The reason I had Devendra is when I was singing the song I sounded like Devendra. I don't know why. I thought, "That's ridiculous I'll just get Devendra." So I called him up and he did it. I needed a little extra at the end, and my daughter was singing out in the other room. It's kind of a cynical sucker punch for the next part, too.
I love the arrangements. The massive dynamic swings, the colors.
I've been making records for fuckin' 25 years.
But it's obvious that you want to hear a lot of different sounds.
My ear gravitates towards huge sounds but also just dynamics. When something is loud all the time it's tedious. Also when I hear a sound I hear another sound. I hear the nuance in things. I hear the overtones and then I replicate them. There are some parts, I won't say which, where I actually sang the overtones and some of those soaring guitar parts, and cut them back into the mix. I plan things out but once things start happening I hear new things.
How do you put the songs together, when you're recording?
We don't flail or jam or anything. I like to repeat parts over and over and gradually they morph and you find new voices inside the chords.
That's the harmonic phenomena at the heart of all the stuff.
Yeah. To me it's like going to church, when I start hearing that I feel like I'm levitating. I think Pink Floyd were probably aware of that phenomenon. Sonic Youth are. But I don't know too many bands that think about that.
To me, this is an approach that really rises out of the early '80s (post-minimalism, etc.)
The volume aids that. That's why its necessary. It's not some act of aggression, some shit like that. Although I like to feel it physically. It's really cathartic. Don't say cathartic. I hate that word.
Galvanic?
Galvanic? That's nice. Galvanize all the forces that are in you.
Caustic.
No, I don't like caustic. Certainly in the early days, it had teeth. But really the big secret was how the music felt physically playing it and being inside it. Nothing like it. It's like ten church choirs singing different pieces at once. Being inside this maelstrom of sound. You can get addicted to it. My friend Doug Henderson, PhD in music, explained to me once that the reason for that is – what is it you get when you exercise?
Endorphins.
Endorphins. [Laughs]. It promotes the release of endorphins.
Loud music and heroin.
It's like a drug.
At the beginning what gave you the bug to make that kind of noise?
It wasn't intentional. It was intuitive. There was a lot of music I liked at the time that had an influence. I knew that I wanted to make something just utterly massive and something that would just crush your body when you played it. It wasn't supposed to be aggressive. It was supposed to be all-consuming. Some of the music that informed it? Throbbing Gristle. The Stooges, certainly. But the Stooges, they changed chords, and I could never bring myself to change a chord. [Laughs really hard]. It seemed like a waste of time! Let's stay here and see what happens. Glenn Branca, with whom I played a little bit. He was inspirational in the sense of his total maximum experiential potential of music. He's a genius in my view, wanting to reach higher and higher. And not many people in this cynical overly self-critical and ironic '80s, were willing to go out to that extent, even bringing in the dangerous word "spiritual."
Back then, you lived in a burned-out basement?
It was burned out but the East Village was burned out, that's for sure. It was at 6th Street and Avenue B. It was a bunker, basically, and thank God it was a bunker because everything we owned would have been stolen many times over. I had one little hatch window at the back of the rehearsal space which was the only natural light. To the detriment of my health I'm sure. It was $100 a month. It was a nice space. It was this ideal situation. [But] it was pretty dangerous. Maybe every fifth building was inhabited – legally, that is. There was machine gun fire every night. We couldn't have made that music anywhere else. We wouldn't have been allowed to. It was really loud outside. It went outside. There was a school across the street. They must have thought it was Satan in there. It used to be a Pentecostal Baptist church. There were pews in there when I moved in. The santeria people used to leave hexes on the door outside, maybe that was why it was never a tremendous financial success.
Hexes?
Little bags with chicken feet and stuff in them?
Because of you?
Yeah. I knew a local lady who was into that and she helped me out. Steve Dollar/Stomp & Stammer 11/10

When it was announced this year that legendary New York art band Swans would be releasing a new album, I was nervous. Thankfully My Father… is a true extension of what the band was doing when they ended. Swans stares into the face of what can be done with experimental noise and folk, then laughs and twists it into something dark and gorgeous. Extended instrumental passages, sweet acoustic songs, My Father… is more of a journey through the universe than just a record. If you haven’t seen them live, you must all costs. Iann Robinson/CraveOnline.com 12/30
From the start of Swans in 1982 to its recent relaunch after a 14-year pause, through the twists of irascible solo projects and soul-searching Angels of Light records, Michael Gira's forte has never been self-editing. Check the indulgence of the Swans catalogue or search (fruitlessly) for an Angels of Light record without a pronounced fault line.
Gira's return as Swans, then, delivers shocking concision and precision. My Father is a tightly built, impeccably paced, 45-minute storm that lashes, shakes, quakes, drifts, and relents at the right moments. All of the Swans touchstones remain-- the skin-raising visions of "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", the repetitive drama of "No Words/ No Thoughts", the sprawling peals of "Inside Madeline". But between the two-minute dirge "Reeling the Liars In" and the chiseled march of "Eden Prison", there are at least two veritable singles here. All year, Gira excoriated those that called this restart of Swans a reunion. He was right: This is more vibrant and focused than a nostalgia trip. --Grayson Currin/Pitchfork.com 12/19
1. Swans (Oct. 1, Le National, Pop Montreal). Michael Gira’s reactivated sonic hypnotists lived up to their raging, surging legend with a hurricane of brutality that was impossible to escape, and just as impossible to forget. I’ve never seen so many dazed faces after a concert. Jordan Zivitz/Montreal Gazette 12/29

This is one of the few albums I kept listening to after reviewing it, and looking back, I misjudged just how scary and alienating this album can be. Michael Gira has aged out of the noisy aggression and theatrics of youth and grown into something much scarier. Haunting is a word too casually used, but in this case, nothing less will do. Rick Allen/Columbus Other Paper 12/29

Built from a legacy of experimental noise and industrial cacophony, Michael Gira’s no wave pioneers, Swans, returned after a thirteen-year hiatus with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, a solid and relatively accessible foray into the compositionally avant-garde. More of an event than an album, Gira’s catastrophic and, at times, beautiful vision leads to pulsing and intensified carousels of orchestrated dread (No Words/No Thoughts, My Birth, Eden Prison), or lonely folk ditties worthy of sunset (Reeling the Liars In, Little Mouth). Devandra Banhart and Gira’s three year-old daughter Saoirse, provide the vocal for You Fucking People Make Me Sick, a lovely enough introduction that abruptly collapses into an avalanche of piano keys and horn blasts. Theatrically charged and unstable, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky took a revivalist’s genre and upped the ante enough to make the charlatans cower. (Sean Caldwell/NoRipCord.com 12/17
Michael Gira, by contrast, hardly said anything in his time onstage and was roughly 10,000 times more menacing: "Is this fun? I'm having fun" from his lips is like a death sentence. The best of a string of pulverizingly loud 2010 shows here in the Loudest Venue in NYC (no disrespect to Sleep or Boris, of course), Swans' live resurrection was cathartic and brutal and bizarrely purifying, climaxing with the psychotic tumult of "Beautiful Child" -- "THIS IS MY ONLY REGRET/THAT I EVER WAS BORN/THIS IS MMMYYYYYY SACRIFICE," etc. I dare you to spit on that guy. Rob harvilla/blogs.VillageVoice - 10 Best Concerts of 2010

As founder of Young God Records, Michael Gira has introduced the world to acts like Akron/Family and Devendra Banhart. As frontman of noisy post-punk band Swans, Gira is alternately a malevolent singer and maker of beautiful sound. For the band’s first album in close to 15 years, he plays a little bit of both those roles. The result is a pummeling record that Liars no doubt wish they had made. —Austin L. Ray/Pastemagazine.com 12/1

Swans isn’t for everyone.
Devilishly subverting the idea of art as entertainment, the group has always made a point of challenging its audience. Whether ascending to ecstatic, synth-driven heights or mining the depths of despair with raw, dissonant screeches and screams, the band’s albums can be an overwhelming endeavor. And that’s what makes them so hard to shake.
A sense of truth, or perhaps clarity, pervades mastermind Michael Gira’s explorations of the underbelly. Yes, his deep, pins-and-needles-driven drawl and massive walls of sound evoke terrifyingly relatable emotions, but the clarity they offer isn’t always a pleasant experience.
Gira started the group in 1982 alongside similarly fractious, art-obsessed acts like Sonic Youth. He’s recently revived the project, not as a nostalgia act, but as a natural extension of his continued artistic explorations, releasing this year’s spectacular My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Of course, a lot has changed since 1997, when he put the project on hiatus. He’s carved out a respectable career as Angels of Light, discovered and promoted Devendra Banhart, been one of freak folk’s most outward and effective advocates, and built one of indie rock’s most respected institutions, Young God Records.
MMN’s Andrew Phillips recently caught up with Gira to talk about the reinvigorated act, why art school (and art) is a soulless endeavor, what ’80s NYC was really like, the real reason Devendra Banhart left his label, and why Young God records is at an end…
MMN: How’s the new dynamic? Are you feeling old cues popping into place?
Michael Gira: Well, it’s not really like that. It’s more like trying to do something new using the parameters that Swans established. The reason I restarted Swans was really to keep myself interested and vital. Not to try to get back the old feeling, because there really wasn’t just one feeling. The band went through so many changes…
MMN: I’m interested in what that dynamic looks like. When people ask me what the new album sounds like, I say it feels like all the eras mixed together.
MG: I started thinking about making louder music again, more all-enveloping, all-encompassing sounds. And I thought, why not re-start Swans? Angels of Light was specifically started at the end of Swans for me to push myself into writing more narrative songs. I wanted the song itself to be the strongest element. Swans always geared toward a more sonic experience. Toward the end, it tended toward sonic overload, sounds that would overwhelm you. That’s the element I’m veering toward more now. The next album, I’m going to take the notions that developed on this record – like the whole intro to the first song and the big instrumental section on “Eden Prison” – and make those the starting point.
MMN: When I try to pin down what Swans was about, what it is now, one thing that is a common thread – whether we’re talking more industrial, no wave-y, or synth-based – is the word “epic.”
MG: You could use the word “epic” at times. It sounds a little self-aggrandizing.
MMN: I said it; you didn’t
MG: [LAUGHING] I know what you mean. The big sounds subsume you. That’s the aspect I really wanted to pursue. The industrial tag I hate, I loathe.
MMN: Why do you hate that tag so much?
MG: It implies a scene, a style, a trend. I always bucked against that, and didn’t want anything to do with that kind of thing. It was individual music, authentic individual music. A lot of the eras didn’t sound like anybody else.
MMN: Is the balance of light and darkness something you think about? The dynamic of Swans songs tend to veer toward either ecstatic highs and then very dark, brooding lows….
MG: I try to make light and shade and different contrasts. It’s a whole very complicated puzzle for me to work out, which I kind of lay awake at night thinking about when I’m making a record. That’s my art really… I look at Swans as a very positive thing, at least for me it is. The sound itself – I want it to be. Even if it’s overwhelming and it seems people mistake it for being aggressive, it’s more like the apex of a church choir when they just really soar – that’s kind of what I’m going for.
MMN: Another word that I have probably used is “cathartic.” Not that all catharsis implies positive energy…
MG: I don’t think like that. I’m not a critic, you know [laughing]. I don’t analyze what I do before I do it. I just do what interests me at the time. I don’t think, “Oh this will be dark.” I don’t even think about the context it’s going to be in when it’s in the public realm.
MMN: Then you’re subject to the over-analysis of people like me.
MG: [LAUGHING] Perhaps. But that’s your job. I make the music. It’s your job to misinterpret it.
MMN: Speaking of judgment, given that your music is so steeped in a wide understanding of cross-disciplinary art forms and modern philosophy, why didn’t art school work out for you?
MG: I always thought I would be an artist. That’s what I wanted to be from a very young age. Around the time I was in art school – the mid and late ’70s – punk rock happened. It seemed much more relevant and intense and vital than what was to me becoming – and it’s gotten worse now – a very academic, elitist pursuit. It’s got its own special language. People call it “art speak,” which I find pretty abhorrent. It’s like a safe career choice now. It’s like choosing to be a lawyer or an accountant: [In a haughty, pretentious artist's voice] “Well I’m an artist and blahblahblah. Here is my work. This is the reason I do it.” Now, art seems to be this series of chess moves. It’s very specialized and doesn’t have much relevance to real life or the culture.
MMN: So punk pulled you away?
MG: When punk rock happened, I was completely into it, immediately. I was in art school and there was this big L.A. punk show like two blocks away at an Elks lodge or something. I grabbed videos cameras, which were pretty cumbersome, huge things at that time, and dragged them over and taped the show. It was like X, the Screamers, the Germs – all these L.A. bands playing at once. I was just sold right there. Next day, I cut off all my hair.
MMN: It’s always fascinating to hear about that era. As much as I love the Brooklyn scene, the New York scene now seems to often be about, “What’s your next step?”
MG: It’s so careerist, yeah… The difference is huge in the way people look at what they’re doing. I’m not really in a scene. I didn’t want to be then either. When I bring people in to the label, usually I want them to have an authentic voice. I was offered some artists that became really huge, but I passed on them because it just sounded really, I don’t know, kind of normal. Like it could be really huge, but didn’t really have an authentic voice to me.
MMN: What’s the dynamic with Devendra Banhart? I got the impression when he stopped putting out records with you, there may have been some sort of artistic divide…
MG: Nothing like that. His contract expired and he was becoming so famous that there was no way on Earth I could keep up with him. I don’t have any employees. I have a publicist I hire and a radio person I hire on a case-by-case basis, and an accountant obviously, but I do everything else. Just fielding all the e-mails was a full-time job. There was so much interest so quickly. It was great… What he chose to do with his music is his own decision. He’s still incredibly young from my point of view.
MMN: There’s a lot of people who would have said, I’ve got a huge act, I’m going to scale up the company. Where does the label fall compared to your own creative endeavors?
MG: The label is going to take a back seat now. With the Swans thing, I’m so busy I can’t see. I don’t have time for anything. The other reason is monetary. It’s such a disaster of putting in hundreds of hundreds of dollars on a record – going back an forth on the songs, rehearsing with them, talking about arrangements, then going into the studio, then talking about mixing and all of that and paying for all that — then people just take the thing off the web. It’s really frustrating. I gave up working for three dollars an hour 30 years ago, and I don’t want to do it anymore. And, in fact, I can’t afford to lose money because I’m sure as hell not rich.
MMN: Where does that leave things?
MG: I had to make some hard decisions. My time now is better spent working on my own music… The people that are on the label, I’ll continue to put out people’s music who want to stay on the label. As far as looking for new bands, I can’t see it. Maybe one-offs or something. The amount of effort that goes into it – I love doing it – it just doesn’t pay anything. I have to survive.Andrew Phillips/Mog.com 11/19

Swans frontman Michael Gira is like a fire-and-brimstone preacher who actually encourages his congregation to sin themselves to hell. The band’s history stretches back to the early ’80s, touching on abrasive post-punk, repetitive drones, gruesome sludge, and ethereal, apocalyptic elegies. Gira disbanded Swans in the ’90s to focus on Angels of Light, a band that explores similar themes of religion and decadence with a more acoustic, gospel folk palette. This new album by the reconstituted Swans combines the songwriting sophistication of Angels of Light with the Swans’ old-school, bloodthirsty, orcish clamoring at the gates. Brad Bynum/Reno News & Review 12/16

Le bonheur des uns casse les oreilles des autres, pour travestir l'adage. Issu de la mouvance post-punk/no wave new-yorkaise, le groupe Swans - essentiellement l'affaire du patron du label Young God et musicien Michael Gira - a, pendant 15 ans, brutalisé les tympans et les bonnes moeurs avec sa musique plus-gargantuesque-que-nature. Entrevue avec le maître de l'horreur (musicale), qui réactive le projet Swans... au bonheur de ses dévoués fans.
Autant faire la mise en garde suivante: si vous comptez assister au concert de Swans ce soir, au National, apportez vos bouchons. Le volume a déjà été si élevé dans les concerts du groupe qu'il rendait carrément malade certains spectateurs.
Swans, c'est d'abord physique. Ça arrache, les mots comme la musique. Gira et ses collaborateurs aiment gratter le bobo. Provoquer, aussi, comme dans provoquer un malaise, une réflexion. Exemple, les titres de vieilles compositions: Money is Flesh, Sex God Sex et la plus risquée d'entre elles, Raping a Slave.
«Comment je vais? Je ne sais pas comment je vais, répond Gira d'un ton placide, rejoint chez lui, à New York. Je travaille trop. Là, je dois traiter toutes les commandes qui nous sont arrivées sur le site web, je ne sais plus où donner de la tête.»
Depuis ses débuts en 1982, Swans commande une horde de fans dévoués, qui attendaient My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, 12e album studio et le premier depuis 1996. Il a été autofinancé par les fans, qui n'ont rien perdu pour attendre. Ce disque puissant est d'une incontestable pertinence sur le plan des ingénieux arrangements comme des textes. À la fois une synthèse de tous les styles précédemment explorés et une progression dans la recherche des formes, entamée par le projet Angel of Lights qui occupait les temps libres de Gira ces dernières années.
«Oui, je suis vraiment surpris du bel accueil qu'a reçu cet album, je ne m'y attendais pas, dit-il humblement. Je vais devoir être à la hauteur sur scène. On met tout en place, je crois que ce sera un concert incroyable. Des versions de 20 minutes de mes compositions. Ce sera physiquement très exigeant, musicalement aussi.»
Les fans ont d'ailleurs souligné que la chanteuse/collaboratrice Jarboe n'a pas été invitée, «justement pour ne pas que ce soit un retour à une époque révolue. Nous sommes en bons termes, nous avons seulement pris des voies différentes», dit-il. Le guitariste Norman Westberg, témoin privilégié des grandes années Swans, est cependant de retour avec Gira. Celui-ci insiste: ce n'est pas une réunion nostalgique.
«J'ai arrêté Swans pour la même raison que je l'ai redémarré: j'étais, musicalement, dans une impasse. J'avais l'ambition d'explorer autre chose en abandonnant Swans, puis, durant Angel of Light, j'étais à nouveau attiré vers des compositions plus grandioses, plus musclées. Revenir à Swans, c'est comme se retrouver face à face avec son evil twin.»
Explorant les recoins les plus sombres de l'âme humaine avec son rock d'avant-garde bruitiste et assourdissant, Gira a mis fin à l'aventure Swans en 1997. Sa sulfureuse réputation de transgresseur résonnait alors autant que ses chansons pas ordinaires.
«Je ne me considère pas comme un provocateur, explique Gira. Ce que j'écris me paraît nécessaire, j'écris ces mots pour créer un état d'esprit qui ne vise pas la société ou la politique, ou quoi que ce soit. Les auditeurs réagissent comme ils le ressentent à partir de mes mots et de ma musique. Mais sur scène, je n'ai plus envie d'être le masochiste public, dit-il en rigolant. On joue encore de manière énergique, mais je ne saute plus partout comme si j'avais 15 ans.»Philipe Renaud/La Press 10/1

Resurrection is hip. Jandek decided to tour. Silver Jews figured it was a good idea. Pixies decided to put aside their petty squabbles and make some cold, hard cash. Slint got back together. My Bloody Valentine reaffirmed that the earplug
industry will continue to grow and prosper and even those wacky, somewhat grayer guys in Pavement are currently off and running. Resurrection is hip and everyone’s doing it. And now Swans… but lest anyone be any concerned over the motivations or what the new recordings may or may not sound like, the first thing Swans’ “mendicant friar” Michael Gira puts on every mention of the new album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, is “This is not a reunion. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After five Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move forward, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that.”

Swans was never a terribly popular band. They’ve always been important, but popular and important are two widely different things. They never grasped for the limelight and never had to sit under its glare. A 1986 issue of Melody Maker magazine confirmed it, toting the band unapologetically as “a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography.” Pornography may not ultimately be the perfect term to describe lead singer/songwriter Michael Gira’s musical vision, but an adjective- starved music press continues to try its best.

Swans originally roared to life nearly thirty years ago in a fairly hectic underground NYC scene that already boasted future icons like Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth. The group’s eponymous debut EP wasn’t exactly a defining statement but rather a brief introduction. The music on it didn’t turn out to be anything like the skin they would eventually slip into, instead owing much to an incredibly popular scene, then culminating with Joy Division - a scene a whole continent away. Swans
continued to experiment sonically and eventually found its sound and voice four years later with 1986’s Greed (PVC) an LP that pointed the band in an entirely new direction – a direction that included two bassists and for some songs, three drummers. What hadn’t radically shifted was Swans’ lyrical content, the role it saw itself fulfilling within the scene. Though far from repetitive, Gira has always disputed and discussed things that other bands weren’t interested in… (remember, “audio pornography”?) and that’s exactly what made Swans stand out. Swans was a welcomed alternative to the big hair and the synthesizer saturation music that your parents would think twice on asking you about if it was booming from behind your locked bedroom door. Gira and co-vocalist, Jarboe, turned Swans from flash-in-the-pan doom and gloom to critically-acclaimed musical force that would go on to release nearly two dozen more EPs and LPs before seemingly calling it quits with 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind (Young God).

Gira didn’t take any time off. He launched his own record label, NYC-based Young God Records that, besides releasing his various solo and group projects, also helped introduce artists such as Devendra Banhart, Akron/Family, James Blackshaw
and Larkin Grimm. This year’s return of Swans actually owes a great deal to the group of musicians Gira surrounded
himself with at Young God. The first thought of Swans rebirth as a distinct possibility came while playing with Angels of Light, a project he’s lead along with collaborating and backing musicians from his label’s promising roster (including
at times Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family). “We were playing this loud, electric music one night and I was sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, I would love to make music with Swans again,’” Gira said. “That show was definitely the early inspiration…
Swans had ended in this sort of firestorm of shit, very traumatic.”

After the band’s “firestorm of shit” in 1997, Gira confirmed he continued writing and recording music without interruption. “A majority of it was primarily acoustic music, lots of orchestrating of songs.” Evolving that into what became Angels of Light, Gira’s first step towards returning to writing Swans music also began life as a series of acoustic songs. This music was comprised on a self-released CD-R that included hand-drawn artwork, sold to help fund the new release through his label.
Gira also published a book of twenty drawings related to the songs on the CD. The LP, I Am Not Insane, sold so well that the official website still proclaims in giant bold letters that the LP is COMPLETELY SOLD OUT. “I was definitely surprised by the reaction to the new music,” Gira said. “One day we may see more of them, I’m incredibly happy and thankful it’s sold as well as it did.”

The new Swans LP isn’t a major departure from the music Gira has previously given his unique sealof- approval. Entitled, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, the LP begins with the cleverly expansive “No Words/No Thoughts” that literally builds and builds for nearly five minutes before cresting and coming down to land. Gira and company - there are
a half-dozen of them this time around - have found a carefully significant niche to chisel and rupture, this is Swans music but it’s Swans set free. Nobody’s messing around. “The recordings for this record have definitely been a high point for me personally,” Gira said. “We recorded in this tall-ceilinged room which added this uplifting feeling to the music. It wouldn’t be wrong to describe it as a religious experience - the music sections, the band playing together - it was all very intense.”

A majority of the music on My Father… began life on the I Am Not Insane recordings, songs like “Eden Prison,” “Jim,” “Reeling The Liars In” and the wonderfully chaotic aforementioned opener. “I took the songs I’d recorded acoustic and then went into the studio and overdubbed and added patterns, the band added arrangements. It was a very active experience
for everyone involved, but I’m still in charge,” Gira laughed. The band for the new LP and tour includes original members of Swans, as well as past Angels of Light members and other musicians Gira has grown comfortable enough with over the years to ask to help bring his vision to life. He also claimed he’s grown as a songwriter and he’s positively looking ahead. “I’ve definitely developed my skills,” he said. “The chords and the words are coming together, and having such an impressive group of musicians has definitely only helped the matter along.”

The six-member band has plans to tour extensively this fall, and Gira insisted they’re more than ready. “We rehearsed for 10-12 hours a day for three weeks to get ready to play this music live; intense rehearsal. The songs changed and expanded in rehearsal, the live shows are going to be very special.” With everything going on, Gira still finds some time to keep an eye on the independent music scene that surrounds him. He may be an old hand at it but he’s made some incredibly fruitful decisions filling his label with both future superstars, such as Banhart, and current trendsetters, such as Blackshaw. He’s
fairly humble about his picky ear but won’t hesitate in acknowledging he has been able to find a handful of bands that have proved interesting. “Certain people are making good music right now,” he said hesitantly - a long, pregnant pause following his words, as if he’s thinking exactly how he wants to state what it is he’s trying to express, or perhaps considering whether
he’s correct in his assertion. “I really like a lot of different bands but I’m not really paying attention to a lot of it… it’s out there. I can confidently say I’m really enjoying a band called Liturgy right now. A publicist friend of mine turned me on to them. They’re kind of black metal but not really. They’re great.” Paul Barbatano /Ghettoblaster October

At one point on My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, legendary Swans frontman Michael Gira proclaims, “I am free from the choking hold/that began in Eden prison”. On another track, shortly thereafter, he croons in his somber baritone, “Please open my mind and take what’s left”. When thinking about the lyrics of most songwriters, debates about the nature of free will in a supposedly fallen universe don’t normally cross one’s mind. Not so when dealing with Gira—the man’s into some heavy stuff, to put it, well, lightly. Even more intriguingly, he doesn’t just bring these issues up in his liner notes, offering pat judgments about good and evil. No, Gira’s not one to oversimplify, not one to make things immediately accessible or familiar. If he did that on an album, it wouldn’t be a Swans album, at all.

If those lyrics above suggest a writer both celebrating and bemoaning his ability to completely control his choices in life, to see his own consciousness as the thing from which all of his decisions and mistakes spring forth, that might explain some of Gira’s recent moves in his decades-long musical career. He’s “re-activated” Swans, dormant since 1997, and why not? It’s his world. Some of his more cynical acolytes may have greeted the news with skepticism, fearing a weak comeback album or half-baked reunion tour. However, Gira’s been doing fine without the band. His Angels of Light project has been putting out compelling material ever since Swans called it quits. So, why reboot Swans if not for some compelling reason of his own? Whatever the case, we finally have My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky to judge, and—whatever baggage it might carry—what a gift it turns out to be.

My Father opens with what sounds like church bells, tolling in a darkly singsong melody. Gira soon sweeps all of that away, his band announcing themselves in a swell of noise, wailings eerily like bomber jets or air raid sirens darting in and out above the mix. Church is out, it seems? After a few minutes, the track, “No Words/No Thoughts”, takes real shape. Gira’s voice leads the way above militaristic percussion and heaving guitars. The 21st century Gira’s still interested in writing songs, no longer content with being a noisemaker, an idea later Swans releases made clear to an often divided fan base. The song sets the tone for the record perfectly: dark, almost to the point of pitch, yes, but also complex and shifting, something like a gallon of oil rushing around your feet, impossible to collect in one handful.

While “No Words/No Thoughts” introduces the emotional tenor of My Father, it doesn’t contain the entirety of its musical palate. The next track, “Reeling the Liars In”, brings the folk elements of Angels of Light into Swans territory. The song could be rightfully called some bastard offshoot of country western music, but it would be from the West of Cormac McCarthy or another dystopian prophet, all grit-covered wasteland and bits of flesh clinging to sun-bleached skeletons. Over a gently strummed acoustic guitar, Gira matter-of-factly sings, “We are reeling the liars in/we are removing their face/collecting their skin/we are reeling the liars in”. The speaker of the song paints himself as a saint, here to “sing as you eat their tongues” after leading these liars to his band of righteous followers. “Here is my hand”, he proffers, “now drive the nail in/Here is my tongue/now cut off my sin”. So, he’s part of the problem, too, another liar to be burnt away. Again, this question seems to be the dilemma of the record: if God has been finally chased away, what do we do about sin, now, by ourselves?

“Jim”, a jaw-dropping, hallucinatory vision dressing up as a song, offers some potential choices: “It’s time/to lose/the binds/to lose our minds/time to exhale/to drink the green sea/to drift upon/the scarlet breeze… it’s time/to begin”. Beautiful imagery, but delivered in Gira’s throaty, clipped bellow, the words become purely sinister, images of men who made their own gods, with all crushing and violent power that comes with that transformation. “Ride your/mechanical beast/to Heaven”, Gira intones over the band’s impossibly insistent, hypnotizing drone. This is explosive songwriting, both burdensome in its weight and liberating in its fevered call-to-arms.

The most impressive thing about My Father’s seething, swaggering intensity is that it keeps it up. “My Birth” groans forward on a seasick rhythm, its wall-of-sound pummeling away as Gira hears “the howl of the beast/I feel his breath on my face/I feel the edge of his teeth…” In a lesser songwriter, these lyrics would become meaningless James Hetfield-style tropes, but Gira’s presence proves indomitable in the earnestness and intelligence of its doomsaying. “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” features Devendra Banhart in his first un-cringe-worthy appearance on a record since—actually, ever—cooing along with Gira’s 3 ½ year-old daughter, Saoirse, to skin-crawling effect. “Little Mouth” closes the record on a note of starkly beautiful (and even more so by virtue of its contrast to the searing trip offered by the rest of the album before it) and qualified hope, with Gira asking, “And may I find/my way/to the reason to come home?/And may I find/my way/to the foot of your throne”. He’s searching for answers in the face of a terrifying abyss, and—true to Gira’s form—Swans again carries off the seemingly impossible task of making music for both the void and the soul.
Corey Beasley/Popmatters.com 9/28

Swans constant Michael Gira's adamant rejection of the word "reunion" makes sense. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the band's first album since their 1996 breakup, ranks among their best — making this the furthest thing possible from a cynical cash-in. There's nothing so legendarily bilious as, say, "Cop" (they left the scorn-faced, metallic noise decades ago), but Gira is still sending sophisticated, pummeling dispatches from the edge of the void. (A song called, tellingly, "You F*cking People Make Me Sick" is a duet between Devendra Banhart and Gira's three-year-old daughter.) Jarboe is gone, but three previous Swans collaborators are in tow, including the great guitarist Norman Westberg. - Stephen Gossett/ http://flavorpill.com/chicago/issues/current 10/5

After a 13-year break, seminal industrial outfit Swans are revving back up. Following a successful tour of the northeastern United States, the band is playing a 10-date stint in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The treks are in support of the group's critically acclaimed new album, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky," on frontman Michael Gira's Young God Records. A month after its Sept. 21 release, the project has thus far reached No. 23 on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums chart.

Reaction to the post-punk band's performances has been positive. Seven of Swans' 10 dates on their recent U.S. and Canada tour of small to midsize venues were sold out, including stops in New York, Chicago, Boston, Toronto and Montreal.

"It's been going really well, let's just put it that way," Gira says by phone from the Concorde 2 club in Brighton, England. The venue is one of the stops on Swans' England run, during which the band headlined the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham and sold out London's 1,500-seat Koko Theatre. Swans will continue touring overseas in two- to six-week stints during the next 18 months, with dates in Japan, Australia, Russia and Greece. The group will return to the States in February.

Gira decided to reactivate Swans when he began feeling creatively stunted in his other band, Angels of Light. "I had been thinking about making louder, all-encompassing, all-consuming uplifting sounds again," he says. "So I thought I'd restart Swans."

To get a sense of what the response would be—and to help drum up financial support for the project—Gira sold 1,000 hand-printed and -colored limited-edition copies of acoustic demos on his website, YoungGodRecords.com. He hoped to sell the entire lot in six months. Instead, they sold out in eight days.

Gira credits the Internet and social media for not only regrouping original Swans fans but also introducing younger listeners to the act's music and live shows. "[The crowds] are very mixed, which is very gratifying," Gira says. "It'd be pretty awful if it was just old people like me." —Megan Vick/Billboard 11/6

If we do ever see an apocalypse, when the dust has settled and the few survivors gather up scraps to construct bars and living quarters -- in that order -- once they get the wiring down, this is the album that'll play on the jukebox. Maybe the only album. Michael Gira's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, with the reassembled Swans, sounds gutted out. It's an album that marries the buzzsaw abrasion of past Swans' albums with the country-cum-death-blues feel of his work with Angels of Light. That's an easy way to explain it, anyway.

This music, though, it's almost anti-music in spots. In a good way. It strips away all the comforting structures we know and leaves us awash in harsh emotion. The standard rock 'n' roll tension release, that burst of cathartic energy, is no more here than a constant swelling, a white-noise frustration that grows and grows to just before the point of rupture, but never quite bursts. The nearly 10-minute opener, "No Words/No Thought," is a jarring combination of not-quite-formless squall and a military-insistent beat. The combination of purpose and unbearable tension is volatile. The deathly waltz of "Jim" takes a similar tack, with a beat excruciatingly slow, the instruments grinding away, and Gira nearly cackling as he insists that we "ride your beautiful bitch to the ultimate sin."

In other places, Gira tears down country music, from its articulate, clever brand of lonesome to a thin, miles-wide isolation. There's no finding your way back to the one you love, no self-destructive wallowing in drink, just the lonesome pit in your gut and the blind lashing out to keep it that way. "Reeling the Liars In" and "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" (simutaneously the calmest and most unsettling track on the record) take this path, and the isolation, all consuming as it is, is also a nice counterpoint to the clustered-up vitriol of the other tracks. It's also preps us for the rattling beauty of closer "Little Mouth," where Gira's voice is at its most bottomed out and arresting.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky takes on a sort rapture, maybe a rapture that works in reverse, where we burn it all down -- there's a lot of burning as violent cleansing on this record -- and sink deeper to start again. It's that feeling, of leaving it all behind, that makes this sound so exhilarating. There's a freeing quality to this record, and Gira seems to be at his most creative, bringing Swans back together not to retread what he's already done but to cut loose the reigns on his tamer Angels of Light work.

If there's hope in a recognition scene -- that moment in Greek tragedy where everyone knows they're not getting out alive -- if there's freedom in embracing the end if only to begin again, then that is the bracing undercurrent of this record. "It's 200 miles to the place where we begin," Gira sings at one point, and his sluggish voice implies its a long way to go (probably on foot), but there's the fainted hint of redemption in there, a slippery brand of salvation that hides behind all the darkness on this record.

Even with that glimmer, though, this disc is an awfully combative listen -- this shit will push at you and push at you, and you have to be willing to take the hits. But if you push back a little, if you grit your teeth and plow through the storm as Gira's music surrounds you in darkness, as it grinds away at your at every step, you'll soon find yourself stumbling through his finest tour yet through the rubble of any and every musical genre he catches in his grasp.
Matt Fiander/Prefixmag.com 10/19

With Swans’ first studio album in 14 years, songwriter Michael Gira has sparked the incendiary fires of his best-known group for another push at the fertile boundaries of music. Having made a journey from raw, ritualistic purgation in the early 1980s, to carefully crafted soundscapes in the late ’90s, the newest incarnation of the Swans swaggers with refined violence and drags the listener into its beautiful and sonorous depths.
Declaring the Swans dead in 1997, Gira went on to acoustic explorations, both solo and with an ensemble under the name The Angels of Light, allowing him to work through his ideas on a more subtle level. The words, his presence, and the subtle nuances of sound came to the fore, no longer consumed by the notoriety surrounding the identity of the Swans. As the Angels of Light progressed, some of the old fire started to peek out again; Gira began returning to the innate energy that had fueled the Swans.
His 2010 solo release, I Am Not Insane, built on this feeling and also helped fund the reality of a new Swans record and tour. The limited-edition CDs, complete with hand-printed packages, sold out in two weeks. “I had a couple of hundred prepared three days before recording the new album,” Gira says. “I wasn’t prepared for them to go so fast.” To make up for the shortage, he went into overtime with his wife and daughter getting everything ready to send out.
Adorning select copies of I Am Not Insane with a golden swirl, Gira’s use of the ancient symbol for the labyrinth provides a poignant reflection for the Swans and for Gira himself. As he noted in his announcement, this is no reunion jag. Like the symbol of the labyrinth, this is a passage through an altered circle — Dante’s inferno — the progress of an artist having gone through hell and coming back out the devil’s mouth.
“This is the most vulnerable I’ve felt in years,” he says. “We’ve rehearsed very hard to pull this off. When you put together a new band, it has to become a band, and that takes time.” Many of the new songs that appear on I Am Not Insane are performed with just Gira’s voice and guitar, and in order to get the new Swans roster up to speed, he sent each of the musicians a copy and allowed them to start experimenting with their own additions. Though Gira has become something of a cult brand, it was important to him that this album represented the individual talents of the players.
To achieve this, Gira assembled hardened veterans of sonic exploration, reaching a realization of the possibilities that earlier Swans albums slyly suggested. Thor Harris, credited with drums, percussion, vibes, dulcimer, curios, and keys, is an accomplished carpenter, musician, and craftsman in his own right. Bill Rieflin was an integral part of Ministry and Revolting Cocks and is currently drumming for REM, as well as working on projects with guitarist Robert Fripp. Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Devendra Banhart, Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica, and “Grasshopper” of Mercury Rev — each helps this album come together as collective artistry.
My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the group’s raw return, was recorded with Jason LaFarge at Seizures Palace. In a stripped-down room of concrete walls and an unfinished ceiling, the band played 12 hours straight for most of the songs. It used the stone walls and high ceilings to accentuate overtones and harmonics. “There was no separation,” Gira says. “We recorded all of us in the room playing. It’s overwhelming to play it that way. It takes a lot of overdubbing to get back to the intensity of the room.”
Indeed, Gira’s expressive music explores the physical experience of sound itself. Both in and out of the studio, he addresses the physicality of sound, creating waves of powerful music.
On tour, this process becomes a more immediate exchange. “I don’t try to recreate what I do in the studio when I play live,” Gira says. “Playing live is about rediscovering the song and getting back to that place where the people are playing, the sound starts swirling — sometimes it takes whole tours to get to that point.”
“No Words/No Thoughts” introduces the album with a gentle percussion piece that builds in violent orchestration of squealing buzz saws. By the time Gira’s vocals come in, the listener’s brain has been scrapped, becoming a sonic Charon leading a journey across the river Lethe. Forget what came before; the Swans walk on.
The album moves through a carefully balanced mix of musical discordance and delicate harmonic play. Gira’s respect for artists like Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan allows him to take this physical material into a place of intricacy. His vocals walk through landscapes of sound, pursued by occasional melodies and orchestral compositions.
As a songwriter, Gira builds from his experiences without nostalgia. Something as commonplace as visiting music websites becomes the beautiful, eerie duet between Banhart and his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter on “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” “Jim” is built from his relationship with JG Thirwell of Foetus, Steroid Maximus, and Wiseblood, but the friendship is merely a source for sauntering rhythms and oblique wordplay.
Along with the official release, Gira created an instrumental mix of the album to explore the longer sonic elements that he’d wanted to put on the album. He describes the process as a “matter of layering bricks; it takes a long time, and grows organically — rushes of inspiration — but most of it is like hacking away with an ice pick.”
Of course, Gira remains busy with his 20-year-old label, Young God Records, which has issued releases by James Blackshaw, Fire on Fire, Lisa Germano, and Akron/Family in recent years. Running the label has allowed him to foster a number of young careers, but it also has fostered Gira’s artistic growth. And with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, Gira and Swans emerge as elemental and potent from 13 years in the grave. Plans for the next album are already fomenting in Gira’s creative consciousness, and we can look forward to further visions of grace and power.David Metcalfe/Alarmpress.com 11/4

"This is not a reunion band going out to play their old record or something; I'm interested in making things happen," says Swans' guitarist/singer Michael Gira, who has been making music for 30-some years as a solo artist and also under the Angels of Light moniker.
Having "reactivated" his preeminent project, Swans, he continues to seek sonic transcendence through persistent shifts in style. He's not one to look back; he's not "a journalist or historian" looking to reestablish a Swans narrative, based upon fans both passionate and casual and their perception of the NY-based group's work.
"Fighting expectations" was what, in '97, wore Gira into "retiring" the seminal NY-no-wave era project. This month heralds a new Swans album, with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky.
"For me, which shouldn't matter to any audience member because it's not about me," says Gira, "it's about the music — but ... it was a major challenge and personal upheaval to reinvigorate Swans. I had to confront my demon brother and embrace him. What I'm doing, and what I'm wrestling with, with this whole concept, has given me a new sense of purpose. I love it. Experiencing these overwhelming sounds again is just tremendous."
Swans are known for battering-ram crescendos, soul-shaking cacophony and a hauntingly beautiful balance of an aural chaos. Gira said that the band (including original member Norman Westberg with other long-time Gira-collaborators Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica, Christopher Hahn and Thor Harris) have been rehearsing all month, galvanizing eight songs into 15-minute "tremendous marathon(s)."
Swans are on an ambitious tour that will stretch throughout the next year and a half. Gira says he's looking forward to the next album: "I want to make the songs more purely, first and foremost, involved in the sonics of it and worry about the words later."
Jeff Milo/Real Detroit Weekly 9/29

The black-and-silver morass that Michael Gira made as Swans ripped a hole in the clouds with its shard and thud. Why shouldn't he return to that legendarily epic ensemble (after five Angels of Light records) with a taut, terrorizing yank through the heavens? Not surprisingly, Gira and Co. don't solely go for the raw powered pummel or the broad strokes of art-damage; the nihilistic noise that drives "No Words/No Thoughts" wafts through this album like a cult-cloud of smoke yet doesn't drive much of Swans' newfound primal yet pastoral Angelic lilt.

There is clever nuance and cool tension throughout - to say nothing of blame, idolatry, confinement and adoration. Though several main Swans congregate the new recording and guest membership includes the wonky-warbling Devendra Banhart (Gira discovered the then neo-folkie and released Dev's first albums) and Ministry/R.E.M. drummer Bill Rieflin, this Swan-y moment is all Gira's and a testament to his dramatically dire yet rapturously passionate aesthetic.
A.D. AMorosi/Blurt-online.com 9/22

Swans once was and is now again a band designed for one primary purpose: producing states of total and overwhelming joy. Despite the lyrical fixations that many perceive as overbearingly dark, violent, sexually debased and heretical, and despite the meat-headed masses that swarm to any prominent music of relative brutality and volume (and who certainly came to Swans during the first 15 years of the band’s career, from 1982-1997), the nature of the work has always been in pursuance of an elevated and elated plane. Never has this been more explicit than in Swans’ brilliant new record, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky—its first since its dissolution by Swans mastermind Michael Gira 13 years ago.
From its title on down, the album is a keenly focused re-assertion and conceptual new morning of Swans’ conquest of paradise, even as it proves something of a bridge from Gira’s last, dense period of work as the softer and more song-oriented Angels of Light. Indeed, the songs that make up My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were initially born under the wings of the previous band. As Gira describes it, “I initially presumed it would be an Angels of Light record, but in thinking about it that way it was sort of underwhelming to me… I wanted to have something more overwhelming. For lack of a better word, louder.”
Working with the core new Swans (many same as the old Swans) Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica and Thor Harris, Gira took the songs to the creative try-pots, playing one song exhaustively for several hours, and refining and recording a song a day in this manner for the bulk of the recording. The rehearsals for the band’s current tour, taking place in a sheet rock-walled room “as big as your average bedroom,” Gira describes as “grueling, very arduous, based on intense concentration… I find it very elating.”
This grand unification of repetitive, highly physical labor and the ecstatic state is the defining essence of Swans and can be traced all the way back to Gira’s young life, both working the jackhammer on construction sites and serving a nowfamous stint in Israeli prison for drug charges. And, for the so inclined, this is what makes Swans such a toweringly affecting force—in the sometimes bludgeoning, repetitive, duration-based songs, the listener (and, more effectively, the audience member) can be elevated along with the performers channeling these energies. Gira describes his intended effect of the aural tidal waves that Swans produces as “like going to church and having 10 choirs singing at once. That’s what I’m going for.”
Back in 1997, in an interview for Swans’ then-final tour, Gira stated, “I chose to end Swans now because I realize how futile it is to continue. I think the name itself has become a noose around my neck.” Thirteen years later, it seems this noose has become a rope to heaven, for Gira, Swans and those strong enough to climb with them.
Sam Mickens/NY Press 10/6

…the highlight of the festival by a fairly huge margin was served up on Friday, Oct. 1, when Swans complete¬ly crushed le National. Not only was Swans’ appearance the pick of the fest for me, it also easily earned its place as my show of the year thus far and will probably remain etched in my memory bank as one of the greatest shows I’ve ever witnessed. Trying to encapsulate it in mere words would be doing it a great disservice, but I’ll try to give it a go. Over a perfectly paced two-hour show, Michael Gira and company started things off with a power drone that slowly crawled to decibel-crunching pulverization that held the sold-out room captive. With very little banter except a couple of tossed-off non sequiturs, it was the grin on Gira’s face that revealed that he was quite chuffed to once again inflict the damage of Swans’ trademark propulsive pummeling of the senses. Right from the moment they took the stage, Gira and co. slipped into a trance and bored to the core of highly retooled versions of “I Crawled,” “Your Property,” “Beautiful Child” (which was actually so heavy I had to leave the room to try and regain my hearing) and “Sex God Sex,” while also letting new songs like “Jim,” set opener “No Words/No Thoughts” and “Eden Prison” ascend to new heights that easily broke past their recorded form. Again, there are really no words available that can truly do this show justice, but “utterly inspiring,” “spiritual ascension,” “primal purity” and “life-affirming” would be a damn good start. Jonathan Cummins/Montreal Mirror 10/7

After Michael Gira disbanded the brutal, beautiful Swans in 1997, he did anything but go quietly into the mists of avant rock legend. He ran his label Young God, wrote and published fiction, formed and cut half a dozen albums with Angels of Light, and produced and released recordings by numerous acts, including the first offerings by Devendra Banhart. Gira reconvened the Swans project for My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, eight songs that pick up in part where 1997's Soundtracks for the Blind left off, while remaining firmly in the present with the influence of Angels of Light and his solo records in the mix. This edition of Swans contains various former members, including guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn, drummers Phil Puleo (who played with Swans and Angels of Light) and Thor Harris (ex of the Angels), and bassist Chris Pravdica. Guests include Banhart, Bill Rieflin (who also guested with a previous edition of Swans), and Mercury Rev's Grasshopper. The chimes that introduce the nine-and-a-half-minute opener, "No Words/No Thoughts," give way to martial, massive no wave guitars and pummeling kick drums and tom-toms. Gira begins his powerfully incantatory roar as the track shapes and twists, rumbling and thundering. Likewise, "My Birth" contains Swans' hypnotic, punishing -- if more refined -- repetition with a sawing dulcimer added in the high end for more tension. Gira's lyrics are still concerned with the extremities of human experience as they encounter the blind light of the divine and the bottomless heart of darkness. There is great power in this music; it points at the margins of violence, but never quite gets there ("Eden Prison," with Gira's vocals amid a swirling mass of in-the-red instrumentation and tribal drumming, is a solid example). "Jim" is the dead cross where late-era Swans and Angels of Light intersect. There are other places here, such as "Reeling the Liars In," where Gira performs solo on acoustic guitar, or on the closer "Little Mouth," where the meld of acoustic and electric instruments as well as chant-like multi-voice choruses create an even wider depth of field. In classic Swans confrontational mode, "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" features Banhart and Gira's young daughter singing "I love you/Young flower/Now give me/What is mine” to one another tenderly, before industrial sounds, textures, and hammering percussion rain down on the listener; it's jarring, disturbing. All this serves to underscore that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is a mercilessly intense and beautiful record that only Swans could pull off, and that no matter who plays in the band, Gira was and is Swans: their sound, their musical and poetic vision, their heartbeat.Thom Jurek/Allmusic.com

This post-punk band started in the early 1980s by Michael Gira is somewhat emblematic of New York’s “no-wave” art scene, which favored work with a pronounced experimental bent. Although Swans dissolved in 1997, Mr. Gira — who went on to found Angels of Light — recently resurrected the moniker and released “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky” (Young God), Swans’ first new album in 14 years. Amanda Petrusich/New York Times 10/8

Music hasn’t been the same since seminal hometown noise-rockers the Swans disbanded in 1997—so news that that frontman Michael Gira was reassembling a crew was met with cheers from those who like their music to literally vibrate their bones. Riding their new album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the Swans play back-to-back reunion shows at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Friday (8PM) and Bowery Ballroom on Saturday (9PM). (Both are sold out, but Craigslist has some tickets.) David Chiu nbcnewyork.com/blogs/nonstop-sound 10/8


Michael Gira says that stopping his New York-based pop-punk band Swans in 1997 “was a really difficult thing to do, but it was totally necessary. I was completely fed up.”

Now, however, he’s “reached the inverse of that.”

Gira has brought Swans back to life this year with a new album, “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” which he partly funded with a limited edition solo album, “I Am Not Insane,” which he says raised “close to enough money” to pay for the recording.

Gira and his latest lineup of compatriots recorded the album — which features guest appearances by Devendra Banhart and Gira’s 3-year-old daughter — in a basement studio in Brooklyn, working on one song per day for 12-hour sessions. He’s happy with the results, but he’s also looking forward to moving Swans forward as a going concern.

“I have lots of musical ideas,” Gira notes, “no word yet but lots of musical ideas for the next album based on what we’re doing in rehearsals now. (Swans) is what I want to do for the foreseeable future.

“It’s not like some reunion thing where a band gets together and plans an old album or something. For me, it was a personal thing I had to do to stay vital as an artist — to stay authentic, really.” Gary Graff/Oakland Press 9/30

I’m not sure what kind of person considers themselves a Swans fan. I don’t think that the group ever really has casual listeners, people who liked a few songs here and there. The band’s super committed fanboy following is one of the things I love most about Swans.
These are the people who truly appreciate Swans, and I count myself as one of them. When the group finally disbanded around 1996, it probably seemed like the most reasonable course of action. I can only assume Michael Gira, the chief architect of Swans, had exhausted all his Swans-options. Gira’s next projects, the group Angels of Light, and the superb Young God Records, satisfied him for long enough.
Now we’re here in 2010, and Gira has gotten Swans back together. I don’t know why — I’ve always taken everything the man has done at face value, but the initial announcement threw me for a loop. It’s not nostalgia, nor does it look like they need the cash. We weren’t in the midst of a Swans revival — which is usually the sort of thing that causes old soldiers to reenlist. There’s no explanation for the existence of new album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. But now it does, and now we are better off.
I don’t know Michael Gira. I like to imagine he spent the last decade planning the new album, carefully, lovingly. On track one, the venomous “No Words/No Thoughts,” I hear the grit and grime of early works of The Bad Seeds, and it out-grinds the current Cave work in Grinderman. It’s the type of song that, at just under ten minutes, burns slowly. I’d like to say this is vintage Swans, but it’s not. It’s something better.
After that last note is banged and clanged, I prepared myself for more abuse, but Gira shocks with an Angels of Light-inspired dark gospel hymn, “Reeling the Liars In.”
The album is seductive, dark, and it doesn’t let you rest from the first sound to the last. The spooky, Devendra Banhart sung, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” is the best thing Devendra has touched since his early days on Young God. The closer, “Little Mouth,” kills you gently, fading out to a blissful shade of black.
I don’t know where Swans can go from here. If they choose to continue to build on this momentum, I’d be happy to hear the end result; however, if this is the last dispatch from one of the most challenging bands to emerge from the American underground, then it will be the grandest exit I’ve heard yet.
Jason Diamond/ vol1brooklyn.com 10/21

The opening track, "No Words/No Thoughts," pretty much sums it up: Swans are still loud, weird and wild. Chiming church bells give way to a noise-drenched marching anthem most apt for elevator music at a psych ward; anonymous guitars and horns screech and moans, then finally, four minutes in, segue into a morbid punk cadence. The song meanders under its own volition, leading you by the hand through the often-unsettling experience.
And so commences Swans 2.0. Thirteen years after their "retirement," My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, resurrects the formerly defunct New York-based noise-rockers. Leader Michael Gira, constrained by the acoustic mellowness of his previous project, Angels of Light, decided to shovel his aural creativity back into the chaotic, freedom-ridden underground he and Swans first emerged from back in 1982. Doesn't matter that he's 56 years old, Gira hasn't lost his ingenious Sidam Touch. Just as always, he spins arbitrary styles and instrumentation into casual entropy, Father being the optimistic example that, yes, bands can reconvene and as record as if they never broke up.
Swans' unadulterated creativity stems and blooms from their choice label - Gira's own. Young God Records, which produced many Angels of Light albums, gives the band complete freedom to keep doing what they do best: shock, rock and make audiences feel comfortably uneasy. Father's loose conceptions of compositions, typically slow-roasted in minor-keydom and blissful cacophony, come in all shapes and flavors. "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" strums in lush, 12-string beauty in the vein of Angels of Light. The melody is bittersweet, and Gira's hushed, fragile baritone sings a fractured tale of greed and oppression. The song's extended coda consists of ominous free-verse horns blaring as various band members go apeshit on pianos, strings and drums. "Inside Madeline" starts as a groovy, bluesy sex-as-sound metaphor. Chris Pravdica's classic rock bass line slithers under the siren-like guitar jam that eventually peaks and smolders into a folky, Old World jingle. Swans demonstrate their more linear and conventional side with "Jim" and "My Birth," two Spaghetti Western punk romps flooded with attitude and Gira's foreboding voice.
The status quo of peculiarity satisfied, there is one difference with Swans: the absence of Jarboe, the band's other constant. While the album lacks her haunting contributions, Gira makes sure Father hits where it counts. As a band that never prunes its personality, Swans and their second coming emanate the energy and individuality of their roots, a trait few bands can attest to almost 30 years after their inception. Welcome back, guys. Here's to hoping you stick around for another long run.Jody Spadea/SpectrumCulture.com 10/14

Born from the New York no wave scene of the early '80s, Swans built up a reputation for being one of the noisiest, most intense bands in America. Churning out slow, pummeling avant garde juggernauts, the band had become the source of urban legend, having supposedly caused physical illness in concertgoers due to the visceral, destructive sound they emitted. Yet around 1987, with their landmark Children of God album, Swans transitioned into a more poetic, subtle and quite beautiful sound, albeit one that maintained much of the power and intensity of their earlier work. And by the time they closed the book on their 15-year career, Swans had become a more abstract, almost post-rock band, as they magnificently displayed on, um, swan song Soundtracks for the Blind.

After having retired the Swans name for well over a decade and creating an impressive body of work with Angels of Light, however, head Swan Michael Gira decided to once again take on the mantle of his old band. For My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, Gira recruited several former bandmates, from guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn to drummers Phil Puleo and Shearwater's Thor Harris, as well as guests ranging from Ministry alum Bill Rieflin, Mercury Rev's Grasshopper, Devendra Banhart and Gira's own daughter. Yet after 14 years, Gira is in a vastly different creative place than he was when Swans first disbanded. The droning abstraction of Soundtracks for the Blind remains in part, but on the whole, Father is a much more accessible, melody-driven affair, still quite dark and haunting, but surprisingly immediate.

From the opening bell chimes of epic nine-minute opener "No Words/No Thoughts," a chill sets in, casting an ominous shadow that sets a dark yet awe-inspiring tone for the rest of the album to follow. In less than a minute's time, Gira & Co. introduce a harsh post-punk sludge, banging out a droning, plodding rhythm that's characteristically abrasive, unsettling and alluring. And yet, halfway through, this doomsday rumble of a dirge kicks up the dust, turning into an art-rock epic of the highest order, with Gira playing an oddly calm master of ceremonies to the whirlwind of noisy riffs and screeching strings.

That opening monolith is an overwhelming experience on its own, challenging the listener while drawing him closer with each movement. Yet this exhilarating and eerie standout is followed up by seven more outstanding songs, each one revealing a different, intriguing side to this new permutation of Swans. "Reeling the Liars In" is a gospel-tinged folk song, Gira intoning the song's title with a bluesy soulfulness. On "My Birth," the band's burly, hard rocking side comes out with ferocity, all Sabbath-style riffs and harmonica. The hypnotic "Eden Prison" locks into a bassy repetition, constantly threatening to explode into unbridled sonic violence, but never allows it to happen. The jaw-dropping, dynamic "Jim," however, breaks loose gradually, reaching a tensely powerful moment as Gira chants, "It's time, it's time/ It's time to begin." And the fantastically titled "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" is a blissfully bizarre ballad in which Banhart and Gira's daughter sing "I love you/ young flower/ now give me/ what is mine," as a lead-in to a series of jarring percussive noises.

A heavy, sometimes terrifying and frequently beautiful offering, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is a breathtaking new chapter for Michael Gira and Swans. It's at once an album that encapsulates all of the Swans' most potent qualities, yet sounds like nothing they've done before. Yet it is clearly the product of Michael Gira's dark genius, from its pummeling industrial sounds to its aggressive rock 'n' roll and bluesy folk. Before releasing the album, Gira stated that he wasn't interested in nostalgia, and the evidence is in Father's songs. This isn't a throwback, but a brave and rewarding new direction. Jeff Terich/treblezine.com 10/18

Among all the bands that delve deeply into dark, erotic Rock, Swans stands alone. Under the perpetual and gravely brilliant leadership of Michael Gira, Swans has set a singular course that pays no attention to musical or cultural trends to make its point. Gira’s musical output has evolved over the past three decades (counting a 13-year hiatus), beginning as Swans’ Industrial fatalism, which sounded like a guitar-shaped chainsaw cutting an airplane in half, and morphing into a still brutally heavy but amazingly melodic and nuanced Pop version of that same general idea under the banner of Angels of Light. And the connective tissue linking all of Swans’ various incarnations and intonations to one another has always been Gira’s doom-laden and emotionally concussive lyrics, every line as sharp as a boot razor and every word designed to cast a pall over any and all proceedings.
Although Gira’s recent Angels of Light releases have been considerably sunnier in atmosphere, the gravity-on-Jupiter heaviness of the material he created for My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky convinced him to return to the Swans persona. The effects of Angels of Light is certainly apparent, but even a kinder, gentler Swans has the ferocious snap of a snakebit wolverine and My Father is solid evidence that Gira is not going gently into the good night anytime soon.
Although the chiming church bells that announce the album’s eight-minute epic opener “No Words/No Thoughts” hint at a lighter atmosphere, the Wagnerian guitar squall that follows, along with Gira’s eulogistic Nick Cave-meets-Lou Reed drone vocalizing, dispel that notion. Musically, the Celtic Folk hymn “Reeling the Liars In” waltzes along with a melodic lilt as Gira’s lyrical focus (“Here is my hand, now drive the nail in/We are reeling the liars in”) counterpoints the song’s tone, but he climbs back on the funereal bandwagon for the electric dirge of “Jim” and the Middle Eastern Black Sabbath slam of “My Birth.”
But perhaps the best disconnect on the album is the pretty-mandolin-to-ugly-piano-and-guitar-apocalypse of “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” a velvet shiv featuring dissonant vocals by Gira’s 3 1/2-year-old daughter and an ominous Devendra Banhart.
Gira has been quick to state that this new iteration of Swans is no crass reunion but a millennial resurrection of an idea that Gira believed in 1997 had run its course. It turns out there’s still plenty of venom left in Swans’ fangs after all.
Brian Baker/CityBeat.com 10/8


ABSTRACT: POP MUSIC about Swans. After a thirteen-year hiatus, the New York band Swans has released a new album, “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” and begun an eighteen-month world tour. Michael Gira, the band’s fifty-six-year-old leader, now lives in upstate New York with his wife and two young children, but in the early eighties he was the standard-bearer for a certain kind of confrontation in the downtown New York scene. The new version of Swans is more musically adept than the original, slightly terrifying incarnation. The question is whether you want plain old music from an artist who has put so much faith in transcendence and physical experience. Do you want Swans to play great music or to erase you? Swans came together in New York in a cultural context that evaporated almost twenty years ago, owing to the twin spectres of AIDS and financial solvency. By the 1983 album, “Filth,” Gira had found his focus and one of his muses, the guitarist Norman Westberg. Traditionally conceived music was replaced by something approaching pure motion, though the tempo was rarely fast. With two bass players, two drummers (one of whom hit various metal objects), and the uncanny howl of Westberg’s guitar, the band sounded as if it were aiming to drive something into the earth, or into a body. As the eighties ended, Swans’ records mutated toward beauty. Gira took Swans through several incarnations in the nineties before retiring the act; he also started a band called Angels of Light, with new musicians. Gira decided to bring back Swans during an Angels of Light show five years ago. On the new album there are few fancy harmonies or syncopations in his work. The pace is generally slow, though the material becomes energized when pounded hard enough…Sasha Frere Jones/New Yorker 10/24

For the first Swans tour in 13 years, one question is pressing: Will they return to the sludgy, deafening abyss-sucking misanthropy of their early years, or will they float on the hazy, sexually frustrated quasi-folk-mystic tip, like frontman Michael Gira has been doing the last decade (via his Angels of Light and even the fantastic new Swans reunion record, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky)? Well, noiseniks, rejoice. Reports from local bands who share neighboring practice spaces with the Swans say that the band is loud, oppressively loud, terrifyingly loud, so fucking loud. One rock band who practices nearby couldn't even hear their own rehearsal while Swans were at work. Another band actually knocked on the band's door and told them to keep it down. In short, this is going to be massive beyond massive. And the fact that it's occurring at Brooklyn Masonic Temple, frequently described as the "loudest venue in Brooklyn," means that innards will be melted, asses will be vibrated from chairs, and the masons should really check that joint for structural damage come Saturday. Christopher Weingarten/Village Voice 10/6

After a hard-fought three-year writer’s block, Michael Gira thanks Jesus that he finally got some songs out. Since moving to the country and becoming a father, “It’s like hacking away at a rock cliff with a toothpick trying to get a song,” he says. Whether it’s the actual longhaired Bible star Gira owes thanks for his latest breakthrough, only he can say. And he doesn’t. But no matter who or what he winks at when things go his way, there is no question that My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, Gira’s first Swans release in 14 years, runs on real deal Holy Ghost power.
My Father was recorded in all-night sessions, cranking the volume in a concrete basement until “the overtones were just ringing like a church.” What better approach can be imagined for a believer who has run out of words than to abandon order and seek beauty in deliriously savage expression, thrashing and busting and speaking in tongues. “If you gave a sledgehammer to a televangelist,” he says, “[this is] the kind of music he would make.” But even at its most gruesome peaks, My Father isn’t about agony. “Being surrounded by so much sound is the most ecstasy I could ever imagine experiencing,” Gira says of the revived Swans’ recordings. “It was about trying to make these overwhelming, hallucinatory musical moments. Completely obliterating and revivifying at the same time.”
Gira’s Swans started out in 1982 as a carnivorous shock and awe campaign that sounded like slow-motion cage fighting. For beating Nine Inch Nails to the wicked industrial punch (and spiking it with cyanide), Swans earned major cult acclaim. But Gira tired of catering to the blood-thirsty, and dissolved the band in ’96 to take a softer, gothic folk tack as Angels Of Light. Well, sounds like he got tired of that too. Between the church bell clatter that announces My Father’s opener “No Words/No Thoughts,” and the tender prayer leading out of “Little Mouth,” stretches a nasty vertical landscape, humid with aggressive atmosphere. The intersection of heady religious zeal and bodily euphoria is the perfect home for Gira’s thought-dry condition, and the loud-first-lyrics-later Swans model is his ultimate vehicle. He has put the band back together, it seems, for a fix. When asked to name the violent new terrain he’s invented in the process, Gira is right on course. “Uh, well I guess it’s heaven.” Daniel Arnold/The Fader Oct./Nov.

Swans blasted on stage with the opening thump of "No Words/No Thoughts", before transitioning into a bit of a reworked version of that song. Their set was overwhelmingly heavy with material from the incredible new My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (five of the eight tracks), but the band made stops by their earliest works too ("Sex, God, Sex" from Children of God, "Your Property" from Cop, "I Crawled" from Young God EP). Moving, crushing, beautiful, and magnetic, Michael Gira and Co delivered one of my favorite performances at a space that has hosted its share of memorable moments: Neurosis, sunn o))), Sleep, and Throbbing Gristle.
Don't believe the hype though; it wasn't quite as overwhelmingly loud as you have been lead to believe... not that it matters either way. It was/is always more about electric performance and there is no doubt that Swans delivered on a Friday night on a quiet street in Brooklyn.
More pictures and video from the Brooklyn show, with the Swans setlist, below..
BBG/BrooklynVegan.com 10/11

And back we go to the Loudest Venue In New York City, to be summarily pulverized by the freshly reunited Loudest, Angriest Band on Earth. Our first audience casualty doubles over at about the 35-minute mark and is gingerly escorted out by his similarly ashen-faced buddies, pummeled with feedback, impaled by the martial stomp, and generally terrified by Swans mastermind Michael Gira, who strides onstage and stares us down like we're the toughest-looking guy in the prison yard, slaps his face several times, and proceeds for the next 100 minutes to put on as mesmerizing a display of feral frontman magnetism as you could possibly ask for, or withstand.
Swans began in 1982 and, prior to this year, had been inactive since '97, which explains the rampant greyness/haggardness onstage. But that only adds to the six-man crew's ludicrous glowering menace, their nihilistic post-apocalyptic post-punk as thunderous and concussive as ever, Gira front and center ranting like a doomsday preacher, rocking back and forth, tracing slow circles with his hands, shaking violently as though caught mid-exorcism, visibly hyperventilating, etc. etc. He points at a bare spot onstage and two trombone players materialize; he spurs them on or silences them with single deadly glance. It's a command performance, worthy of the Glowering Menace Hall of Fame. (To date the single scariest moment of my concert-going career was watching Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds walk onstage.) Not that he's joyless -- he smiles broadly when he notices that his bassist has busted a string that's not just hanging there looking like an industrial-strength bridge cable. "Is this fun?" he asks us, smirking, deadly serious. "I'm having fun."
The setlist is heavy on this year's mercurial, deceptively placid My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (no "You Fucking People Make Me Sick," alas, but the sentiment is still conveyed), with a detour into a couple tracks from 1989's venomous Children of God: The seasick two-chord march of "Sex, God, Sex" features Gira's magnificent self-flagellation ("I am sexless/I am foul") and a capella lamentations to Jesus; "Beautiful Child" is almost unbearably intense, Gira screaming "THIS IS MY ONLY REGRET/THAT I EVER WAS BORN/THIS IS MMMYYYYYY SACRIFICE." His band renders all this two-fisted fire and brimstone with total precision and a bizarre sensual undercurrent (there's no way to play drums in this band without being shirtless), the end result both exhausting and weirdly purifying. I don't know if I could survive this again, but I would definitely like to try.
Critical Bias: This was probably the best Murdered at Brooklyn Masonic Temple show yet: more charisma than Neurosis, more trepidation than Sleep, better visibility than Sunn O)))).
Rob Harvilla/Blogs.VillageVoice.com 10/11

When it was announced early this year that post-punk band Swans would be resurrected for a new album and tour, press began telling tales of the group's legendary early days: brutally loud shows, with two bassists and two drummers that together made a deafening primal beat. For his part, frontman Michael Gira used brute, guttural vocals and hazardous performance tricks, which on one tour included locking venue doors to trap audiences inside for the duration of a violent set.

Founded in New York in 1982 as part of the No Wave scene, their contemporaries once included dissonant drone act Mars and an early incarnation of Sonic Youth. But over a career that spanned 11 studio albums until they disbanded in 1997, their style grew beyond raw barking rhythm to encompass acoustic and world music elements, drone and field recordings. Heavy music makers like Godflesh and Ministry have acknowledged their influence, but Gira's also fostered a new generation of experimental folk music through his label Young God Records, formed in 1990 and home to Devendra Banhart, famed minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, as well as his own band Angels of Light.

The new Swans album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, was released last week, and their New York shows over the weekend had already been sold out for months by the time we spoke with Gira. He was driving through the mountains between Columbus, Ohio, and New York City, on the eve of Swans' first show here in 13 years.


KAYLA GUTHRIE: Many of your songs have spiritual imagery. Did you have a religious upbringing, or is this something that's developed over the years in the course of writing music?


MICHAEL GIRA: It has to do with the conjoined aspirations of what I want from music and what I want to experience in life before I die: wanting the music to elevate, to make you levitate, almost like having it erase your body and lift you up to heaven. It's also an aspiration to find what's behind things in everyday reality, like having an extended session of tantric sex with someone you love: a slow, gratifying, sensual thing, where tension builds and builds until finally you just see this white light and you reach something bigger than yourself.

GUTHRIE: Were you making music or art from a young age?

GIRA: I went to art school and never thought I'd be a musician, but then punk rock came along in the late 70s and kind of ruined my life. [LAUGHS] So I quit art school to get involved in music and I've been doing it ever since.

I guess I've always strived for the big sounds. A pivotal experience in my early days was seeing Pink Floyd—before they sucked—in 1969 at a rock festival in Belgium. Of course, I was on LSD, and it was a really out-of-body experience. That psychedelic impulse of great music from the 60s is sort of the core of what Swans is doing.

GUTHRIE: Do you see music as a higher art form than visual art?

GIRA: Oh, no, I don't make distinctions like that. The main reason that I stopped art was that I just was questioning what I was going to do with my life, and art felt like this increasingly professional decision, where you'd go to university and do the right things and discuss "issues", and that's not what I really wanted from it. I liked disruptive things, and I noticed then—and it's even worse now—that the art world was becoming so academic and elitist. All the lingo involved in being an artist was just completely bogus in my mind, so I just said Fuck this.

Punk rock at the time hadn't yet become so stylized. It felt immediate and relevant. I gravitated towards that and learned new ways of making sounds. I liked the impulse to just make something happen, right now, on the spot, make it real.

The post-punk bands took the idea of not having to be a skilled musician to make compelling sounds. So me and my cohorts just worked with sound and rhythm. We didn't worry about it being a song or not. We wanted to generate an experience.

GUTHRIE: I've read about your interest in Bob Dylan and Howlin' Wolf, American blues and folk music...

GIRA: Oh yeah, those guys are great; to me Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters are just geniuses of American culture, right up there with great writers and presidents. They changed the course of history. In Muddy Waters' case, he's this guy who grew up picking cotton - you know, with outdoor plumbing, completely poverty-stricken—and managed somehow to affect the course of modern music. What a titan! And I love his voice, it just gives me immense pleasure: the way he can go from this bellowing, low, guttural groan into this falsetto suddenly I just find both comical and profound.

GUTHRIE: Such a contrast to nowadays, with so much processing involved in making songs. Do you think of yourself as particularly American?

GIRA: [LAUGHS] I'm very American, yeah. A straight shooter and all that stuff.

GUTHRIE: I've heard you live in the Catskills. When did you move out there?

GIRA: Four years ago. It's something that I'd been wanting to do for centuries, but I finally managed to get the funds together and buy a house. I like going back to the city, but it holds a lot of dark memories for me. There was a lot of extreme poverty and hardship in the early days, and it's hard to divorce yourself from that now, when you walk down the same streets and remember being so poor and everything being so difficult. I was really pleased to get out.

GUTHRIE: Swans are famous for these harsh songs like "Beautiful Child." I was watching the 80's live video on YouTube...
GIRA: I wrote that song after reading this bit in the bible about Abraham and Isaac—it was just sort of a thought about where morality begins and ends, and the importance of making a choice. I know that video; it's kind of intense, isn't it?

GUTHRIE: A user had commented: "You're not watching music, you're watching an exorcism. We're all lucky Michael Gira had musical talent or else he'd probably be doing serial killings." Obviously, that's an exaggeration?

GIRA: That's kind of how our music is now actually, so not really. They're not songs, that's for sure. At least live, I think you'll experience that it's more of an undertaking: sort of like being in a sweat lodge on LSD or something. Kayla Guthrie/InterviewMagazine.com 10/12

Michael Gira spent a lot of time onstage at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Friday making circular motions with his right hand. The patterns were mostly parallel to the ground: whirlpools, force fields, tornados.
He made the gesture when he wasn’t singing in his dry, commanding baritone, and when this new version of his band Swans was doing what it does best, a refinement of an old strategy: launching loud, sliding chords on the waves of slowed-down rhythms that threaten to become arrhythmic. Swans existed from 1982 to 1997, and this version includes Norman Westberg, who played guitar on most of the band’s records through the ’80s; the four others on the tour have been collaborators at various times in Mr. Gira’s steady flow of work since then.
In advance of this tour — weeks of one-nighters across North America and Europe, with more to come next year, in theaters bigger than where the band used to perform — Mr. Gira (pronounced jhee-RAH) stressed the point to interviewers that he does not consider this a reunion but a way forward. Surely he’s capitalizing on old memories and an old brand: the merchandise tables, selling T-shirts with new and old Swans designs — dollar signs, teeth, a splatter pattern with the word “No” in the middle — were doing brisk business, and nearly every item was signed by Mr. Gira himself.
But it’s not an empty claim. There’s a new Swans album, a very good one: “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky” (Young God Records), which sounds like an arrow shot forward from the second half of the band’s life, once it had broadened its language, figuring out how to be serene and still severe.
And this particular lineup, different from any other version of Swans, has its own sound. Mr. Westberg and Mr. Gira both play electric guitar, with Christoph Hahn creating bright, metallic roughage on lap-steel guitar as a background. Chris Pravdica, the bassist, spent nearly the entire show with his back to the audience, facing the hard-hitting drummer, Phil Puleo; they were maintaining the rhythm seriously.
Thor Harris played extra percussion, doubling the stomps and cymbal crashes, and also playing long passages — central to the new Swans music — of dulcimer, vibraphone and tubular bells. In a band with this much middle-age male energy, it is good to have a long-haired man named Thor hitting long metal pipes with hammers.
Swans’ music is surely loud and aggressive and suggests a kind of exorcism. Mr. Gira has always had a volatile relationship with his fans. At this stage of his life, his form of crowd control and stage manners is to act basically level and courteous and then once in a while, in a quiet moment, scream at the audience.
The lyrics of some of his older songs, like “Your Property,” played on Friday, signify the exact opposite of what’s actually happening in the music, a ritual self-abasement in the middle of a power trip. But at the same time Friday’s show suggested the music’s flip side, which is sensuousness. This stuff isn’t alien to man and nature; it’s graceful and body centered, and now a lot more so than before.
The performance had a strange effect on the audience. Many who weren’t stunned and stuck in one spot, following the pacing and the commitment of the group, the rolling, sea-chantey feeling of the new and old songs, strode around fixing one another with charged, satisfied, flirting looks. It was a charmed 90 minutes. Very definitely someone was running this show. Ben Ratliff/New York Times 10/12
"The only way to begin/Is to reel the first liar in," declares art-rock pioneer Michael Gira, stepping into coiling sounds. Thus freed, the seeker summons faithful Swans to "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky." It's carefully wired: bludgeons are applied only when necessary. Meanwhile, transgendered Baby Dee's voice comfortably hovers and intriguingly ricochets around her harp and piano, building boldly hopeful ballads, on "Songs For Ann Marie. " Dee's range is more idiosyncratic live, sometimes including bawdy, possibly improvised verses, evolving into sing-along choruses. Don Allred/U Weekly 10/6

Michael Gira the great human hell mouth behind Young God Records and spectral drone alt-country group Angels of Light has officially reconvened his legendary horsemen of the urban apocalypse Swans after a hiatus of thirteen years. Armed with a new album due out September 27th titled My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, Swans are ready to embark into new lands. Gira makes it perfectly clear that,”THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that.”
Listening to the seventh track on the album, “Eden Prison” illustrates just how much has changed from from 1997. The production is wider, all encompassing and just as heavy and dark. Gira’s voice has concentrated itself from his time with Angels of Light, forgoing the razor ballistics of early Swans for the deep internal furnace of an apocryphal demagogue. The doom infused drone of the song is just as gratifyingly orchestrated as ever. Makes you wanna topple some skyscrapers. Daniel Ahrent/SeattleShowGal.com 8/5

… Right away on track one, “No Words/No Thoughts,” I’m reminded of what I consider Swans finest hour: the first track of Swans Are Dead, “Feel Happiness.” “No Words/No Thoughts” opens with thudding guitars and drums that give way after three minutes to a quieter guitar-drone reminiscent of an instrumental passage from “Feel Happiness.” But where “Feel Happiness” was a constantly morphing jam, this is a straight-ahead ferocious rock song. The drone gets louder as Gira starts singing. And when things have finally built up to a healthy level of noise, the band shifts to a more direct method of blowing out your speakers, ears and mind. At the end, the band lays off so that you can finally make out Gira’s words, but that’s just a brief respite before a final rock out.
In fact, this incarnation of Swans rocks harder than Swans ever has. With the exception of the Bill Laswell-butchered The Burning World, Swans albums have never been sedate, but I don’t think they’ve sounded this intense since 1987’s Children of God. In fact, many of the songs on here come close to trumping the intensity of Swans’ early work. The difference is that this time Swans envelop their audience with melodic chaos rather than punishing them with noise. “Jim” is a particularly effective song. It starts quietly enough with a sulking blues melody. With the snare and vibraphone, it almost sounds like an Angels of Light song. But Gira brings to the song a level of intensity that Angels of Light have rarely touched. He’s also more willing to let the band take this song right off the cliff. The scorching guitar solo in the song’s final minutes is some of the most exhilarating playing I’ve heard in a while.
But not everything here is chaos. Two and a half of the songs sound no different from anything Angels of Light have done. “Reeling the Liars In” is almost nothing but acoustic guitar and vocals for its first minute. When the band comes in behind Gira, they keep it restrained and manage to sound more like a country band than the legends of No Wave that they are. And “Little Mouth” provides similarly sweet closure to the album. “Inside Madeline” starts as an intense, driving instrumental that eventually gives way to an acoustic second half whose relation to the first half I cannot discern. Whatever, it’s two fun songs in one. I won’t complain.
But those are the exceptions. This is a rock album, and the majority of the songs here are devoted to kicking your ass. “My Birth” made a previous appearance in Swans’ final tour in a slow gloomy version that’s similar to the first minutes of “Jim.” It’s reborn this time as a four minute, no-bullshit rock song that starts loud and stays loud. It would be the most direct and brutal rock song Gira has recorded in more than a decade if not for “Eden Prison,” the album’s six minute monster. This one again starts heavy and never really lets up. The song follows a simple repeating melody played as loud and heavy as possible. It yields in the middle to a two minute instrumental passage that brings to mind the brutal repetition of Public Castration is a Good Idea. Only this manages to be both louder and more fun.
… ultimately I think what Gira’s given us is his “rock” album (I should mention as an aside, that I don’t know what to make of “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” It’s the one song on here that feels totally out of place confuses me. I don’t dislike it, but it once again shows how Gira can deliver a sonic kick in ways that are entirely unpredictable). And maybe that was the best thing he could do. Gira isn’t just recycling or reviving Swans. This is a new band that draws from the strengths of both Swans and Angels of Light. And right now, I can’t think of anything better to release than an honest-to-god rock album. In the era of Sleigh Bells and Crystal Castles, it’s nice to see someone remind us that playing loud means more than just turning the volume up. Joseph Bogen/InYourSpeakers.com 9/23

Highly influential force of nature Swans have confirmed a UK and Irish live dates for October, including a date at Glasgow’s Arches on 25th October.
The dates will follow the release of a new album – Swans’ first since 1996’s Soundtracks For The Blind – which, according to frontman Michael Gira, will be released on 14th September through Young God Records and will have the title My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky.
Emerging from New York’s No Wave scene in the early 1980s, Swans’ slow motion grind, demon-filled lyrics and shape-shifting experimentalism has influenced generations of bands, from goth metallers Cult Of Luna, hard-as-nails Shellac to …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and electro high priestess Fever Ray.
Having put the more melodic Angels Of Light (the outfit he formed after Swans’ demise in 1997) on hold for the time being, Gira has reactivated the band with members of Swans old and new. As well as the wraith-like frontman, Swans 2010 will feature: Norman Westberg: guitar (original Swans), Christoph Hahn: guitar (mid-period Swans and most Angels of Light ), Phil Puleo; drums, percussion, dulcimer etc (final Swans tour and most of Angels of Light), Chris Pravdica: bass and gadgets (Flux Information Sciences / Services/ Gunga Din) and Thor Harris: drums, percussion, vibes, dulcimer, curios, keys (Angels of Light, now also with Shearwater). Nadine/McBay/bigonldn2010.com

Michael Gira has already bellowed in our collective ears that the new Swans album “IS NOT A REUNION,” but while we struggle to think of what to call it (a reconvening? A get-together of old buddies?), further details on that record have now surfaced. Gira's own Young God label will release My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky on September 21.
That mooted Devendra Banhart collaboration—Gira released some of Banhart’s earlier albums—will be on a pleasant little ditty titled “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” which suggests a return to the ill-feeling of older Swans records like “Raping a Slave.” The Banhart track also reportedly features Gira’s three year-old daughter, Saoirse, who is presumably growing up fast. Nick Heyland/Prefixmag.com 7/8

In the grand tradition of Serge and his then-adolescent daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg's duet on "Lemon Incest" comes another potentially controversial father-daughter rock pairing. This time it involves Michael Gira's three-year-old daughter, Saoirse, sharing vocal duties with freak-folk weirdy Devendra Banhart on a little number called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick." The track is part of the upcoming album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, from Gira's newly 'reactivated' Swans (TMT News). Okay, in reality the only possibly controversial thing about the Swans song is whether it will be 'pretty awesome' or just 'kinda awesome.'
Gira has assembled some good people for this non-"dumb-ass nostalgia act" album. (He says, “THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that.") Swans members from the first incarnation(s) Norman Westberg, Bill Rieflin, Christoph Hahn, and Phil Puleo; new members Chris Pravdica (Flux Information Sciences/Services) and Thor Harris (Shearwater); and guest Grasshopper of Mercury Rev all make an appearance, along with Mr. Barnhart and Ms. Saoirse. The album was financed through sales of the limited edition acoustic Swans album I Am Not Insane earlier this year (TMT News). Liz Louche/TinyMixTapes 7/8

As previously reported, Michael Gira has “re-activated” Swans for their first U.S. shows in more than a decade. (Full disclosure: I’m helping put on one of those shows.) As we also made clear in January, you can expect new Swans sounds at those events. As Gira told me, “[the] approach will be basically where Soundtracks For The Blind/Swans Are Dead left off, with influence of Angels of Light in there too. Probably pretty severe tho, according to my present mood…” We now have a title: In September, the band’s releasing My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, the first album of new material since 1997’s Soundtracks For The Blind. It was recorded by Jason LeFarge at Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn and is in the midst of being mixed by Gira with Bryce Goggin at Trout Recordings. So far it includes guest spots from Devendra Banhart, Bill Rieflin, and Mercuy Rev’s Grasshopper. We’ll have more info soon. For now there are some song titles and those tour dates in full:
The songs so far: “No Words / No Thoughts,” “Reeling The Liars In,” and “Jim.” You can hear the “No Words” demo at MySpace. Brandon Stosuy/Stereogum.com 6/21

Every record-store-owner surely has a hard-on for one tour this fall. Swans are touring for the first time in 13 years. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the NY outfit, they are the Sonic Youth that didn’t make it. To this day, John Lydon doesn’t understand how The Pretty Things are an obscure fossil of music snobbery, while The Rolling Stones are the nuclear-family-approved biggest act in the world. Swans suffered this tragedy on an indie level. Two bands attempted to bridge the gap between No Wave and Rock’N’Roll: Sonic Youth went on to become a badge of being musically in-the-know, while Swans were relegated to the record players of only top-notch music snobs.
Historically, Swans have maintained an aesthetic that is cohesive only in the fact that words like “art” and “Avant” always come up. At times they have been lumped as simply post punk, at times their instrumentation has been compared to Jazz, a few have hinted to some of their sounds as slow-motion Heavy Metal, they have dabbled heavily in experimental acoustics and transgressive electronics. “Noise,” both the genre and the adjective, also come up frequently (although it would be inaccurate to leave them simply in that genre). Adjectives used to describe their music often mirror those used to describe the remains found at Auschwitz. Although mainmain Michael Gira found great inspiration in history’s bluntest prophet, the Marquis de Sade, had Gira’s work come first, Sade would likely have been a fan… along with Pasolini.
It’s no surprise that Swans never really caught on with the masses. While Sonic Youth managed to imbue their sound with more traditional rock and pop (albeit at their most obscured), Swans never kicked out anything even slightly accessible to the mainstream. Even recent generations of indie kids remained largely ignorant of the band until those select few discovered them in S.A. Crary’s film, Kill Your Idols, which documents the No Wave movement and has its originators laughing (unfortunately, not all the way to the bank) at the recent, half-hearted attempt at a revival courtesy of misguided posers like Liars, Gogol Bordello, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
In early 2010 Gira announced that Swans would reform for an anti-reunion: “THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not reinterpreting the past.” he clarifies. The band recently released their first studio album in 16 years, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky. As has characterized their past work, fitting it into a genre proves impossible. The epic, nearly-ten-minute “No Words/No Thoughts,” that opens the album begins with daunting ambience, before shifting into enveloping industrial noise… and then back again… and then back again, etc. The majority of the release is comprised of the scariest fucking folk music you will ever hear, a bit like Nick Cave’s later work, except lacking any of the elegance or suaveness provided by the Aussie. While the album does have its more traditionally noisy moments (as it nears an end, or “the end” it becomes more sonically frantic), more often than not, it just has Gira skullfucking American country and blues.
Swans’ musical dystopia is about to hit the road and the opening ceremonies take place at the Trocadero this Tuesday, September 28th, where the city of Philadelphia will be the first to experience the legendary anti-heroes of Rock’N’Roll. Legend has it that the sheer volume of their live performances has been known to induce physical sickness among audience members. While this surely won’t be a ticket-selling-point for the masses, the masses have rarely had anything to do with music history’s most significant moments. – Izzy Cihak/Origivation.com/theblog 9/25

It's no big secret: we love Michal Gira. Not only do we love him recently for Angels of Light and Young God (the label responsible for such artists as Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family), but we also love him for recently "reactivating" his Swans project by announcing a fall tour and a new album (TMT News). The album, Swans' first since 1997’s Soundtracks For The Blind, is currently being mixed at Trout Recordings and has been titled My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. It features guest spots from Devendra Banhart, Bill Rieflin (drummer for REM), and Grasshopper of Mercury Rev.Mr. P./TinyMixtapes.com 6/21

Michael Gira founded Swans some 27 years ago. Time has brought a measure of nuance and versatility, but the raw, inhuman power of the band persists, even as many of their more lauded peers have succumbed to nostalgia or exhaustion. Pure tenacity, as much as loud guitars and violent lyrics, is what gives the new album the brute force that is characteristic of Swans at their best.
If anything, My Father… is a reassertion of principles on which Swans was founded. The anger, fear, and contempt of their earliest records still lingers, embodied in one unmistakable element: the impossibly dense wall of molten guitar noise generated by Gira and longtime Swans member Norman Westberg. The blunted, lurching style they developed remains unmistakable. “Jim,” a tale of urban bitterness and revenge, demonstrates that the dynamic still has legs. The song begins rapturously, with images heavenly ascension and paradise, and then devolves into a murderous rampage as the eponymous character finally settles his scores. “Let’s strangle the mayor at the top of the stairs/Let’s piss on the city that burns down there,” Gira sneers as a lead-footed waltz beat circles around him, the band’s skill at pulverizing audience resurrected intact.
Despite the heaviness, Swans still manage to insert slivers of beauty into what seems like an impenetrable storm. Mandolin and vibraphone embellishments flitter through the loudest guitar squalls. My Father… is intense both in volume and clarity. That is not to say that the record lacks moments of simple and unadorned beauty. The lyrical coda to “Inside Madeline” finds Gira waxing unabashedly cosmic. “The engine divine is inside Madeline/The star dust is yellow and red/And it’s mapping out time inside of her head,” he sings, the moment resembling his more delicate work with the Angels of Light.
My Father… also makes use of another more recent development in Gira’s career, his free use of irony to poke fun at his fearsome artistic persona. “Reeling the Liars In” is at once a bloodthirsty call for honesty and parody of bitter old age. There is something almost goofy in the way that he deadpans, “The only true thing/the place to begin/is to burn up the liar pile.” Of course, Gira implicates himself as well, changing the words from “the liars” to “this liar.” This disarming clash between arrogance and humility make the song a standout track of the album.
Included in the deluxe version of My Father… is a second disk of outtakes, vocal fragments, and instrumental tracks sewn together in a continuous mix. Though not essential for enjoying the parent album, the disk is a rewarding listen nonetheless. The disembodied voices and phantom instruments recall the widescreen audio surrealism of albums like Soundtracks for the Blind.
When he announced that Swans were reforming, Gira justified his decision vigorously, in advance of any criticism that he was going soft or cashing in. He needn’t be so defensive. The results speak for the wisdom of that decision. Furthermore, the excitement generated some long overdue interest in a band that is often pointedly overlooked. My Father… has all the elements that make Swans a challenging and ultimately rewarding group.Matthew Spencer/Brainwashed.com 9/19

Sandwiched into a Williamsburg rehearsal space the approximate size of a prison cell, the six members of Swans each had exactly enough room to stand, their backs to stacks of imposing amplifiers lining the walls. An intrepid guest barely squeezed in by the door when Norman Westberg made a humanitarian gesture.
"Have we got some extra earplugs?" he asked, his electric guitar already crackling.
"No," said Michael Gira, who has been fronting some variation of the band, off and on, since 1982. He smiled, a cowboy hat lending the singer-songwriter a touch of the desperado.
"Let him suffer."
And then they leaned into a swirling, relentless piece of music that started loud and grew exceptionally louder, an overlay of guitars, bass and percussion generating a mysterious cloud of overtones, floating above a vertiginous drone. Mr. Gira, who eschews cochlear protection himself, intoned the lyrics in a baritone a bit north of Johnny Cash as the drums crashed concussively.
The song, "Eden Prison," belongs to a whole new repertoire that the legendary New York band has hammered into shape for its first live performances in 13 years, touring behind a new album, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky," on Mr. Gira's independent Young God label. The group, which will be on the road into 2012, performs at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple Friday night.
"I was done with volume, I thought," Mr. Gira, 56, said during a rehearsal break, puffing on a cigar outside a nearby bar. "But, lo and behold, fate intervened."
Though he forged a reputation for punishing live shows in the 1980s, blasting audiences at downtown venues such as the Mudd Club, Mr. Gira gradually steered Swans from the Stygian to the sublime. He disbanded the group in 1997, continuing to record and tour with a new outfit, Angels of Light, before going solo with an acoustic guitar. A few years ago, he left his apartment in Park Slope and moved to the Catskills, where he lives with his wife, artist Siobhan Duffy, and their two young children. He discovered that he missed the noise.
"Certainly in the early days, it had teeth," Mr. Gira said, recalling a time when he lived in a bunker-like basement off Avenue B with scarce natural light and the enmity of neighbors who practiced Santeria and left hexes—forbidding little bags filled with chicken feet—on his steps. "The big secret was how the music felt physically playing it, being inside it. There's nothing like it. It's 10 church choirs singing different pieces at once. You get addicted to it."
Though he struggled with writer's block that left him feeling like "a piece of salami" for three years, Mr. Gira persevered. To finance the new album, he recorded a demo version with only voice and guitar that he sold online, fabricating each customized package by hand. "It took hundreds and hundreds of hours," he said with a rueful laugh. But an edition of 1,000 sold quickly.
The songs that he finally put together for the album are richly imagined and painstakingly executed, evoking everything from campfire songs to the dissonant ritual horns of avant-garde Viennese composer Hermann Nitsch. There's a colorful dynamic range, darkly poetic lyrics that reach from the gutter to the stars, and a kaleidoscopic piece called, in true Gira fashion, "You F---ing People Make Me Sick," which features guest vocals from singer Devendra Banhart, whom Mr. Gira signed to his label in 2002.
Mr. Banhart was pleased to participate. "Michael told me to sing in my Elvis voice," he said. And since Mr. Gira's 2-year-old daughter happened to be singing in an adjacent room, she was invited to join. There's a full spectrum.
"My ear gravitates toward huge sounds but also dynamics," Mr. Gira said. "When something is loud all the time it's tedious. Also, when I hear a sound I hear another sound. I hear the nuance in things. I hear the overtones and then I replicate them."
It's not an issue that concerns most rock bands, although it made perfect sense to some of Swans's early peers, who absorbed the influence of amplified, guitar-playing minimalist composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. "When you repeat parts over and over, gradually they morph and you find new voices inside the chords," Mr. Gira said. "To me it's like going to church. When I start hearing that I feel like I'm levitating." Steve Dollar/Wall Street Journal 10/6

The pioneering proto-industrial group Swans end a thirteen-year hiatus with a meticulously crafted new record called “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky.” Founded in 1982 by Michael Gira, the singer and front man, the band had an early sound that was filled with lyrical brutalism and slow, punishing rhythms. By the early nineties they had softened their approach, creating beautiful, richly orchestrated records that maintained a lyrical darkness. In 1997, Gira disbanded Swans and formed the Angels of Light, a folk-tinged project that employed various acoustic instruments, including the accordion and the mandolin. Last year, Gira decided to re-form Swans, bringing together several veterans from different incarnations of the group, most notably the band’s long-standing and underappreciated guitarist, Norman Westberg. Dan Kaufman/New Yorker 10/4

According to Swans’ dubious Wikipedia page, the crushing low frequencies of the group’s 1980s performances literally induced vomiting among more delicate members of the audience. “That’s all hype,” frontman Michael Gira snaps over the phone from his home near Woodstock, New York. “That’s what I hated about the way Swans was perceived in those days—like the volume was the whole deal. It was just one aspect of it, a tool to reach a certain state.”
“There could be some truth to it, but it wasn’t intentional,” lanky guitarist Norman Westberg counters, sipping a Molson on Avenue C. “It’s about that wavering motion we had; if it was loud enough, I could totally believe people would be vomiting. In ’86 or ’87, we played in Dearborn [Michigan], and my brother brought his wife. She was wearing these billowy pants, and her clothes were moving while we played. I think she ran out crying.”
Fact or fiction, those tales of gut-wrenching din nicely summarize the pivotal NYC noise-rock crew’s venerated early approach: Dual drummers forged depth-charge rhythms, into which a bassist or two crammed blunt, repetitive chords. Westberg’s lawn-mower riffs moaned unrelentingly, while a writhing, shirtless Gira roared lyrics obsessed with power, religion, money and degradation. This harder-than-hard, slower-than-slow M.O. set the template for innumerable doom-metal, industrial and experimental lugs, including Godflesh, Earth, Sunn O))), Neurosis and Khanate.
So exactly why—at age 56 and after a decade-plus of mining quieter territory with his subsequent project, Angels of Light—has Gira decided to resuscitate Swans for a global tour and a superb new studio LP?
“It was my life’s work,” he reflects. “It’s like facing my true nature or something.” The genesis, he explains, came when the members of Akron/Family were doing double duty as his Angels. “We did a couple songs that had elements that were related to Swans,” Gira says. “I really wanted to surround myself with that kind of sonic whirlwind again and just be lifted up to heaven. I didn’t want to do another album where I recorded myself playing acoustic guitar and then orchestrating it from there; I wanted something expansive and larger. When you start thinking about things like that, you start thinking about Swans.”
Released late last month, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky reunites Gira with a quintet of recent and past associates. “As adults, I think everybody has a better understanding of it now,” says Westberg, an estimable if humble force in the band today and during much of its original 1982–1997 existence. “I consider myself a support person, not a songwriter in this forum,” he continues. “But Michael has a real vision: It always changes, which I respect. Michael’s heart always comes through.”
Instead of rehashing history, the current lineup channels Swans’ prerequisite heft and hypnotism into a maelstrom that’s surprisingly relaxed and slightly psychedelic. Compositions both thunderous and subtle exude a corporeal, ensemble-type feel: Cacophonous storms of shimmering dulcimers, clanging bells, braying slide guitars and chain-gang percussion churn across the dense bruisers “No Words/No Thoughts” and “Eden Prison.” Coasting on Gira’s robust yet weathered baritone, the stark laments “Little Mouth” and “Reeling the Liars In” provide tuneful respite from the lumbering ruckus.
The dichotomy is perfectly logical, seeing as constant stylistic evolution is one of Swans’ hallmarks. Downcast ballads, goth-friendly melodrama and the sultry vocals of chanteuse Jarboe (conspicuously absent from the 2010 incarnation) characterized middle-period efforts, such as 1989’s major-label disaster, The Burning World. Gira eventually learned from that misstep, emerging triumphant with a strategy that split the difference between beauty and beast. The epic sweep of 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind, for example, presaged the grand gestures of post-rock luminaries Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
“I don’t think it’s correct to ascribe a single adjective to Swans,” Gira stresses. “It was many things as time went on. It wasn’t just aggressive—even in the old days, with the thudding physical jolts.”
Regardless, earplugs might be a wise investment for the uninitiated. “I’m sure it will be very loud,” Westberg says of this weekend’s shows. “But Swans is about an attitude. It’s not going to be muscular, half-naked young guys onstage, but it’ll still be intense.” In other words, the impending gigs probably won’t make the crowd lose its collective lunch. But they will, quite possibly, blow its collective mind. Jordan Maimone/Time Out NY 10/5

As recently as 2006 Michael Gira, front man and songwriter of Swans, was still swearing that the seminal band he'd led from 1982 to '97 was gone for good. But zombies are all the rage these days, and this winter he flip-flopped spectacularly: 12 years after the release of the double live album Swans Are Dead, Swans are, well, undead. The new six-piece lineup includes three Swans veterans—guitarist Norman Westberg, who debuted with the band on 1983's unspeakable Filth, percussionist Phil Puleo, and guitarist Christoph Hahn—and three members of Angels of Light, the band Gira has led since 1998 (Hahn, Puleo, and percussionist Thor Harris, also of Shearwater). Earlier this year Gira released I Am Not Insane, a collection of acoustic songs, to help fund the recording of the first Swans studio album in 14 years, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (Young God). Rather than return to the furious brutality of their early work, it picks up roughly where the last Swans record, 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, left off. Jarboe's feminine touch is notable in its absence, and the new songs reflect the influence of Angels of Light's dark, spiritual neofolk and yearning psychedelic rock, which is heavy in its implications rather than its declarations. But Swans still operate on an apocalyptic scale that's all their own: equally huge whether they're whispering or thundering, they sound like holy ecstasy and divine wrath, delivered in the same bolt from on high. Baby Dee opens Monika Kendrick/Chicago Reader 9/30

Speaking to The Gazette recently, Michael Gira summarized his rationale for resurrecting Swans after a 13-year deep freeze: "I want to be in the centre of a very large, overwhelming, body-destroying sound." He wasn't kidding.
The overwhelming part started Friday at Le National before the band even began playing, with a queasy taped drone piped in at daunting volume for 10 minutes. The body-destroying part came soon enough. After Samsonian percussionist Thor Harris hammered out a mesmerizing pattern on a six-foot-tall rack of bells, the rest of the sextet joined in the hammering on a lengthy instrumental that was brutally elemental and left the audience visibly gasping for air. It was a shock to everyone's system -- not least of all diehards who doubted the band's new incarnation would live up to the legend.
It was nearly half an hour into the show before Gira sang. When he did, the ominous twang employed in Angels of Light -- the dark roots collective he initiated after Swans' demise in 1997 -- was absent, often replaced by a hellbeast baritone. Vintage Swans, in other words, although any nostalgia ended with the confirmation that Gira could still bellow himself red in the face. Original-period Swans songs were rearranged nearly beyond recognition -- for the sake of finding new meaning in old vitriol, not for the sake of being capricious. Your Property was even more grinding, more dangerous than the original; the holy roar and merciless percussion of Beautiful Child brought on severe heart palpitations. In a display of Gira's restlessness, even new compositions were made new(er); No Words/No Thoughts was twice as fast and five times as vicious as the version on the two-week-old album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky.
Every song was raging, surging, hypnotic in its repetition, and head-explodingly loud. But as Gira has pointed out, being loud isn't the point. The point is being all-consuming and impossible to escape. Gira couldn't have kept us prisoner alone. Harris and drummer Phil Puleo were an astonishing pair, the former often clobbering cymbals while the latter would beat out the song's primal backbone. Christoph Hahn unleashed demon shrieks and menacing atmospheres from his steel guitar, and long-time Swans guitarist Norman Westberg calmly scraped out nightmare riffs. It must be said that ultimately, very little of this felt negative: body-destroying, certainly, but far too cathartic to be soul-destroying.
There are no words for the sheer force of Swans' set. This was music that had to be felt to be understood -- and it was felt, not just heard. It isn't an exaggeration to say you could feel the air move when Chris Pravdica churned out a monster bass line. There was no mosh pit, no stage diving, and yet the nearly two-hour show left plenty of fans looking and feeling battered. If you glanced around when the show ended (the only way it could: in near silence, with Gira singing Little Mouth's a-cappella conclusion), just about every face was dazed and exhausted. What the hell just happened? For my money, what just happened wasn't only a no-brainer candidate for the most exciting gig of 2010, but a new entry on the list of the 10 greatest performances I've witnessed in my lifetime. Jordan Zivitz/Montreal Gazette 10/2

Even if no one’s heard the Swans since 1997, the singular New York act’s current return to stage and studio is not some trendy, nostalgic reunion. Don’t look back, indeed—there’ll be no renditions of “Raping a Slave.” And there’s certainly no need.
The new My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is a career peak, a walloping epic that offers gripping variations on frontman Michael Gira’s gutter-to-the-stars aesthetic. It moves from the frightening din that’s defined the band from its 1982 debut to the ethereal supplications of Gira’s latter-day incarnations in Angels of Light, with an awful lot of everything else in between. The six-piece, which features veterans like guitarist Norman Westberg and aptly named percussionist Thor Harris, will have its grubby hands full adapting the tight, multifaceted arrangements in concert. Although cochlea-melting loud, the new material is marked by wild dynamic swings, with sudden outbursts of turbulent trombones and crashing pianos, or the chilly echo of a vibraphone haunting a stoic soliloquy in waltz-time.
Gira’s baritone anchors even the most extreme moments. And his dark sense of humor is still very much intact. “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” which features vocals from both his two-year-old son and indie hero Devendra Banhart, opens with a Jew’s harp and ends in modern classical cacophony. After the storm, a prayer: “May I find my way to the reason to come home/May I find my way to the foot of your throne,” Gira intones in the album’s closing line. There are only two ways to hear the Swans: on your feet or on your knees. Steve Dollar/Time Out Chicago 10/5

Few bands cast a shadow as long as Swans have. From the humble start as a post-punk, post-No Wave, art project of founding member Michael Gira (aka M. Gira or Gira) the band became and remains one of the most influential musical forces of the last twenty five years. Disbanding Swans in 1997 Gira went on to form Angels Of Light as well as Young God Records. Over the last thirteen years he has established himself as a premiere singer/songwriter as well as a creative force for our times.

Now in 2010 Gira has re-vamped and reinvigorated Swans for a new album titled My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky and a new legacy. Speaking with Gira was scary for me being such an enormous fan but it ended up being a fascinating discussion covering fathers, musical inspiration, Swans legacy, the new album, the lack of Jarboe and so much more.


CRAVEONLINE: So after all this time why bring Swans back?

GIRA: It grew over a period of time beginning with the last Angels Of Light record, which was…wow I forgot what it’s called. Oh, right, We Are Him (laughs) I’m so wasted, I’ve been in the studio a lot. There was some more sort of sonic quality to this Angels Of Light album then there had been before, more electric guitars and things. That and touring with Akron/Family as my backing band with some very loud sections.

Not to say all Swans are loud sections but they had this swirling guitar, very repetitive. It took awhile to come to terms with it. It was a traumatic thing for me to restart this band, which had been like lancing off a rotted arm when I decided to quit it. Over time the notion grew and I had these songs I was writing for what I assumed would be an Angels Of Light record and I was thinking about how to orchestrate them.

CRAVEONLINE: Did that help make your decision?

GIRA: I found myself a little bored with the idea of using the normal things like strings, percussion, vibraphones and so on. I thought why not just do what I really want to do, which is re-start Swans and deal with that. I faced up to that and thought about the people involved, got in touch with them and that was it. I had these songs as a blueprint and we went into the studio and worked on them, each song, twelve hours a day. We expanded them and morphed them into a Swans entity.

CRAVEONLINE: How did you choose the people involved with this Swans project?

GIRA: It was as much about picturing myself in a room working with them as it was about their instruments. I had recently reestablished contact with Norman Westberg who I instantly thought of because he was the longest running member of Swans besides Jarboe. I thought of him and his guitar sound, which has been a joy to be in close proximity of. It’s been incredibly uplifting because it’s like a little orchestra unto itself. I called him and Christoph Hanz who I had been working with in Angels and he was over the roof with the idea. Phil Puleo played drums on the last Swans tour, so he was a natural choice and my good friend Thor Harris who played another drum set along with percussion and tubular bells. He plays with a great band called Shearwater do you know them?

CRAVEONLINE: I’ve heard the name.

GIRA: They’re really good. They’re more of a pop band. He took a sabbatical from that to play with Swans. The bass player was just a good friend who I’d never played in a band with named Chris. It’s all male to, which kind of appealed to me.



CRAVEONLINE: You’ve done a lot since the end of Swans. How does that material play into recording the new stuff?

GIRA: Where I’d left off with the Swans was Soundtracks For The Blind and then the tour so I took a thread from that, which were long mantra passages of music, and built the new stuff from there. These songs weren’t written to be played with Swans so it’s inevitably a hybrid of Swans and Angels Of Light.

CRAVEONLINE: Will that hybrid continue?

GIRA: I think on the next album I want to focus on certain other aspects of this record, such as the extended instrumental passages on No Words/No Thoughts or Eden Prison. I want to take that and then work with people on it, as opposed to having finished songs going in. I want to build the conception of it that way, maybe not have many vocals at all. I don’t know I’ve always kept working so this last ten or twelve years has informed how the Swans album happened. I was a little looser and more open to letting people play than I had been in the past where I’d stop every ten bars and say “No, no try that”. This has more of an organic feel that way.
CRAVEONLINE: Is there a story behind the album title?

GIRA: It was a lyric from a song actually not performed on the album. To me it had a personal meaning that I don’t need to go into but it also applied to me with optimism and a sort of transcendence while at the same time a dead end.

CRAVEONLINE: I was curious because having lost my father years ago, I wondered if it had that kind of meaning for you.

GIRA: My father does inform my way of looking things. He died in ‘90. Are you involved in something surrounding your father’s legacy?

CRAVEONLINE: I have small press company called Isolation Disorder Press and I find a lot of what I do centers around the loss of my father.

GIRA: Well since you’ve told me that. Both my mother and father are dead and with the song in question, which was called “Oxygen”, it was about not being able to breathe. It had to do with my chronic asthma, which has gotten better since I quit smoking, and this rope of smoke going up to heaven and me inevitably dying and following my parents up to Heaven on a rope of smoke.

CRAVEONLINE: Wow, mine was not nearly as subtle. The first thing I ever did was about a fistfight with God.

GIRA: Wow. Y’know after my father died I had a lot of intentions and things to do, one of which was these cassette tapes. I hadn’t been in touch with him for fifteen years and during the last ten years of his life we became friends really. I would go out to California and visit him and interview him about his life. He was getting older and I wanted him to have something and so I have sixty or so ninety-minute cassettes of him just talking about his life.

He was a great raconteur so he would tell me about his various adventures in business or with woman, as discreet as he could be for his generation. He talked about World War II and I have all these narratives. I was going to build a whole record around these tapes and put music to them, I just never got around to it. I did use one of his narratives on Soundtracks For The Blind. It’s where he talks about losing his eyesight. He was totally blind by the time he died.

CRAVEONLINE: Wow, I wish I had done that. (There’s a brief awkward pause as we end that aspect of the conversation) You used the I’m Not Insane record package to help finance the new Swans album. You think self-finance is the way bands will have to do things now?

GIRA: Possibly. I can’t say it’s a great thing. It’s born from desperation. People, as you know, are not buying music, so you have to figure out ways to induce them to buy with variations of the music or special editions of things. It’s good for the consumer but really bad for the artist and the record company. In this case I’m both. I just had to be creative and work two or three times as hard for two or three times less money.

It’s not pretty. I’m done complaining about but I do find the entire idea of illegal downloading to be morally corrupt and inscrutable. I spent hundreds of hours making those I Am Not Insane packages and that allowed me to cover most of the cost of recording. I paid for the privilege to record and now I’ll put that out and people will steal it. They’re stealing a lot of hard work.

CRAVEONLINE: Most bands are being forced into that or hoping the merch sells on tour. Speaking of, what’s the tour schedule for the new record?

GIRA: Oh we’re doing extensive touring. We’re touring now and then Europe and then the southwest and Australia, New Zealand and then back again. We’re going to be touring for the next eighteen months.

CRAVEONLINE: I thought maybe at this point in your career you might be done with touring.

GIRA: No, the only thing that could get in the way would be my health. For the last few years if a tour was extensive I’d get ill from exhaustion, which built into bronchitis and a few times pneumonia. Most of that had to do with the asthma and smoking cigarettes. I’m hoping since I stopped smoking and I’m exercising I’ll be okay.

CRAVEONLINE: I’m excited to see you live. Most things like this bore me but Swans doesn’t feel like a “reunion”.

GIRA: Exactly. We’re taking off from where we were before. I couldn’t live with myself just doing the same thing.

CRAVEONLINE: Right, like just come back and try to redo Cop.

GIRA: (Laughs) I couldn’t even do that when Swans existed, we had changed so much. I would feel like a parody of myself. It’s funny though because the set list is about four songs from the new album and the rest from is the Cop, Filth, and Greed era.

CRAVEONLINE: Really?

GIRA: Oh yeah, that’s some of the stuff I’m really looking forward to because it’s so alien. That’s some of the only Swans stuff I can listen to because it’s so distant and I’m a completely different person. We are going to change it into something else, which is the interesting part to me. I don’t want to sound like I did in those days but I can use that music as a starting point.

CRAVEONLINE: Does the song “Reeling In The Liars” from the new record have any political connotations to it?

GIRA: I started writing that around the end of the Bush era so it started off as that but inevitably it inverted and became more about me. I just figure it’s important to look within before casting aspersions. I figured I was just as guilty as anyone else.

CRAVEONLINE: Who is that singing behind Devondra Bernhardt on “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”?

GIRA: That’s my three and half year old daughter

CRAVEONLINE: Really? She has a great voice.

GIRA: (Laughs) It’s interesting that song because unlike the others it really started from nothing. It started with tape loops and different odd sounds that had nothing to do with what ended up on the record. It was supposed to be just a one or two minute transitional piece but I kept building on it and moving it around and figuring out how to deal with it. I ended up with this little ditty in the middle so I went home and recorded my own voice and thought, “who do I sound like”.

Then it dawned on me I sounded like Devondra so I called him and he agreed to sing on it. That led to me thinking about other things so I got these mandolins, Grasshopper from Mercury Rev played about twenty tracks of mandolins. Aside from some christof arpeggios and some juice harps at the beginning there’s nothing left of what was there originally.

CRAVEONLINE: Devendra sounds just like you, I had no idea it was him when I first heard the song.

GIRA: It’s funny with that song because unless people are told they just think it’s me singing. I sent him a tape of the song and he sang my melody so I guess subconsciously he sang it in a lower register.

CRAVEONLINE: What’s your take on the Swans influence?

GIRA: I suppose it’s uncompromising and it goes to places that most people won’t go. It’s not hip in any way, it’s not fashion oriented or trend oriented. As soon as it became like that I would shift or change it. It’s never been about style but more reaching for something that has an inner strength to it. One of the reasons I stopped Swans at that juncture was because I didn’t think I could do that anymore with that music.

What I needed to do for me to feel viable as a human being and an artist was to sing by myself, with an acoustic guitar, and make the experience just as intense or transformative as Swans, with all the guitars and volume. For me the thing I’m most proud of is being able to learn how to do that really well. I came from a non-musical background, punk rock, noise rock, whatever you want to call it, and eventually I learned how to play guitar and sing well enough to make an event happen by myself in a room.

It’s amazing now that the band’s reinvigorated, seeing the kind of interest in it is sort of ironic. That level of interest was never there before, but it’s nice to see. It’s interesting to look back and see the effect it’s had on groups and people in general. One of the most rewarding things for me is to be at a show signing things and talking to people and having regular non-music people come up and tell me how much the music has meant to them. That to me is a really, really, high reward to have effected somebody in a true way not just because it was part of some kind of scene.

CRAVEONLINE: Final question. Why is Jarboe not involved in the new Swans work?

GIRA: Fair question. She was a very important part of the band, she was a tremendous resource and I incorporated her into the group because of her talent and she had a lot to say. At this point it would be a complete farce to involve her. I haven’t spoken to her in twelve years and considering her prominence in the band it would be a nostalgia act to involve her. I don’t have anything in common with her musically now after hearing some of the music she does, not saying that it’s good or bad, but I just think it would be reenacting something that’s gone. There’s no animosity, I have tremendous respect for her.
Iann Robinson/CraveOnline.com 9/26

Fourteen years can seem like a long time.

Believe it or not, it's been that long since New York avant garde/no wave pioneers Swans released their last studio album, Soundtracks for the Blind. The band called it quits roughly a year later in 1997 with figurehead Michael Gira letting his countless other side projects consume his time. So Swans were no more, until a January 2010 announcement on the band's MySpace page which read "SWANS ARE NOT DEAD."

It is rather easy to see Swans are not dead with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. The album opens up with a nine-minute opus "No Words/No Thoughts," that creates an atmosphere that feels like Gira and co. never really took those 14 years off. There is an indistinguishably vintage Swans feel on My Father, but Swans' efforts are remarkable enough to usher in a new generation of eager fans -- ones that weren't around to witness the band in their heyday. Like I said, 14 years can seem like a long time -- but all that instantly vanishes when something like My Father is the reward for such diligent patience. Michael Lopez/Phoenix New Times 10/5

There is a building ambient drone going on when a percussionist walks on to the stage and starts hammering a few tubular bells. After a building swirl of this, a drummer, bass player, guitarist, keys/noise/guitarist, and Michael Gira (vocals/guitar) join him on stage. It is the famous Swans sound, a pounding steady drone with just a little variance particularly in the bass and lots of overtones and interesting sounds swirling deep in the maelstrom of the guitars. This is an important band and I guess I could consider them, Sonic Youth, Das Damen, and some others as little brothers of the NYC No Wave bands. The No Wave bands were wildly original and often not terribly enduring in career length or listenability. But the next wave did produce lots of challenging music that had enough accessibility to sustain it to a wide fanbase throughout the world. Of course, no one quite hit the heights of Sonic Youth, but the Swans did quite well until Michael Gira felt he needed another direction in 1997. But he is back with new music, US and European tours and he's brought along plenty of ex-Swans in this line-up. They continue on with a steady stream of droning music with a nice feral beat. Gira's vocals are strong and interesting. If you are a Wire fan like me, you may hear sounds similar to the drones in "Pink Flag" or "Mercy". There are certainly not as many pop hooks here, but the songs really resonate. Their power and simple structures are easy to grab onto and the 80% full crowd tonight did just that. The percussionist had extra drums, a gong, and vibes to vary the sound. The keys and noise equipment was subtle and well integrated into the overall sound wall. There really is not much more to say. This band really is not as radical as some may think, but thoughtful, original and powerful. Welcome back, this was excellent.

Quote of the Night: Michael Gira after playing a shorter number... "That's our pop song. Think it'll get me an interview with Pitchfork?"David Hintz/DCRock Live 9/30

Musical performances are characterized by their physicality. Bands move to the music they play and their crowd moves with them, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly. Nevertheless, it’s a different beast entirely when the music itself is literally moving you; you try to stand still, but you can feel it buzzing in your stomach, vibrating up your spine and to the back of your neck. You’re overwhelmed and taken over, put in a full-body trance. This perhaps best describes the feeling of a Swans show — it’s a completely visceral experience. Lead singer Michael Gira claims that the band have taken on a more “acoustic” approach to their live shows, but Swans were always about the sensorial intensity of their live experience, and whether he’ll admit it or not, he’s brilliantly stuck to his old ways. Beautiful and haunting, the six-piece played inward, to one another, while Gira spewed religious obscenities to the crowd. They seemed like a part of a trance, like we were all in it together. This was, without a doubt, one of those most memorable concert experiences of the Pop festival, if not of the entire year. Swans are conceptually flawless, and the fact that they remain capable of providing an intensely abrasive and controversial experience after more than 30 years proves that they are not only true musical greats, but artistic greats as well. Jessica Carroll/Exclaim.ca 10/3

More than a dozen years ago, Michael Gira pronounced his industrial band Swans as dead. Done.

Until now.

The singer and guitarist — who since 1998 headed the gentler Angels of Light — reconvened Swans to create a brand new album, the engulfing “My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky,” which was released last week on Gira’s Young God Records.
A reunion this is not, Gira insists. It’s not about recapturing the past, but moving forward.

“It was a way to stay vital as an artist. It’s what I had to do to feel challenged,” Gira says from his home in the Catskills before Swans first tour in 13 years launches in Philly. “That’s why I went back to Swans, or over to Swans, as it wasn’t going back. Angels of Light was becoming a predictable thing for me to do. I wanted something larger to stay vital and alive.”
But there was also something he wanted to pull from Swans’ past.

“I needed to hear this music again and experience it. This is a progression of how Swans once was,” he says of the album. “It’s also reaching toward some of the places that Swans music reached for in the past, which is a really transcendent, overwhelming sound that lifts you off your feet and sends you up to the sky.” Linda Laban/Metro 9/28

This pioneering no-wave act went into hibernation in 1997, but the hiatus hasn't sapped leader Michael Gira's desire for renewal and redemption through spectacular destruction: After a nine-minute opener that lays waste with creepy jet-engine roar, guitar chug, and lyrics about a "zero man," Gira delivers "Reeling the Liars In," a catchy campfire ditty about doing terrible things to dishonest people. Recognizable shapes of jazz and post-rock often accompany Gira's baritone croon, but they're always delivered between passages of fastidiously crafted clamor that's as cauterizing as ever. Spencer Kornhaber/Spin October

Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky finds Michael Gira seamlessly shifting from Angels Of Light mode to the heavier, noisier realm of his earlier incarnation(s), adding newfound details, nuances, and unexpected elements in the process. This isn’t a surprise: When I spoke with Gira about it last January he told me “[the] approach will be basically where Soundtracks For The Blind/Swans Are Dead left off, with influence of Angels of Light in there too. Probably pretty severe tho, according to my present mood…” What that description doesn’t let you in on is the actual strong quality of the songs. The purists may want to crucify me, but Swans’ first studio album since Soundtracks is also one of Swans’ best, most relentlessly dark and beautiful albums to date. Gira remains angry/venomous, but he’s introduced a kind of time-won wisdom (and guest spot via his three-year-old daughter) you wouldn’t find in the nihilistic ’80s. Get acquainted via the whirlwind (and shivers) kicked up by “Eden Prison.” Brandon Stosuy/Stereogum.com 7/30

Swans: Running the gamut from oppressive terror to quivering beauty, Michael Gira's long-running band of art-punks has been reassembled with former members Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn and Phil Puleo and two more musicians Greg Kot/Chicago Tribune 9/10

Michael Gira’s return to the Swans name finds him assembling a group of collaborators old and new, including drummer Thor Harris, guitarist Christoph Hahn, and guest vocalist Devendra Banhart. Though they share a fondness for dense vocal harmonies, there’s a sinister quality here that differentiates this album from the Angels of Light section of Gira’s discography. And the paranoid guitar of “My Birth” and distorted stomp of “Eden Prison” impressively channel Gira’s visceral imagery. Toby Carroll/Flavorwire.com 9/10

I SAW just a little bit of a Swans show in 1983, in their early days, during their period of slow-but-alert, theater-of-cruelty music. If I remember right, I had come to CBGB to hear Heart Attack, the fastest punk band I knew, and after that the tempos plunged. Sonic Youth played next: lots of strange tunings, innocently curious. Then came Swans, with violent songs that sounded as if they were barely moving.
Did they have one or two guitars then? One or two drummers? Certainly there was the tall singer Michael Gira, heaving out his nasty mottos. They might have played “Weakling” (“I don’t feel pain/I never escape/I’m under the bed/I’m licking the floor”). Or “Big Strong Boss” (“Blood runs black/Cut my throat/Kill me snake/Do what I say”). But I don’t know. I was 15, and this music didn’t seem to come from music. Maybe from literature, maybe from visual art. My ears hurt, and the whole thing seemed to require thought. As many did in those days when faced with Swans, I left early.
“Thought?” Mr. Gira asked me recently. “Really? My hope was that you’d just open up, and you’d be fine. It’s like reading Beckett. If you start thinking too much, you’ll never read it. You have to just let it flow through you and accept it.”
We were at a house in the Catskills, near his home. A friend of his had offered us a quiet living room, so that Mr. Gira, now 56, could talk about why he has re-formed the group, or at least revived its name, for an 18-month tour starting this month, as well as discuss “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky,” a forthcoming album that feels unusual for what could be called a reunion. (Mr. Gira, emphatically, rejects that characterization.) The record is partly an index of currents within Swans’ music over its 15-year history, from gnashing sound sculptures to serene art songs. And, partly, it’s a whole new equation.
Mr. Gira sat for 90 minutes, intense and polite, holding an unlighted cigar in his right hand. (He quit smoking a year ago.) He spoke rapidly, full of strong pronouncements; when challenged, he first responded vehemently, then laughed at himself.
Mr. Gira (pronounced jhee-RAH) ran Swans from 1982 to 1997. The band was the Miles Davis of postpunk: it changed its sound often and unrepentantly, moving away from its early minimal-brutal work toward the lush, ambient and even acoustic. (The last stand of their negative phase was a live recording from 1986 called “Public Castration Is a Good Idea,” one of the darkest records ever.) Mr. Gira stopped barking and moved toward a style of singing occasionally resembling Johnny Cash’s; he started collaborating with the singer Jarboe, his partner at the time, who had a fuller, more disciplined voice, a female balance to his.
At their peak Swans could fill Irving Plaza — a 1,100-capacity hall — and sell 20,000 copies of a record. But in their afterlife, as Mr. Gira has made a steady stream of records with his new project, Angels of Light, the old group’s reputation has persisted and expanded, here and around the world. Not long ago Mr. Gira played one of his solo shows in Russia — these are simple events in which he sings in his planing baritone and strums acoustic-guitar chords with his thumb — and 2,000 people showed up.
He has become a folk hero, essentially, to a coalition of musicians from indie-rock to grindcore to electronic composition, from million-selling bands to metal and the art-pop underground. Tool, Neurosis, Big Black, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Godflesh, Xiu Xiu, Battles — bands and musicians to whom power relationships and confrontation in sound verge on philosophy or religion. Perhaps the spectrum is so wide because Mr. Gira isn’t part of any particular musical tradition. Literary, artistic, maybe. Musical, not so much.
By his own account, for Swans’ 15 years Mr. Gira worked hard and burned bridges. “I was negatively networking, going around the country making enemies,” he said.
He remains unsentimental but kindly. A few years ago he told an Italian magazine, “Thank God I am no longer me.”
Here and there “My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky” could be another Angels of Light album — there is the new calmness, the new transcendence in his music, and even the love song “Little Mouth” for his wife, Siobhan Duffy — except for a few elements. One is the drumming. On “No Words/No Thoughts,” the album’s first track, you hear the kind of slow, slammed, wobbly pattern that was all over early Swans. The group’s original drummer, Jonathan Kane, played in blues bands as a teenager; he told me that he and Mr. Gira loved the emptied-out, half-time shuffle from Howlin’ Wolf’s song “Evil.”
And here or there, the words on the new Swans album sound as if they were lifted from an earlier phase of his life, especially in “My Birth”:
Then I strangled your neck, because I love you too much.
Then I kissed your red mouth, because I love you to death.
Not surprisingly, those lyrics were written for Swans, around 1997, but left unused. Mr. Gira said he wanted to make lyrics that were impenetrable, like slogans or chunks of physical matter. “It wasn’t meant to convey a message,” he said. “It wasn’t meant to be about me.” More quietly, he added, “In retrospect I can see that it totally was.”
Mr. Gira had a bad adolescence in Southern California and Europe: an alcoholic mother, a businessman father who couldn’t contain his son’s self-destruction. He completed two years of high school and then dropped out, working in construction. By the time he turned 16, he had spent time in jail, in Jerusalem, for selling drugs. Returning to Los Angeles, he earned his equivalency diploma and enrolled at what is now the Otis College of Art and Design. He played in a punk band but aspired to be a visual artist, fascinated by Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden and various kinds of Middle European severity: Egon Schiele, Joseph Beuys, and the Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch, who brought his Dionysian multimedia happening, the “Theater of Orgies and Mysteries,” to Venice, Calif., in 1978.
He moved to New York in 1979, and a few years later he met Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth. (He had met that band’s bassist, Kim Gordon, in art school.)
“I played him ‘Confusion Is Sex,’ which we’d just finished,” Mr. Moore said in a telephone interview, speaking of Sonic Youth’s first LP. “And he played us Swans’ first record. And we were like, O.K., we belong together. Neither of us felt too much affinity toward any other contemporary bands.”
Though Swans and Sonic Youth are now linked in that New York, post-No Wave moment, Mr. Gira said the two bands had little to do with each other musically. And though he credited some West Coast punk, he couldn’t relate to the hardcore scene in New York at all. Hardcore, he said, was a “namby-pamby” genre. “It was just a way for people to belong,” he said. “And that’s the last thing I think people should do.”
For 11 years Mr. Gira lived in a rear-storefront apartment with one window in the East Village, where Sonic Youth and Swans both rehearsed. For a few years they shared bills, at CBGB and the Sin Club. They toured the South and Midwest, to small and vanishing audiences. Back then Mr. Gira performed with a noose hanging above and just in front of his head. “I’d throw my body on the stage, get up, throw my body on the monitors, break my ribs, and I didn’t feel it,” he said. “It was like making the world into a whirlpool, lifting you up. It was exceptionally wonderful. It wasn’t negative in the least.”
To a disbelieving look, he added: “I guess in the lyrics it might have been a touch negative. But it went with the time.”
Mr. Moore recalled: “We spent a lot of time together. He was completely opinionated and negative about things, but also very generous and respectful. I think, because his family history was somewhat problematic, he wanted to hold on to being wise and educated and smart, and he took offense at anybody who would play dumb, or dumb themselves down, or settle for what they were offered.”
When Swans finally penetrated Europe, the British media wrote excited reviews about how Swans were the loudest band in the world. This revolted Mr. Gira. “I got so tired of people walking out on me,” he said. “In ’84, ’85, we did some shows in Europe where we’d turn out the lights and lock the doors and play. Like, just take it.” At the same time he said it depressed him to see “lunkhead metal kids” in the audience — the kind of kids, perhaps, who might have been conditioned to just take it, and like it.
But wasn’t there a macho element in Swans? “No,” Mr. Gira said. “There might have been a manly element. But not a rooster thing.”
The last Swans tour was conceived as such, and the live album resulting from it was “Swans Are Dead.” Mr. Gira runs Young God Records, a one-man operation that has released 43 albums, including three by Devendra Banhart, the label’s breakout success. Mr. Gira threw himself into steady music making, his own and others. He moved to the Catskills four yours ago and has two children with Ms. Duffy; he has become a singer-songwriter, essentially, although one who claims to have no aptitude for writing narrative songs.
As late as 2006, when a journalist asked Mr. Gira, “Would you ever consider re-forming Swans?,” he replied: “Absolutely not, never. Dead and gone.” But he changed his mind. It was while on the road a few years ago with the band Akron/Family as his backing group that Mr. Gira felt something like a Swans feeling again.
“The songs got longer and louder, and we entered into this kind of swaying slave-ship rhythm, and I lost myself in it.” Swans, to him, is less a particular band of players than a physical experience: “being completely overwhelmed in sound,” as he put it.
The new six-piece version of Swans includes a few members from different incarnations of the band — the guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn and the drummer Phil Puleo — as well as the bassist Chris Pravdica and the percussionist Thor Harris, from other parts of Mr. Gira’s working life. (It does not include Jarboe, with whom Mr. Gira has not spoken in 10 years.)
The band will play in bigger halls than it ever did the first time around; its two New York shows are at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene on Oct. 8, and the next day at the Bowery Ballroom on the Lower East Side. It will even play a few rearranged older Swans songs: “Raping a Slave,” “Your Property,” “Beautiful Child.” “The harder things,” Mr. Gira said. “What I think of as the blues stuff.”
Mr. Gira is hoping his voice holds up during the tour. He has a more psychological concern as well. “I guess the hardest thing will be not to let the” — he tapped the table nervously — “destroyer aspect of myself take over, and make the audience into my victims.”
Ben Ratliff/Sunday New York Times 9/5

Swans, a New York City post-punk group led by austere visionary Michael Gira, made uncompromising, often brutal music from the band’s inception in 1982 to its demise in 1997. Gira’s lyrics were influenced by Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade and obsessed with sex and the Old Testament. Listening to those early recordings was like being trapped in a dorm room at 3 a.m. with a pretentious, black-clad art student whose humorless rants knew no end. Unsurprisingly, Swans’ sadistically loud live shows reportedly caused multiple patrons to vomit on themselves. Gira has remained active, playing in the Angels of Light and running his Young God label, which released the early, good Devendra Banhart records and, more recently, the excellent work of James Blackshaw, the finest extant practitioner of American Primitive guitar playing (although he’s British). Gira has reformed Swans for a new recording and tour, although he will tell you in stentorian all-caps that “THIS IS NOT A REUNION.” Jarboe, the chanteuse who softened the Swans’ sound when she joined in 1985, is not included in the not-reunion. Gira’s still got religion, as evidenced by the reference to his “mendicant friar act” in the credits of the forthcoming record, My Father Will Guide Me Up To a Rope in the Sky. The savage, trembling no-wave guitar sound and Gira’s baritone, which makes Mark Lanegan sound like Tiny Tim, are still intact. Longtime Swans fans can rest assured that, with song titles like “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” Gira is just as cuddly as ever. David Dunlap/Washington City paper 9/15

"This is not a dumb-ass nostalgia act." says singer songwriter Michael Gira. The Swans are a legendary "post punk" rock group from America which began it's musical journey in 1982. The Swans had disbanded in 1997 but has now been activated again in 2010. The latest release is a supposed to be a natural progression for Gira and is not intended to be a reunion type project. The album "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky" is a haunting masterpiece of rock music. The strange instrumentation and legendary songwriting still ring true with this latest release. This album ranges from rock to post punk and sometimes veers into the realm of folk. The album has an acoustic dark Noir feeling to it and when I close my eyes I feel like my mind is wandering down a dark desolate road somewhere in the mid-western desert highway without a certain destination with only the stars and the moon to guide the path. The album is really great and sounds incredibly honest and is indeed a true piece of musical art. Jason Friend/ examiner.com/underground-music-in-sacramento 9/11

The first Swans album in nearly 15 years, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky encompasses all the original band’s many moods. Known for crushing noise-rock explosions, by the time of its first demise the band has thoroughly absorbed the intimacies of moody pop and pastoral folk rock as well, giving it an atmospheric and dynamic sound that would prove influential on the indie rock hordes that followed. For Swans’ self-willed revival, band mastermind Michael Gira (joined by both Swans veterans and members of his subsequent band Angels of Light) weaves the disparate strands of pounding rock, Middle Eastern tonalities, psychedelic folk and symphonic skronk around meditations on obsession and compulsion in striking songs like “Inside Madeline,” “Reeling the Liars In” and “Eden Prison.” More than merely a comeback, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is Swans’ next major statement. Michael Toland/BigTakeover.com 9/20

As founder of Young God Records, Michael Gira has introduced the world to acts like Akron/Family and Devendra Banhart. As frontman of noisy post-punk band Swans, Gira is alternately a malevolent singer and maker of beautiful sound. For the band’s first album in close to 15 years, he plays a little bit of both those roles. The result is a pummeling record that Liars no doubt wish they had made. Austin Ray/Pastemagazine.com/blogs 8/27

Swans debuted in the early 1980s with the starkest and ugliest music imaginable: Nerve-shreddingly slow and plug-your-ears loud, somewhere between no wave and doom metal, with lyrics that viewed humanity as a sheep-like mass that deserved whatever horror came its way. Melody, nuance, and gentleness came later, but by then it was too late. Swans' rep as unrepentant industrial brutalists had stuck. Sure, it was unfair, but that's what happens when you introduce yourself with a sound that singular and abrasive.
Swans frontman/mastermind Michael Gira was notoriously unhappy about that rep. His early records made their point-- music can sometimes hurt, and sometimes that hurt is weirdly pleasurable-- and by the late 80s his interests lay elsewhere. Sure his lyrics remained oppressive, abject, and generally icky, but his bellowing and moaning became a mournful croon. Humanity and beauty kept leaking in, almost despite the band's best intentions. As the 90s went on, Swans albums became as much about exploring gorgeous (if disquieting) ambient texture as crushing heads. Gira's songs blossomed from skeletal rhythmic sketches into lush epics that predicted a lot of post-rock.
But Swans' music, whatever the period, was driven by a philosophy of no compromises. Gira wanted the freedom to change direction whenever he wished. Swans fans and critics refused to shut up about his earlier, more brutal records, as if Gira were Woody Allen raised on Marquis de Sade. So he did the only reasonable thing an intractable man could do: He killed the band in 1997, dumped its historical baggage, and tried to enjoy the freedom of no expectations in a new project, Angels of Light.
Perhaps 13 years was enough time to put Swans into perspective, though, because here's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Its existence is surprising to say the least, especially considering Gira's sneering dismissal of the whole idea of bands reuniting. What's less surprising is that Gira's shifted musical directions yet again, though his voice and the inimitable end-times vibe make My Father instantly recognizable as a Swans album.
I understand why Swans' music, even the later and more melodic period, can be off-putting to those who prefer their music more humane and humorous. Gira can be a blackly funny fucker, but to truly enjoy Swans, it does help to have some affection for music that's, well, bleak. Really bleak. Theatrically bleak. Because however funny or lovely or melodramatically stirring he can be, there's always going to be a core of desolation to Gira's songwriting.
My Father reinforces that fact, but it does so with a stomping, swinging, snarling live-band urgency that sounds little like Swans' last album, 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, which leaned heavily on the band's love for tape loops and ambient soundscapes. My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues. The musicians sound go-for-the-throat savage after their long absence, as if Gira presented them with a batch of blackened lyrics and they couldn't wait to pound the songs into shape.
In other words, My Father grooves, and grooves hard. "Eden Prison" features one of Gira's most menacing performances in recent years, but really his snarling contempt is a bonus given the intensity the band brings to the galloping rhythm. Unlike the keyboard-driven Soundtracks material, which often had to be radically reconstructed for the band's final tour (as heard on 1998's posthumous live album, Swans are Dead), you can imagine the reconstituted Swans taking these new songs to the stage and kicking them out as-is.
Gira's new songs are obviously far more refined than band's bash-and-groan 80s material. (Just about every song ever written is more refined than something like 1984's "Raping a Slave".) There are still touches of the Soundtracks era and its atmospherics, though it's usually restricted to intros and outros. But this is the closest Gira's come in decades to the band's old immediacy, intensity, and brute force. "My Birth" is traditional hard rock filtered through Swans' drone-happy sensibility, the one to play for Queens of the Stone Age fans. And while "No Words/No Thoughts" opens the album with a moody wash of church bells, it immediately drops into the kind of swampy lurch that once made Swans heroes in the sludge metal community.
But if Gira got his Swans groove back, he also got his Swans bile back. This album is the antithesis of 2010's gooey let's-all-be-friends chillwave fun. The only way My Father would make sense on a beach is if nuclear winter had broken out. After all, there's a song here called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", which sets a new standard for Gira's spit-in-your-eye venom. It is also sung, in part, by Gira's little kid and opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo. That's Gira's kind of comedy. He always seems to having the most fun when he's at his most sardonic, and when he's at his most sardonic, he's also at his most memorable.
A lot of people have died in Swans songs over the years. (They've also been abused, degraded, violated, and made to wish they were dead.) On My Father, there's "Reeling the Liars In", a full-scale moral cleansing where Every Liar on Earth, or at least as many as Gira can get his hands on, is loaded onto a pyre and set ablaze. It's the slightest song on the album, and the most vicious, and also the catchiest. I only mention it here at the end only to let new listeners know what they're in for when Gira's in a good mood. Longtime Swans fans are, I'm sure, already smiling. Jess Harvell/Pitchfork.com 9/22

After hearing Michael Gira’s work as Angels of Light for the past however many years, it’s a shock to hear him back at it with Swans again. Swans being the band that made a habit of pummeling everyone’s eardrums in the most pleasurable way possible for years and years. The new album sits somewhere in the middle, nine-and-a-half minute opener “No Words/No Thoughts” acting as a good primer to just what the band is about in 2010. And what they are about is taking that pounding loudness and harnessing it into a palatable structure. Sure, at nearly ten minutes you’d expect some fatigue to set in, but instead it just builds and builds—layers of guitar and chimes and an elastic bassline rolling smoothly underneath it all. The second track, “Reeling the Liars In,” is much closer to Gira’s Angels of Light stuff—baritone, melancholy but full-bodied folk music. Basically, My Father… is a deceptively brutal record that finds beauty in layers upon layers upon layers of loudness. You can listen to the whole thing at the link below, and we recommend turning it up as loud as you’re able. Sam Hockley Smith/TheFader.com 9/20

After “No Words/No Thoughts,” the first song on Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, it’s hard to keep listening. The song isn’t bad; rather, it’s a 10-minute mini-epic that swells and blossoms and implodes so apocalyptically, it’s hard to imagine what could follow. But Michael Gira has imagination to spare, and the Swans leader pushes impossibly deeper into folk, noise, and Armageddon gospel throughout the remainder of My Father. The full-length is the group’s first since 1996, and although singer-keyboardist Jarboe is absent, Gira and longtime guitarist Norman Westberg have sired a leviathan of an album. It resembles all of Swans’ previous work, yet none of it: “Reeling The Liars In” is a righteous, vindictive hymn, while “My Birth” is a crushing pulse of existential lightlessness. Gira, his voice as grim and stentorian as ever, sings of sin and prayer, but those poles keep wandering—and when his former protégé Devendra Banhart duets with Gira’s 3-year-old daughter on the droning, yawing “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” the result chills bones. The disc’s most horrific revelation is that Gira himself may be its titular father, and that his chain of harrowing songs is the rope he’s dangling earthward. Where it leads, and who dares to climb it, is irrelevant; the fact that it so dizzyingly hangs between spirituality and perversion, austerity and decadence, is enough. Jason Heller/ The Onion A.V. Club 9/21

For his first LP under the Swans banner in 14 years, frontman Michael Gira has allowed his sludgy, distortion-fucked past to make amends with his brooding, snake-bitten present. From the first Swans EP in 1982 on through 2007's album with Angels of Light, you can trace how Gira's unique bursts of misanthropy have slowly matured from ultraviolent, ultra-abrasive Anthony Burgess bloodletting to a desolate Cormac McCarthy gloom. My Father… uses a hodgepodge of musicians from various Swans lineups (including longtime guitar torturer Norman Westberg) to play both sides, advancing his more recent dalliances in southern Gothic scruff into new worlds of dissonance and doom. His dust-kicking swirls now have wailing strings, laying alongside dead-eyed thuds, creaking noises, haunting gurgles and the creepiest jaw harp solo put to tape. By adding a more rock-centric base, the bleak Angels of Light twang-doom of "Reeling in the Liars" and the manic mandolins of the feedback-drenched "Jim" now play like a bloodthirsty Leonard Cohen skinning cats in his barn. Even more excruciating tracks like "My Birth" sound like a deranged cousin to Nick Cave's Grinderman, bringing Gira's sex/religion/death obsessions to the brink of the apocalypse. But it's tracks like opener "No Words/No Thoughts" that should easily please anyone excited about the un-retiring of the Swans name, turning church bells into slurry where heavy metal meets 4AD, tromping with industrial robo-elephants, and exploring all the chiming crescendos that Godspeed You! Black Emperor so kindly borrowed. Michael Gira announced the resurrection of his band Swans with two bold and dramatic statements. First, "Swans are not dead" was posted on the band's myspace page — an allusion to the group's posthumous live album, 1998's "Swans Are Dead." Later, Gira declared (in all caps), "THIS IS NOT A REUNION." Christopher Weingarten/eMusic.com 9/21

The latter announcement makes perfect sense: Other than mainstay Gira, Swans' lineup changed frequently during its 1982 to 1997 run (female singer Jarboe was a constant member during almost all of that time, but she is not part of the current group).
Swans' first album since 1996, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky" (Young God), is a blend of the original Swans sound (one part No Wave, one part post-punk, and one part goth, with an emphasis on brutal sounds and dark lyrics) and Gira's post-Swans project Angels of Light, which featured a more melodic, less abrasive sound.
The result is both ominous and awe-inducing. The album opens with the nine-minute "No Words/No Thoughts," a song that builds a dark, chilling drone before Gira's vocals finally emerge. The vocals are a large part of Swans' menacing atmosphere: Gira sounds downright possessed on this track, singing in a trancelike chant.
Elsewhere, though, Swans builds a calmer sound: The short "Reeling the Liars In" could have been a track on any Angels of Light album, and Gira's textured baritone carries the weariness of Leonard Cohen on some of the spoken lines — if one could imagine Cohen growling, "Here is my tongue, now cut out my sin."
But that's about as normal as Swans gets. "You [Expletive] People Make Me Sick" is a duet between fellow weirdo Devendra Banhart and Gira's daughter. Their lilting, childlike interplay is a stark contrast to the thunderous, devilish cacophony of instrumental noise that rumbles underneath. The building repetitions on "Inside Madeleine" whip the song into a frenzy that climaxes into a somber, pulsing dirge.
Gira's collaborators here include Norman Westberg, guitarist for the original Swans, as well as several frequent Angels of Light players (many of whom also contributed to Swans): guitarist Christoph Hahn, percussionist Phil Puleo, bassist Chris Pravdica and percussionist/keyboardist Thor Harris of Shearwater.
But as always, the most important figure in Swans is and always will be Michael Gira. It's his dark, arty-punk aesthetic that guides this record, making it sound like an old Swans album played through an Angels of Light filter, capturing the best aspects of both projects.
Catherine Lewis/ExpressNightOut.com 9/21

From 1982 to 1997, New York’s Swans built a cult legacy for a solitary blend of industrial, folk, noise, and avant-garde music. It was less music than an experience, helmed by songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocal oddity Michael Gira.
Along the way, the group’s sound evolved from raw to delicate and anywhere between, channeling ambient sounds, acoustic tenderness, post-rock, field recordings, cinematic drama, and much more. But Gira wanted to turn his attention elsewhere, and Jarboe, Gira’s partner and one of the group’s only other constants, went her own way.
Gira focused on acoustic works in a solo career and with a group called The Angels of Light, and he released other people’s material on his label, Young God Records. Though a new Swans album never seemed likely or possible, Gira now has delivered one that far exceeds expectations thanks to an all-star cast.
In a new, balanced mix of noise rock, strange ballads, and stratified power, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky calls on Thor Harris, Bill Rieflin, Devendra Banhart, and a number of other multi-talented collaborators. Whether droning, marching, building to a crescendo, setting a creepy tone, or simply delivering melodies, this marks a new and important chapter in the Swans story.Scott Morrow/AlarmPress.com 9/21

Swans rose out of the No Wave scene that produced Sonic Youth, Suicide, and DNA, among others. Their first album appeared in 1983, and was titled Filth. The name was a fitting description of the music, as the record just sounded nasty. Steeped in abrasive sounds, textures, and lyrics, their debut made you feel like you were listening in a sewer. The onslaught continued with Cop the following year. Swans had perfected a stance that would prove to be a blueprint for industrial music a few years later. But their dark vision and plodding rhythms became almost suffocating, and the future of the band seemed uncertain.
That was when leader Michael Gira did something that would become customary in the years to come. When the music began to show any signs of stagnation, he threw out the old rules and changed everything. By opening up to all sorts of new influences, the group was able to move forward in several different directions. Classic Swans albums like Children Of God and Holy Money followed, confirming their status as fearless trailblazers.
The original incarnation of Swans ran from 1982 to 1997, when Gira decided to retire the name. In reconvening the group, he is emphatic that it is not a reunion; in fact he is almost obsessive about it in the press releases. But the new CD, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky sounds very much like the Swans I have always known.. In fact, it sounds exactly like what I would have expected from them in 2010, whether the name had been dormant for the previous 13 years or not.
The name Swans has meant something to fans for a long time now, and their latest more than lives up to the legacy. The nine-minute opening track “No Words/ No Thoughts” sets the tone. The cut begins with a clanging, tribal din that slowly gives way to sounds that are epic in dimension. All of this sets the stage for the remarkably hypnotic musical voyage that comprises the bulk of the song.
Swans are using a lot of folk music influences this time out, which adds an interesting element to the proceedings. When I say folk music, I am talking about the real hardscrabble old stuff of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of Folk Music, not the Kingston Trio. “Jim” seems to bring up the ghost of Leadbelly‘s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” while “Reeling The Liars In” is a deceptively simple protest lament a la Woody Guthrie.
The latter half of My Father reminds me a lot of the latest by Current 93, Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain. The music and the lyrical content both convey a tone of searching, and ultimately of redemption. “Eden Prison” is an especially notable example. The sheer aggressive power that Swans are noted for is never far from the surface, at times appearing in short bursts to punctuate things. On “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” the group just lets it rip, using everything they have to build a song of nightmarish intensity.
There are a number of guests appearances, but the oddest one has to be from Devandra Banhart. This is a guy who I never would have expected to find on a Swans record, although he did do a great job.
My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky is a tour de force, as all good Swans albums have been. The many different musical styles the group incorporate give it something of a travelogue feel, a tour of their collective musical tastes in a way. It is one I will certainly be listening to again, and one that I recommend to anyone who has an interest in music that exists a little outside of the mainstream.Greg Barbrick/Blogcritics.com 9/21

This is it. This is the ultimate M. Gira record.
A brief overview: Michael Gira is the colorfully damaged, enviably fearless guy who started an earlier incarnation of Swans in the boiler room of early ‘80s New York, as a monotonous, relentlessly negative… “industrial” doesn’t really work here. Think slo-mo brutality in 2/4, with no real stake in society at large. Over time, particularly when he brought in the ultra-girly drama-club influence of singer Jarboe, Swans became something much more complex. Along with Gira’s scary cult-leader charisma and the grinding, sadistic rhythm section, albums such as Love of Life, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and The Burning World (a simplified, Cohen-biting bid for college radio airplay that’s weathered surprisingly well) brought in symphonic complexity and moments of gorgeous emotional depth. Catharsis via extreme contrast.
More recently, Gira’s records as Angels of Light (with or without Akron/Family, which, let it be known, is a completely different band when Gira is in the room) have mined American folk music, with often transcendent, sometimes disappointingly “mature” results.
It’s always a bitch to write about a musician who writes about his own music so obsessively and entertainingly. (David Thomas is another one of those.) In his effusive mailing-list updates, MG has made it clear that this is “not a reunion.” K. But I’ll observe that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It’s a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real.
We enter the maelstrom (if you don’t smirk when you read the word “maelstrom,” Swans may not be your thing) with “No Words/No Thoughts,” a rhythmically erratic, epically overblown dirge clocking in at nine minutes and challenging King Crimson in the extremist prog-rock sweepstakes. Then we get “Reeling the Liars In,” fleeting and elegantly understated in Gira’s Burroughs-as-bluesman persona. “Jim” and “My Birth” finally, after many years, effectively merge the two concepts, making this a Swans record that could only exist after Angels of Light. And do not miss the centerpiece, “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” which brings together Gira’s glaring misanthropy, an astounding depth, courage and complexity vis-à-vis the arrangement, and a cameo from the leader’s three year old. “Eden Prison” then does the angry, balls-to-the-wall apocalypse thing again. I would say this is the best Gira record for beginners, but I can also picture it being exhausting. At times, things get so intense, it’s hard not to laugh.
Band reunions never make good on their promises, but this record certainly does.
Emerson Dameron/Dustedmagazine.com 9/20

When Michael Gira describes what it's like to make an album, his words recall the song "Failure" written by his chamber-goth rock band, Swans: "It's no surprise that I'm pushing the stone/Up the hill/Of failure."
"You write the songs over two or three years, and then they gestate and they have a vibration and you think about the people you want to perform on it," says Gira, recounting the ordeal rather cheerfully. "And you go to record with them and you pound it out."
That's when making music gets painful. Nothing ever sounds like it's supposed to, Gira says, and every project reaches a few points where it might as well be abandoned. But the band keeps pushing -- the layers keep building and receding, the arrangements keep shifting. There are sleepless nights spent trying to determine how tracks transition. And finally, some semblance of a record emerges, ready to be mixed.
"That's the worst part because it's final," says Gira, 56. "Then it sounds like some dead hamburger on the street because you've listened to it so many times. I'm a horrible person to be around at that point. All I think about is music, at the expense of everything else."
Gira is speaking from outside a small rehearsal space in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The room is crammed with amplifiers, guitars and drums, evidence that the latest iteration of Swans is preparing to take its first album in 14 years on the road. A delightful, dark and demanding record, "My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky" is, as Gira puts it, the sound of his decision to once again "make love to my demon brother." It's a loud album, heavy on crack-the-sky dynamics and sounds that, without warning, do their best to shatter the speakers.
"You [Expletive] People Make Me Sick," for instance, is a duet between Devendra Banhart and Gira's 3-year-old daughter, Saoirse. It begins as an eerie lullaby, both singers cooing over a sea of mandolin and mutated percussion. Then, suddenly, it sounds as if the whole world has crashed into a piano and a drum kit. Horns howl over the seismic clatter, and the room quakes. Even "Reeling the Liars In," the most immediate and understated track, backs Gira's stentorian baritone with a choir of ghouls, seemingly ready to storm at the master's call.
"Swans is about embracing these kinds of maelstroms of sounds again. Sound has a physical creator and destroyer property, and it's something you can't escape. It makes your body atomize," Gira says. "It's something I very intentionally cut off when I cut off Swans. But we're known for our sonic intensity, and it's something I want to embrace again."
In the 14 years since Swans' farewell album, 1996's "Soundtracks for the Blind," Gira released a half-dozen albums under the name Angels of Light. He started a family and ran Young God, a record label that has become a surprising clearinghouse for ambitious, ascendant bands. Gira produced the best two Banhart albums when Banhart was but another bearded wastrel. Similarly, Calla and Akron/Family made their most adventurous music with Gira, years before they signed with much bigger independent labels.
"I'm a record producer. I look at it as a clinical task, with quiet and nuance and opposition," Gira says. "I think about things pictorially."
Today, the picture is pretty good. The record is done, and the band has 10 more days of rehearsal at Gira's Catskills home before hitting the road. When he decided to reconstitute Swans, Gira asked only those musicians he knew he could tour with for the better part of a year. He wanted bandmates who understood where the group had been and where it might go. And he wanted it to be loud. Back inside the Brooklyn rehearsal room, that's exactly the sound of success.
"I decided to start touring Swans, and it's like mainlining heroin," he says with a laugh. "There are six people in there with really large amplifiers playing at loud volumes. It's like being in some chamber of ecstasy." Grayson Currin/Washington Post 9/24

Back in 1997, while I was digging into serious fare like Earth Crisis and Avail, Michael Gira was just wrapping up Swans. Their breakup, however, did nothing to slow the growth of the band’s now decades-old legacy that looms over what passes for “heavy music” these days like the shadow of a distant obelisk.
Now in 2010, Gira just came out of nowhere with a bunch of loud, fucked up sounds that seem totally appropriate as a Swans album. So that’s what it is. And they’re going on tour, too. People like me who were utterly oblivious when the band was around the first time are now pretty psyched.
Vice: Just so you know, I’m definitely coming from a “fan” background, so I’m a little intimidated to be talking with you.
Michael Gira: Oh, don’t worry about that. I clean up dog shit. I wipe my baby’s ass. I’m a regular person.
Unfortunately, I missed out on Swans when you guys were around the first time, so for the upcoming tour, I’m wondering what songs will be played–will it be just the new album, or will there be a sampling from the band’s different periods?
I made a list of older material to play, but we haven’t started rehearsing yet. When we do, it’s going to be these long, 12-hour sessions for three weeks, I imagine. I want certain songs from the album to just extend and breathe for a really long time, so I don’t know how much physical time onstage we’re going to have for other material.
But, that said, the songs that I sent everybody to learn how to play are: “Power for Power” from the first album Filth, “Clay Man” and “Your Property,” from Cop, “I Crawled” and “Raping a Slave,” from the Young God EP, “Another You” and “A Screw,” from Holy Money, “Anything for You,” from Greed, and from Children of God: “Sex God Sex” and “Beautiful Child.”
Holy shit, that rules.
But that’s too many already, that’s too long for a set in itself. So I don’t know how many are going to make the cut, but we’ll just work on them and see what happens.
When I used to commute to work on the Q train, “Beautiful Child” at full volume felt like the only logical response to the environment because I couldn’t handle everyone around me. Even though it felt right on the train, I don’t think I ever got the full grasp of what was being expressed in that song.
I guess it was sort of a perverse take on the Abraham and Isaac theme. Sacrificing a child. Also, I thought it was about facing your darkest inner self and expunging it–or first embracing it, then expunging it. The words kind of took on a talismanic quality live and then I would just repeat them over and over. That was a really amazing song to play live. It turned into some kind of beast on its own.
The live show is going to be much different from the album. I think we’d really be doing ourselves a disservice if it wasn’t. Hopefully more powerful. To me, an album is just the template, or blueprint for a song, and then from there the song can expand or contract. In this version of Swans, I definitely want it to expand.
When Swans disbanded, was it a “We’ve done everything we can do” kind of thing, or was it more…
I wanted to move onto something else. Swans transformed from pretty monodimensional and brutal in the early days into… I don’t know how many different versions. As many versions as there were albums. It was always different. But at the end, the whole baggage of Swans and its 15 years of struggle, it just kind of weighed me down. I didn’t have the spiritual strength to continue anymore. I wanted to start things from a simpler place. That’s why I started Angels of Light. I was exhausted, basically.
Now, after 13 years of doing that and running the labels and producing other people’s music, I want to rock. [laughs] Not really, but I’m ready to make some electric guitar-based big sounds again. I’m craving it, my body needs it. I feel like I’m deprived of vitamins or something. So that’s what I’m doing and it makes sense to me to call that Swans.
You’ve said that when you started making music with Circus Mort you had “no musical ability.”
I didn’t have any musical skill. I definitely had musical instinct, just not technical ability. So I turned that, I think, into a strength. I made something happen with the means I had at my disposal. About the closest we ever came to being punk rock was operating from that perspective. Just make shit happen with what’s in front of you.
Almost like a caveman approach to music.
Oh, I don’t know about caveman! I figured I could make something musically powerful happen with a bunch of rocks and a glass of milk. It’s something about how you arrange it–your intent, and the context. I’m not by any means an accomplished guitarist. I mean, I know how to play guitar for myself, but playing other people’s songs, forget it. However, I do have musical experience and know how to speak the lingo, so I can make things happen. But that’s just organizing sound. Did you get the remix thing, the double album?
Yeah, Let Me Go?
Yeah, did you hear it yet?
I did. I listened to it last night. I noticed about 20 minutes in that there is a really distinct sound–it almost sounds like a guy masturbating.
Well, I won’t mention what that is, but that album is sort of working with music as raw material to make something else happen, not necessarily a song.
You’re one of the only acts that has almost as many live albums as you do studio albums.
I hadn’t thought about that, but I guess so. I think Swans as a live band was one of the best, so I wanted it to exist. If you listen to the songs live and then listen to them in the studio, they’re totally different. So the live albums are a result of that. Also, one of the ways I figured out how to make a living was to keep putting out as much fucking music as possible.
That is true.
Yeah, otherwise, what am I going to do? Hang sheet rock? As you get a little older that’s not an option anymore. [pause, background noise] Sorry, I’m executing my job as shipping clerk right now.
Oh, I didn’t know I was calling you at work. Wait, you have a job?
I’m a shipping clerk…
That’s weird.
… at Young God records. My job is Young God records.
Oh, right, OK.
I’m so behind.
That always struck me as being admirable–having ordered stuff from you and knowing that you’re the guy who’s putting it together. You personalize so much of what you send out too.
At a certain point I kind of verge on having a heart attack. It’s a lot of work, I’ll tell you that. But otherwise, I don’t really have an alternative. I can’t hang sheet rock, and I don’t have any skills. It’s unacceptable for me to be painting behind some lady’s toilet with my ass sticking out. I’m forced to make a living as a musician. That’s what I do. From the time I was like 15. Worked my ass off for a long time.
And most of that was in NY, right?
Yeah, well except for when I moved to Atlanta towards the end, but then I moved back to NYC after Swans ended and Jarboe and I split up.
Is Jarboe a sensitive topic?
Oh no. I love Jarboe.
Was there a reason that she didn’t factor into this iteration of Swans?
I haven’t been in touch with her for years. Part of how things went with Swans was, she was my spouse, and when I would get the material together for a record I’d sometimes use a song by her, but I was the one who arranged it. Or I would get her to sing on a song I wrote. She added a lot, I don’t want to discount her, but it was sort of like she was there, so I used her.
Not used her in a bad way. It’s what I do–I just used my daughter on a song because she’s there. I used Devendra Banhart on a song because he was there. All these people I work with, they can do certain things, so I can kind of marionette them into place with the music. And that’s what she was: she was my partner and she was intertwined with the music for that period. Once we split up and once Swans stopped for such a long period of time, to incorporate her back into it, that would definitely be entering nostalgia land and it doesn’t make any sense to do something like that. It would be inauthentic and kind of demeaning to us both.
We went through so much together. I could never say a bad word about her. We went through so much hardship together, and it’s really bittersweet thinking about it. But you know, it’s the past.
So, did being a New Yorker influence the kind of music that you’ve made? You’ve got these huge, overpowering gray landscapes that you’re painting with sound and then you look at New York–
You think they’re gray? I think they’re red.
Well, I could see red as well, but definitely monochromatic.
Are you kidding me? There’s a lot of nuance in there.
Oh, I’m not saying there’s no nuance. I just mean there’s an overpowering singularity that’s being expressed in every song.
Yeah, maybe so. When I lived in NYC in the early days, it was such an unlawful, fucked up place. You had permission to do whatever you wanted. Not necessarily lifestyle choices, but musically. It felt like “What the hell? It doesn’t matter. Just do what you want and make it happen.” Force it down people’s throats. [laughs]
New York was a really tough place then. Everybody was so competitive. A lot of people, younger people, don’t realize that in the 70s and early 80s it was really hard. But it was also very fertile, maybe for that reason.
So you don’t necessarily feel that the city’s ambient negativity was being filtered through the sounds you were making? I don’t know if I’m expressing the question correctly.
No, I know what you’re saying. I sort of bridle at the idea of Swans being negative. I think the overall intent–and certainly the effect on me, and hopefully a lot of the audience–was kind of uplifting and overwhelming in a certain way, even transforming and transcendent.
I agree, but when I think of the early to mid-period Swans stuff–and also having read The Consumer [Michael’s collection of short stories]–the dominant images are of joyless, mechanical sex, or empty transactions between hollow people…
A lot of the lyrics had to do with living in a consumerist society and what it ultimately boiled down to, you know? And the media inculcation of the consciousness, but I don’t know about the negativity and the brutality. You know, I’m sure all that’s there, but it’s not something I really occupy myself thinking about.
You seem like a cheerful guy.
Oh you know, I’m complicated but I enjoy life. It’s a mystery. I’m privileged to exist.
How old are you?
I’m 56.
Really? Wow, you’re older than Gibby Haynes.
I’m older than God.
I’m 36. Probably a good half of the audience that you’re going to be playing to in the next couple of months are going to be about my age or younger.
More than half, for sure. When I’ve played with Angels of Light it’s been mostly younger people. I like that, I think it’s great. I think it would be truly awful if I were to go out and it was just a bunch of old geezers hoping to relive the past, you know?
There will be that element too, I’m sure.
Maybe somewhat. But you know, like I said, Angels of Light never drew huge audiences, and most of the audiences they did draw were younger people. When they’d come up to me afterward they’d also be very conversant in the work of Swans. So that’s really pleasing that over so much time the audience actually seems to have grown for Swans. It’s encouraging, you know? I just hope I get through it all before I die. ARTIE PHILIE/Viceland.com 9/24

With the first new Swans album in 14 years, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky (Young God), vocalist/guitarist/producer/songwriter Michael Gira is showing how a reunion is properly handled. You don’t just go out there and trot out the greatest hits. You don’t make it a blatant cash-grab. You create something. You reenter a headspace, make a new record, and give your fans a new context for understanding how you’ve grown and progressed since the last go around. Most importantly, you don’t try to remake what you’ve already done. Gira, who’s spent his post-Swans years developing the apocalyptic-folk strains of Angels of Light, reignites Swans with the vigor of a new band already established in its approach, vehement in its creativity and positively crushing in its sonics.
Joining him in the endeavor are former Swans guitarists Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn, as well as a host of personalities from various Swans and Angels of Light tours and albums, including drummer/percussionists Phil Puleo and Thor Harris and bassist Chris Pravdica. Conspicuously absent is Jarboe. Gira’s songwriting is center, as ever, and several of the My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky cuts could be heard on the precursor limited acoustic record I am Not Insane (also Young God), which was released in order to finance the recording of this new album. Here, though, the tracks are fleshed out with sundry noises and percussive twists and very much “plugged in,” opener “No Words/No Thoughts” tackling a godless universe with all the crushing weight that implication has for mortality. At over nine minutes, the song undulates rhythmically, reeling back and unleashing a growing barrage of new elements one after another until cutting to Gira’s vocals so the effect can be even greater when the music starts again.
So this new incarnation of Swans isn’t afraid to be heavy, but there’s more to their sound than slow builds and crashes. Anyone wondering why Swans had such an influence over the generation of acts that followed need look no further than tracks like “Reeling the Liars In” or the even-more sinister “Jim,” which evoke dark atmospheres that’s largely to Gira’s desolate-sounding vocals. In “Jim” especially, Gira’s vocal cadence shows what players like Steve Von Till and Scott Kelly of Neurosis were able to glean from Swans’ original run and put in the context of their own work. One could say the same for “My Birth,” on which every snare hit feels like a gut-punch in an insistent rhythm the likes of which Godflesh based most of its tenure on. Despite a number of jumps in aesthetic, from “Reeling the Liars In,” which but for the personnel involved probably could have been an Angels of Light song and no one would have batted an eye, to “Jim,” to “My Birth,” and so on, Gira is what ties the album together.
As such, it should come as no surprise to those familiar with Swans past work that Gira takes a step aside for “You Fucking People Make Me Sick,” letting folker Devendra Banhart handle the front-end of a call-and-response duet with his three-year-old daughter, Saoirse Gira. And all the while the sweet chorus of “I love you/I need you,” is playing out, the title has you thinking there’s a turn coming, but it’s no less satisfying when, after the line, “Now give me what is mine,” the music turns into cacophonous noise, violent sounds like horror’s ascent. The switch off is evidence that much like its cumbersome title, the music of My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky demands the full attention of anyone bold enough to engage it. Both “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” and the once-again Gira-led “Inside Madeline,” which of all the tracks on the record follows the guitar most a manner that might be called “traditional,” show a confluence of sides for Swans; the atmospheric weight and the tonal aggression. At 6:37, “Inside Madeline” is the second longest track behind the opener, and though like the song before it, it also comes in movements, the twisted waltz on which it concludes is one of My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky’s most satisfying sections.
“Eden Prison” could have been the song that spawned the entire post-metal genre. It is perhaps the album’s hardest-hitting song, with Gira’s vocal out front once again laying out the lyrical dichotomy between religious-prescribed paradise and death or destruction as the angular interplay of guitar takes swipes at the human sense of humanity. Where else could it lead but huge crashes and ringing notes? Thinking about hearing this song come out of the P.A. system at next year’s Roadburn festival in The Netherlands makes me want to blush. “Gosh, that’s heavy,” and so forth. Even better is when the song ends and starts again.
My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky ends with “Little Mouth,” a brooding Americana afterthought for an album that’s already trounced your psyche and made short work of expectation and prejudice as to what it might or might not have been. Swans are back — that’s the headline — but if you go into this album thinking it’s 1985 again, you’re going to get the disappointment you deserve. Like I said above, this is not a rehash or attempt to capitalize on what the band was more than two decades ago, but instead, a visceral reinventing of Gira’s creative personality today. What’s even more striking than the material of the record is how comfortable Gira seems back in his role in Swans after so long focused on different goals with Angels of Light. His performance here is at his best, and there are times where it sounds like he’s pulling the string to unravel the universe, but although elements of Swans’ past show up, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky is a new challenge entirely. JJ Koczan/ TheObelisk.net 9/23

It’s not a reunion but rather a continuation onto a slightly different path that finds us rewarded with the first
Swans studio album in 14 years, one that balances delicate psychedelics with crust-splitting noise nearly perfectly. The influential Michael Gira-led post-rock experimentalists last visited on 1996’s double-album “Soundtracks for the Blind,” and while some of the sonic elements have changed (and ghostly siren Jarboe did not return), the anger, pessimism, and tumultuous emotion remain in abundance.
The eight cuts, naturally, are quite challenging and likely will be polarizing. After a funeral-doom-nodding opener “No Words/No Thoughts,” the band melts into the trancy freak folk and frothing at the mouth of “Reeling the Liars In” and the noisy homage to no-wave pioneer J.G. Thirlwell “Jim,” where Gira is at his baritone best. “Eden Prison” is the most straight-forward cut here, with Gira sounding like an even darker Nick Cave; while “You F***ing People Make Me Sick” is a quietly destructive curveball with Devendra Banhart and Gira’s 3-year-old daughter on vocals. Vicious, cataclysmic and terrifying are terms typically reserved for metal bands, but they fit on a late-career entry by a band that’ll never bow to style, fashion,expectations or others’ discomfort. Brian Krasman/Mckeesport Daily News 9/18

I probably speak for the majority when I say waiting is no fun, especially when it comes to a new album. Case in point the Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, an album which we’ve been waiting on for a good 13 years now.
When that glorious release date does arrive at last, however, it of course falls in to one of two definitive categories: The totally worth it and then the totally not worth it. In case you’re wondering, when Stereogum today debuted “Eden Prison”, the first song from My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, we most definitely lobbed it into that first category.
Named after a prison in New Zealand (of which lead singer Michael Gira was unaware), the song, the band’s first offering since 1997, would make you feel right at home in any clanker: lots of menacing instrumentation and Gira’s post-rock, industrial-strength voice barking out orders. And at six minutes long, expect it to get drilled into your skull.
In an interview with TheQuietus.com, Gira said the song “wrote itself. I don’t know where the words come from, except that they extrapolate upon some sordid and soiled childhood memories.” No matter the source material, Gira said this one in particular could be a track that could have an interesting live interpretation.
“I’m looking forward to playing this song live,” Gira said. “Inevitable, the middle section will be extended to 20 minutes until the last drop of blood and light is strangled out of its body.”Chris Coplan/ConsequenceOfSound.com 7/30

Following a long and successful run as the leader of Angels of Light, in addition to helping build his label Young God Records into one of the most daring, versatile indies in America today, Michael Gira makes the surprising move of resurrecting his legendary NYC no-wave outfit Swans after over 14 years. But rather than completely harking back to the chaotic roar of the group’s brutal heyday, the illuminating My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (released September 21), finds Gira bringing the best elements of both his groups to these eight harrowing songs that hang between the merciless post-industrial rumble of such Swans classics as Greed and Children of God and the dark, pastoral beauty of his finest moments with Angels of Light to create, simply put, the finest recording of his career. (RH)Ron Hart/DirtyImpound.com 10/27

Anyone who worried Swans weren't going to be able to wreck shit on their reunion album just got served: Stereogum has a stream of "Eden Prison" a punishing, lacerating and noisy song that builds to a brutal conclusion. Michael Gira and company still have it, folks. Which bodes well for My Gather Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, the band's comeback album Andrew Winistorfer/Prefixmag.com 7/30
Michael Gira’s seminal New York band, resurrected after slightly more than a decade, offers a fresh vision of industrial-folk music with cryptic sounds, brooding grooves and titanic climaxes on its forthcoming album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, due September 21 on Gira’s Young God label. Jordan Maimone/Time Out NYC 8/26

If there's one band from the past decade that we've always been meaning to purposely discover...it is The Swans. For whatever reason, this highly influential band passed underneath our radar in their heyday...and even now scoring their CDs for nothing can be quite a challenge. Probably because--unlike most modern artists--there is still a real demand for the music. Even though we don't have a thorough knowledge of the Swans...we are very familiar with Michael Gira's projects over the past few years (his Angels of Light band and his incredible Young God Records label). After five Angels of Lights albums Gira decided to resurrect The Swans...making it a point to inform listeners that "This is not a reunion. It's not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past." (Gira is obviously a man of integrity.) My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky presents wonderfully inventive and imaginative compositions. The album begins with the intense and lengthy "No Words/No Thoughts"...and then proceeds to dabble in all kinds of styles and sounds as Gira and company challenge their listeners to follow along with them in 2010. Joining Michael on this album are Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica, and Thor Harris (along with some additional guest artists). Warning: This is not "easy music." This is exhilarating and sometimes difficult progressive music that cannot and should not be ignored. TOP PICK. After hearing this we'll be making it a point to collect the band's entire back catalog...Don Seven/Babysue.com 8/31

For being little more than a blip in rock music’s ever-developing history, the impact of No Wave’s short and abrasive smear across New York’s art scene is a continued and seminal presence heard in many of today’s more inspiring and important bands. As nonsensical and unlistenable as much of it was/is, No Wave warranted Brian Eno’s attention, and has since propagated bands like Liars, These Are Powers and Mi Ami to name a few, noise constructivists that envision No Wave’s boundlessness of sound as opportunity to net aural complaint, or simply blow minds.
As Michael Gira’s Swans have reemerged after 13 years of inactivity, it makes perfect sense that he would want to pursue the opportunities this band has historically offered. Though with My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, he seems less interested in being unlistenable, and more interested in utilizing its experimental base as a way to bolster a more theatrically composed concept.
Sound lame? It isn’t. Gira has stated that this new album isn’t a reunion record or some bid for nostalgia. Instead, the album is an evolutionary idea that functions under a familiar name and he’s enlisted the aid of many of his past/current collaborators from old Swans line-ups and his newer Angels Of Light, plus Devandra Banhart, Shearwater’s Thor Harris, Bill Reiflin and Mecury Rev’s Grasshopper, (though Jarboe is interestingly absent). As No Wave’s longest surviving offspring, Swans have a history of crafting some very severe odes to industrially charged sound pollutant and esoteric noise-based self-indulgence, carrying on a tradition of non-conforming vision relevant to late 70s NYC. Part mind numbing, part infuriating, part stimulating and always worth discussion, Swans remain a significant force in underground and independent music and this new album sees the No Wave merge with the compositionally avant-garde.
I may paint this album as bigger and bolder than it actually is, but as Liars’ Sisterworld album bends into a modernist vision of Los Angeles seen through Brett Easton Ellis’ complacency and Travis Bickle’s homicidal fantasy, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky seems to build onto something similarly thematic. This is only my opinion, of course, as one album has nothing to do with the other, but as Liars continue to perpetuate No Wave’s quintessential penchant for noise, a characteristic Gira helped create, Swans' move toward something in the vein of Sisterworld or Drum’s Not Dead, something epic that only works as a whole. Supporting this “epic” claim, the album opens with nine minutes and twenty-four seconds of bells and operatic clash with No Words/No Thoughts.
As openers go, No Words/No Thoughts begs some patience, albeit with no apologies asked. You sort of know whether or not you’re going to like the album before Gira’s voice appears, which happens once the music shifts into a pulsing march. Shrieking piano keys and rhythmic back-and-forth close out the song before the country folk-flavored Reeling the Liars In plays with the "Spaghetti Western" sunset. And, then the carnival-ish Jim plays like an uprising, its subtle and singular bass line growing and growing as voices and instruments comingle. From then My Birth cycles along with one syncopated rhythmic foundation, operatic and intensified, more of an ornate take on trance music, or even jazz fusion.
Gira relies heavily on these orchestrated loops; songs like Eden Prison and the malevolent build up of Inside Madeline constructed with complex intensification. Inside Madeline, in particular, transitions into something sort of beautiful: Spanish guitar and balladry following the introduction’s generated dread.
But, because the cycled compositions are so intricate, they never feel monotonous. Even with Eden Prison’s rambunctious spin, you’re treated to both the song’s strength and its ambition. The benefit of the loop is that it only sounds simple, but once you delve deeper (headphones are a must) the artistic merit appreciates.
You Fucking People Make Me Sick features Gira’s three-year old daughter aiding in sung repetitions. The song itself doesn’t feature any verbalized profanity, though it abruptly bursts into kneaded piano keys and explosions of brass and a storm of instrumentation, while not nausea-inducing, still conjures nervousness and tension. The little girl matches her father’s desperate sorrow, though with the honest inflection of a child trying to sing. Little Mouth appropriately ends the album in a wave of angelic vocal and acoustic folk, which mutates into dissonant rockabilly just before Gira finishes the song a cappella.
Independent labels, record stores and music are built on the ideals of artistic freedom, creative growth and the notion that music enthusiasts will lend their support. It could be I’m not frequenting the correct avenues, or that I’m unaware of composed music like this existing in plentitude, but the independent and esoteric composer, this idea of the maverick, though exalted, artist, doesn’t seem to warrant the attention it should. Granted you have individuals like Mike Patton, John Zorn, Philip Glass, Diamanda Galás or the late Joe Zawinul, Sun Ra and Frank Zappa to name a few, musicians that want(ed) to challenge listeners by expanding on the concepts of modern music in all its era-defining permutations. But, albums like My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky remarks on the lack of compositional madmen gaining notoriety these days and it could have to do with musical awakenings capturing fewer imaginations in our reality of downloaded music and our collective delirium perpetuated by too much access to too much information.
Gira, through his many years as a champion of alienating force, has come up with something pretty amazing. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is an advance for Swans, and Gira comes across as less of an eccentric noise-generator, and more of a presence that requires our attention. No Wave has transcended its yearlong dominance in a citywide art scene, and become the basis for high art in a revivalist musical climate. Sean Caldwell/NoRipChord.com 9/21

Despite having declared the group permanently dead in the past, Michael Girl insists that Swans's new album is not a reunion. His discomfort with that term seems significant, characteristic both of a continuous refusal to conform to convention and a savvy understanding of what the word suggests. Reunions have a connotation of creative death, the distillation of a band's extant image reanimated into a shade of its former self. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky submits to no such relaxed idleness. It earns the right to avoid the term "reunion," picking up right where the band left off.
This isn't surprising. Considering how restless and noncommercial Swans remained over their first 15 years of existence, it's hard to imagine how Gira could easily sum that up, even if he wanted. The band does make concessions, namely to their prevailing doom-and-gloom image, evoked in the tortured group shot that graces its jewel case: weathered faces arrayed in some cruel parody of the Brady Bunch opening credit sequence.
Darkness is still in great supply throughout these eight long songs. This is fitting, as a bleak worldview has remained the group's most definable quality across numerous permutations, from the untrammeled brutality of early work like Filth and Cop, still some of the harshest music ever recorded, to the sprawling grotesqueness of Songs for the Blind.
Were the album all black-hearted nihilism, it would be pointless, the kind of retread that Gira seems so intent on avoiding. The nearly 10-minute opener "No Words/No Thoughts" silences this concern, at once fierce and shifting and melodic. Many of these songs were sketched out on Gira's solo I Am Not Insane from earlier this year, an attempt to raise interest that presented them in prenatal form. Here they grow to an impressive size, deepened and shaded by rich instrumentation. The material is markedly different from Gira's Angels of Light project, with which he's been making music for the last 12 years. There his focus is on transcendence, with soaring melodies and vocals that skew decidedly toward hope.
Swans, however, thrives on the relentlessly grim investigation of darkness, which Gira plumbs as dexterously and grandly as Cormac Mcarthy writes about violence. It's hard to think of anyone who would have the mettle to have Devendra Banhart duet with their five-year-old daughter on a track called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick," much less get away with it. It's this kind of inspired, risky brilliance that informs My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, signaling the sharp return of a group that would like you pretend they never left.
Jesse Cataldo/Slantmagazine.com 9/20

In a recent New York Times interview, Swans lead singer Michael Gira described the failings of hardcore music: "It was just a way for people to belong. And that's the last thing I think people should do."

It's that sort of nihilism that embodies the Swans' pathos. The constant driving, occasionally pummeling, force of their songs can be abusive to some, but there is a beauty to their abuse. For those willing to suffer a little, they return the sublime. The band had been disbanded for over ten years until this most recent album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, having gone through multiple iterations of brutal industrial to dark folk in the years before. The new album returns as a summation of all those variations gone by. It fluctuates from the machine-like pounding rhythms of Eden Prison to experimental piano discordance, ringing church bells, and quiet, child-like melodies. Gira's lyrics range from bleak optimism to a potent, religious symbolism where all characters are gods and everything is drenched in meaning.

In a sense, their music represents a brutish classical music. It's not the loud arrogance and directionless rebellion of punk but a focused, emotional composition. Llewellyn Hinkes Jones/ TheAtlantic.com 10/1


The arrival of the new Swans record is an event filled with excitement and reservation. The Swans are not just a band; they are a musical force, a power that challenges the mind and soul. After such a long absence, and with a glaring lack of Jarboe involvement, would the new Swans record, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, measure up? How could it really? In what way could Swans mastermind Gira, and his cohorts, repeat the lightening in a bottle they’d captured for so many years. The answer is simple, deceptively simple - they just don’t.

My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky is not an attempt to reactive Swans but more an act of writing the next chapter in their existence. Gira is not one to pander to his audience and he’s smart enough to realize that mimicking older Swans material would result in this being some kind of nostalgia trip, as opposed to something original with its own life.

These songs take into account all that Gira has learned since the end of Swans with Angels Of Light, Akron/Family and his other projects. Swans are reborn in the light of new priorities and new adventures in sound. It’s the best of all that Gira has done, coupled with some amazing musicians, and pushed through a filter of all the places Swans has been creatively.

The album opens with “No Words/No Thoughts”, a track whose first half is a movement of different sounds. It operates more like an overture, introducing the album and setting us up for what’s to come. The overture ends with the start of bells, drums, noises and Gira’s voice singing “See That Man”. From there it erupts into a droning movement before calming back down again. It includes all the musical movements of the record in one song.

No band does more with less than the Swans. The ringing of the first song is barely over when the slow crawl of the acoustic “Reeling The Liars In” unfolds. What’s so moving here is how Gira’s voice is center to the piece. He understands that you can create scary moods and settings simply by how you apply lower vocal tones over strings.

The same can be said for “Jim”, which maintains a slower and creepier pace but relies more on percussion and noise than acoustic guitars. Swans plays with the identity of music by rewriting what we expect from certain things. We’ve all been lulled into a sense of security by bands that do what’s expected. Swans slaps us right out of that by taking what’s been done and turning it on its ear.

For those worried that My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky lacks the Swans harsh edges, fear not, they’re all in there. Gira doesn’t attack it the same way as before but manages to maintain them along with this new musical approach. “My Birth” is a great example of the two forms meeting, as is “Eden Prison”. These songs remind us that Gira hasn’t forgotten where Swans come from; he’s just moved on and brought those experiences to the new record.

One of the most surprising tracks on the album is “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. First of all it’s not Gira singing but singer/songwriter Dvondra Bernhardt doing an impressive interpretation of Gira. Dvondra usually has almost a silly tone to what he does so it’s unsettling to hear him sing this way. Adding to the feeling of impending doom is the sweet sounds of Gira’s daughter, Saoirse, who sings playfully behind Dvandra’s vocals that drip with disgust and bitterness. Midway through the song it changes and becomes a noisy tune involving a horn and sounding like the Earth throwing up. The power involved here is truly stunning.

I’m sure there are those who will balk at My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, saying it isn’t Swans, it’s an attempt to cash in, and so forth. Those people just don’t get it and they never have. Swans have always been a band that moves on to the next musical thing they need to do. Even the lack of singer Jarboe, while missed, makes sense. There’s a massive difference in what she’s doing and what Swans is doing. Combining the two now would have seemed more like a forced reunion than a natural musical progression. My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky is an art piece, not just a record. A reminder that music is meant to express human emotions and help bleed our poisons out before the consume us. Anything else is simply filler. Iann Robinson/CraveOnline.com 9/27

Let's (sadly) dispel a myth: in Swans' salad days, the New Yorkers might have been a repulsively loud band, but their predilection for brain-thumping volume did not cause audience members to vomit.
"That's a bunch of shit," claims Michael Gira, Swans' guitarist/vocalist/mastermind. It was likely around 1983 — the year the noise/post-punk act shot out their debut LP, Filth — that rumors of audience retching began drifting around. Gira attributes the "preposterous" detail to an overzealous member of the British press. He does, however, vouch for another story: audience members would exit Swans concerts in droves, leaving two, maybe three persons in the audience by show's end. "It was a real antagonistic relationship. It's not like we were attacking the audience, but the level of commitment we applied to what we were doing was met with indifference or derision." A dry chuckle. "You either have to give up or redouble your determination."
It's surprising that Swans — who play the Middle East September 30 — survived as long as they did. From the outset, they seemed to be headed toward early combustion. Their plodding, lurching clatter sounded as if it came from repurposed construction equipment, and the way Gira explored cheerless topics — suicide, social conflict, trauma, destitution — made it seem likely the world would eat itself before this soothsayer/pariah was through with his doomsday prophecies. He meant for those uncomfortable decibel levels to "destroy my body," but the contemptuous crowds had him pushing limits. "When you're young, you're both immortal and there is no future."
Although Swans' adolescence was thrilling, their æsthetic would grow to encompass more than noise. They began testing acoustics on 1986's Holy Money; they recorded a wealth of live albums, and by 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, they were downright artsy. When the members parted ways in 1997, a live album bore the bombastic title Swans Are Dead. The obit has since been nullified, since Gira recently resurrected the band. This month's release of My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (Young God) marks the first Swans release in more than 10 years.
My Father attests how much the project has changed since Filth. Although they still examine moral blight, the band dissect rather than steamroll, using distortion only when necessary. Gira's voice once raged; now, it's a stoic thing concerned with precision. In the tumbling, empty-sky ballad "Reeling the Liars In," Gira vivisects "the liars" by "removing their face, collecting their skin" and "burning them in a pile." It's a slow, cruel nightmare, but he finds humor in the concept. And he tells me how bandmate Thor Harris interpreted the song: "It's like we're all a bunch of cowboys, sitting around the campfire late at night, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar. Thor says, 'Mike, grab one of them liars and throw another on the pile.' " "Reeling" is hardly My Father's only vicious missive — check out "You Fucking People Make Me Sick."
Still, there are moments when it seems Gira might be softening with age. He notes that he's become more positive over the years (though he's not certain why). And in explaining why he remained committed to Swans when listeners turned away, he avers, "It's important to keep in mind how short this existence is, and how crucial it is to act as if every day was your last." Reyan Ali/Boston Pheonix 9/28

Last night, Michael Gira's newly revived noise/no wave/goth outfit Swans delivered a show at the Black Cat that more than made up for the group's 13-year hiatus: It was as dark and relentless as Swans' recorded output, and it certainly lived up to the anticipation that comes from all the weirdo lore that surrounds this band.
But most of all, the show was just uncomfortable. It was a good kind of discomfort — a journey through darkness to catharsis — but it was unsettling nonetheless.
Most of that discomfort came from Gira himself. The six-piece outfit rumbled through about ten minutes of an ominous, accelerating noise to start the show — an eternity of anticipation — but before Gira uttered a single syllable, he slapped himself in the face. Repeatedly. It was a bizarre act of self-flagellation, but it fit with Gira's lyrical themes of sin, corruption and failure.
Gira's every word added to the unsettling feel: his bellows of "Praise God! Praise the Lord!" might have been ironic or sarcastic— or even serious; it was impossible to tell — while later, his repeated roar of "kill the child!" disintegrated into a syllable that sounded like "chay! chay! chay! chay!"
Even wordless, Gira could incite uneasiness. In a song early in Swans' 90-minute set, he began grunting over the controlled cacophony behind him. "Unh. Unh. Unh." It was guttural and robotic— and he took it to an extreme, grunting over and over again until it ceased to be clear whether he was in agony or ecstasy. "Unh. Unh. Unh." Over. And. Over. And. Over.
Gira even added a layer of physical discomfort, with a request that the air conditioning be turned off in the concert hall. The stale, sweaty air wasn't as unpleasant as it might've been in the heart of summer, but it did add a layer of tension in the club.
That request certainly wasn't for sonic reasons: there's no way that the hum of an A/C unit could have been heard over the band's din. To the group's credit, the sound was aggressive and abrasive without being deafeningly loud. Even still, the audience could all feel the rumbling deep in our guts; not only does Swans' noise sound like the end of the world, it feels like it too. At one point, Gira and his band stretched their music to a tempo so slow that the anticipation of the downbeat felt like Chinese water torture.
To the uninitiated, this all may sound like a horrendously unpleasant experience. But the one thing that Gira does better than create discomfort, though, is to make all that pain somehow sound beautiful. That he can do so with such simple song structures— usually just one or two chords, repeated over and over again— is even more impressive.
Even amidst all the darkness, Gira still has a sense of humor. After one particularly dark tune, he couldn't hide an ear-to-ear grin. "That's a pop song," he said. If that's Gira's definition of pop, only time will tell where he'll take Swans next. Catherine Lewis/expressnightout.com/ 9/30

About 9 o'clock Tuesday night, the pummeling noise-rock band Swans took the stage of the Trocadero. About 9:10, they played their second chord. In between, Michael Gira, the band's only constant member, and five cohorts pounded rhythmically at a single note, repeating it three, five, 10 times in a coherent but unplaceable pattern.
At one time, Swans, whose roots lie in the same New York subculture that spawned Sonic Youth (whose Thurston Moore was an early Swan), were known less for their music than for the volume at which they played it. They were so loud that many fled the room, while others fought a sick feeling in the pits of their stomachs.
Gira, 56, disbanded Swans in 1997 after a 15-year run, citing his fatigue with their endurance-test rep. But after more than a decade leading the relatively docile Angels of Light and playing shows with (horrors!) only an acoustic guitar, Gira announced earlier this year that Swans would return, although he insists that it is not a reunion but a continuation.
Tuesday's 75-minute tour-opening show, the same day as the release of the new Swans album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, never strayed too far from its opening salvo, appropriately titled "No Words / No Thoughts." But the endless repetition was trancelike rather than monotonous, a ceaseless onslaught that made the room vibrate like a tuning fork.
Gira's songs are brutalist rather than primitive, with just enough variation built in to let you catch your breath but not enough to let the spell dissipate. On "Your Property," drummer Thor Harris quickened the pace with a sixteenth-note skitter that came close to swing. The wave broke during "Sex, God, Sex," but only long enough for Gira to "Praise the Lord, Jesus Christ" with an anguish that made salvation seem like the lesser of two evils.
In the end, though, the feeling was less one of assault than of cleansing, as if the audience had been scoured clean. Gira's thoughts may be ugly, but the sound was oddly beautiful. Sam Adams/Philadelphia Inquirer 9/30

“This is not a reunion. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act,” proclaims Michael Gira regarding his decision to awaken Swans from their 13 year slumber. Formed in 1982, the group outlived the intentionally ephemeral no wave scene they are normally classified under, releasing 19 studio and live albums before 1998’s Swans Are Dead. Through gruesomely loud (concertgoers have reportedly vomited from the punishing decibel levels) and grinding dirges, they plunged headfirst and fearless into the darkest regions of the human experience: violence, Bataillean sexual acts, madness, misanthropy. Their new album, which is every bit as ferocious and singular as their past work, validates Gira’s proclamations. Swans are not dead. Elliott Sharp/ philadelphiaweekly.com 09/28

Imagine being trapped inside a tiny unit at a self-storage building that is on fire. You are trapped inside this 5×8 corrugated metal coffin and it is filling with smoke. Imagine yourself panicking, pounding on the walls, walls that keep getting hotter and hotter. You are roasting. Your sweat stings your eyes and soaks through your clothes. Now hear your own cries for help bouncing off of the burning walls, listen as the echoes turn into screams. Welcome to the existential terror that is seeing SWANS in concert.
Michael Gira, the spiritual leader of the group, has pulled together a new aural torture squad under the SWANS moniker after nearly 13 years of inactivity. SWANS are legends of the New York, post-No Wave, noise-rock scene. Gira used the group to explore a broad range of psychological torment music during their original run from ‘82 to ‘97. Rumors had been circulating the web for about a year that Gira was putting together a new SWANS line-up and album. By the Spring, we had confirmation in the form of some demo recordings appearing on his various websites. Last month SWANS released a very strong new album entitled “My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky”. On Wednesday night, at the Black Cat, Michael Gira and his SWANS performed their second concert of the 2010 reactivation tour. It was an experiment in terror that the crowd of devout fans and the sonically curious happily subjected themselves too.
I knew I was in for something different when I reached the top of the stairs at the Black Cat. The double doors had signs hanging on them that informed “At the request of the artist the air conditioner upstairs has been turned off.” I knew that SWANS were infamous for making shows so confrontational and uncomfortable that they had been known to drive people out of the venues before they were even finished. These signs were my first indication of Gira’s reach touching the audience before his band even took the stage.
Inside the Black Cat, there was a long line of people waiting to purchase SWANS merchandise. I scanned the merch table and Gira had brought an entire catalog of SWANS special editions and collections. Each had in-depth sonic descriptions printed out next to them. As I read each note describing the hardest most abrasive noise-love ever recorded my anticipation for the show ahead loomed large. I am a huge fan of intense, challenging music and over the years, tales of SWANS concerts have taken on near-mythic proportions. Based on these stories I have collected over the years and the strength of “My Father…” I was fairly confident that this concert was going to be a
But I also had some element of doubt. SWANS later material delved into spooky acoustics and dark “Americana” that I personally would not expect to enjoy in concert. With DC’s date being just the second of the tour, there was little information about what material Gira would be mining here. SWANS catalog is so large that he could be playing any number of styles. These worries were erased and my positive suspicions were confirmed during SWANS opening number.
A droning loop of noise over an empty stage. Out steps a dead-ringer for Marvel Comic’s “The Mighty Thor” who begins to bang on tubular bells. The drone continues while the bells emit a gothic jangle. Then the rest of the band file onto the stage. Gira and three other older-looking bad-asses take position with their guitars (including a horizontal steel guitar) and bass. The drummer sets up behind his kit. Soon each SWAN is using their instrument to either harmonize and amplify the drone or play against it in dissonance. This intro grinds along, getting louder and louder as it goes.
Ridiculous volume is a part of every SWANS tale I have every heard and the opening salvo of Wednesday’s show quickly reached ear-hazard levels. My Bloody Valentine end every show with an extended noise jam that rips out from the guts of their song ‘You Made Me Realize’; this is the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life and it comes almost as a noise therapy after a full set of MBV’s beautifully loud music. Here SWANS were opening their show in a similar sonic fashion but it had an entirely different effect. Their noise was oppressive, and rather than having MBV’s oddly soothing effect, it only served to assault you. By the end of their first song, you are either on board with SWANS or you are going to have a very long night. Personally I was able to find the groove within their throbbing noise and by the end of the first song I was loving it.
Any SWANS fans that had similar concerns about what material was being covered on this tour, fear not. Gira mined some choice tracks from SWANS most nihilistic period. SWANS performed amped up versions of just about the entire new album which melded perfectly with the back catalog selections. There were several extended intros tacked onto songs and some noise transition pieces that completely blew my mind. Immediately after one of these transitory jams I completely lost my cool and sent a text to my friend who skipped the show “OMFG SWAAAAANS. Soooo powerful. I am afraid. They make post-metal finales look like girl scouts.” Which is true. Their mid-show guitar battle was so loud, dense, and abrasive that it was like listening to Justin K. Broadkick on PCP repeatedly punching through a cop car windshield while being hit in the back with shotgun blasts.
Michael Gira is one fucked up guy. His stage presence is akin to Hannibal Lecter roaming around his cell. Gira appeared calm for large portions of the show, singing and playing his guitar normally. He occasionally waved his hands along with the music. Sometime directing the band, others just because he was really getting into it. But beneath that calm exterior, it was obvious that a devious mind was at work, constantly calculating when and how to escape to bite a guard’s or in this case the audience’s face off. Gira channeled some deep demons during this set; it is not everyday you see a singer repeatedly smacking himself in the face. His vocal performance really soared on the older songs. Especially on ‘Sex God Sex’ and ‘I Crawled’. The performance of the latter was Gira at his most disturbing; hugging his guitar close to his chest, face twisting in agony with each word, as he screamed on and on and on about weakness and begged to be choked.
Wednesday night’s show was a flawlessly performed combat tour. The band inflicted heavy losses on the audience; the Black Cat was nearly sold out, but by set’s end nearly a third of the crowd had retreated to safety. For those of us who stayed, the die hards and the insane, the concert could not have been better. It was actually quite amazing how well the new material worked seamlessly next to some of Gira’s finest original works. This is a testament to the excellent song-writing that exists beneath all of the noise. Even with SWANS monolithic sounds hammering my ear drums for the entire show, I walked away from the set with a renewed or perhaps newly found perspective on Michael Gira as an artist. One has to see SWANS live to fully understand; from making the room uncomfortably hot, to assaulting the audience with noise, all the way down to his fractured psyche vocals delivering his masochistic doom poetry; Michael Gira is a demented genius. Michael Darpino/WeLoveDC.com 10/1

Five months after announcing he would be reforming Swans, Michael Gira will lead his seminal post-rock/industrial outfit on its first US tour in over 10 years. Gira disbanded the legendary noise dealers in 1997, citing his distaste with the state of music and the music industry, so you can expect these tickets to be snapped up by his hordes of hungry fans worldwide.
On the Swans resurrection, Gira, who has never been known for his sense of humor, sternly explains that this is not your typical cash-grab comeback tour (are you listening Don Henley?!?!?).
THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After five Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that. I’ll be using what I learned in the last several years to inform the way this new material develops, while carrying forward from where Swans left off with its final album Soundtracks For The Blind, and in particular, Swans Are Dead. If you have expectations about how Swans should be, that’s your business, but it would be a disservice to both of us if I were to make music with your needs in mind, and the music would certainly suffer as a result. In any event, I certainly never thought this day would arrive, but it’s inevitable, it’s here, it’s fate, so I’m succumbing to it. 

Helping me in this quest are the fantastic musicians and friends listed below. I’ll enter the studio with the songs, we’ll hash them out together, someone will come up with something unexpected, then that will lead to new ideas, the song will take a different trajectory, and the material will grow on its own. This is what I’m hoping, anyway.
Is Gira’s (not so) merry band of malcontents coming to your town? We’ve got tour dates after the jump. Daniel Alvarez/Crawdaddy.com 5/12

In January I posted about Swans’ plans to reform, record, and tour. At the time, I had no idea I’d be helping to organize their biggest ever show in New York City. It’s an honor — Swans’ music/thought exerted a huge influence on me at a crucial time and the band’s remained one of my all-time favorites. I put together an acoustic M. Gira show at Housing Works a couple of years ago, but this is a different monster: Haunting The Chapel’s teamed up with the Blackened Music Series (we did Alcest at the Studio) and Issue Project Room to present Swans’ first show in NYC in more than a decade. It takes place 10/8 at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (317 Clermont Ave). It will be very loud. Michael Gira handpicked Baby Dee to open. Her performance will be keyboards accompanied by a cello. Tickets go on sale Friday (5/14) at 10AM EST. We have info on that and the rest of the tour dates. Brandon Stosuy/Stereogum.com 5/10

Back in January, Michael Gira announced that he would reform Swans, the pioneering New York postpunk/industrial band he led from the early 80s until their 1997 breakup. The newly reconstituted Swans are at work on a new album, which Gira is currently mixing. And now, he's announced the first round of dates for the new Swans.
In September and October, the new-look Swans (which feature two original members, two later-period members, and two new guys) will hit a few North American venues, including a stop at Montreal's Pop Montreal festival, and the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, England. A post on Gira's Young God Records website promises that at the Supersonic show, "an assortment of dancing geeks, angry children, and fulminating politicians will adorn the stage...." Tom Breihan/Pitchfork.com 5/10

Hip '90s record-clerk favorite Swans has just announced it'll be hitting the road for the first time in 13 years this fall for nine shows—including an Oct. 5 stop at the Bottom Lounge—behind its first new album in 14 years. Though he's pressed on since 1999 as Angels Of Light with other collaborators, forlorn-sounding frontman Michael Gira says he had an anticlimactic moment of realization a few years ago during an Angels show where he said to himself, "You know, Michael, Swans wasn't so bad after all." Expect that same enthusiasm to shine through during the following shows: David Wolinsky avclub.com/chicago/ 5/11

Former Swans frontman Michael Gira took to the band's MySpace page on Saturday to announce that the pioneering New York postpunk band will reunite for a new album and "tour(s)". Thanks to Shane Lange for the tip.
The band, which Gira started in the early 80s, began as a particularly dark and noisy product of New York's clattering downtown art-punk scene. Their early records had tremendous, widespread influence across the underground rock spectrum, making an impact on indie, goth, industrial, and metal. Later on, the band's sound became subtler, taking on ideas from pop and modern classical. Swans broke up in 1997, and Gira went on to lead the more pastoral and folk-influenced (though still absolutely intense) Angels of Light.
According to Gira's MySpace announcement the new Swans lineup includes two original members, Gira and guitarist Norman Westberg, as well as guitarist Christoph Hahn and drummer Phil Puleo from later incarnations of the band. Flux Information Sciences' Chris Pravdica and Shearwater/Angels of Light member Thor Harris also join the new Swans. Gira also promises "many special guests".
Via his own Young God Records, Gira plans to release a limited edition CD/DVD package called I Am Not Insane, proceeds from which will "raise money for the swans recordings/offset the huge costs involved". The package will include two live shows on the DVD and a CD of rough versions of songs that may make the Swans reunion album. Gira is only making 1000 copies of I Am Not Insane, and he's handmaking all of them himself.
Gira posted one of those songs, a homemade acoustic demo of a track called "Jim", to the band's MySpace page. If you've been keeping up with the Angels of Light, it won't surprise you that Gira's elemental baritone is still in fine form. Gira also points out that the Angels of Light are now on hiatus so that he can concentrate on this Swans thing.
Click here to read Gira's announcement and here to stream "Jim". Tom Breihan /Pitchfork.com 1/11

As the post title over at MySpace reads "COMING SOON, NEW SWANS ALBUM AND TOUR(S)." And as close readers will also note, the seminal noise-rock crew's swansaredead MySpace page has been updated with a "Swans Are Not Dead" headline. This, of course, is extremely exciting news: Probably my favorite band to emerge from that early '80s NYC scene. When I spoke with M. Gira about all of this last week, he told me about the aesthetic feel for the new collection:
[The] approach will be "basically where Soundtracks For The Blind/Swans Are Dead left off, with influence of Angels of Light in there too. Probably pretty severe tho, according to my present mood..."
Gira recently added an acoustic solo demo of a song called "Jim" over at MySpace. It's a rough version of a song being considered for the album. One of many. He passed along a copy, so take a listen while you read up on more details surrounding the release of the first Swans studio album since 1996.
M. Gira/Swans - "Jim" (MP3)
The note via MySpace:
A CD of these acoustic versions, as well as a live (2 shows) dvd of m.gira will be for sale very soon as a hand made (by gira) package called I Am Not Insane (CD/DVD). This package -- in a limited edition of 1000 -- will be sold in order to raise money for the Swans recordings/offset the huge costs involved ... check back here or at and http://younggodrecords.com for ordering details and more information ... coming soon ... coming soon...
Principal players on the Swans album are (and there will be many special guests):
Michael Gira / gtr / voice / mendicant friar act (original swans)
Norman Westberg - Guitar (original swans)
Christophj Hahn - Guitar (mid period swans and most angels)
Phil Puleo - Drums, percussion, dulcimer etc etc (final swans tour and most angels)
Chris Pravdica - Bass and gadgets (flux information sciences / services/ gunga din)
Thor Harris, Drums, percussion, vibes, dulcimer, curios, etc etc... (angels, now also with shearwater)
Angels Of Light is temporarily on hold while gira pursues his "new" project...
If all goes well, look for an early Fall 2010 release. Tour info when we have it. In the meantime, keep watch at MySpace where you can sign up for a mailing list and remain in the loop regarding future Swans rumblings. Get some earplugs:Brandon Stosuy/Stereogum.com

Asked in a 2006 interview if he would ever consider reforming Swans, the band he led from their birth in the flux of New York's early 1980s no-wave scene to their dissolution in 1997, Michael Gira was unequivocal. "Absolutely not, never," he announced, flatly. "Dead and gone. I have more interesting things to do."
Call it a change in heart or a gap in the diary, but – as a new note on the band's posthumously created MySpace page puts it – "SWANS ARE NOT DEAD". In a blog posted on Saturday, Gira announced a reformed band featuring members of classic Swans lineups including guitarist Norman Westberg as well as musicians from Gira's current backing band, Angels of Light. A new, as yet untitled album is currently in the works.
Swans, if you've not had the pleasure, were one of the most fearsome and challenging of the groups to emerge from America's post-punk underground – a band next to which even the mangled-guitar dissonance of their close contemporaries Sonic Youth sounded tame. Early releases such as 1983's Filth and their 1984 EP Young God took repetition, abrasion and punk aggression to new extremes. Gira, a former teenage drifter versed in the writing of Jean Genet and the Marquis De Sade, spoke of "wanting to make a sound that completely overwhelmed me, or the listener … that filled me with joy". Not all listeners heard the joy in Swans, though – early live shows were said to reach such a volume and intensity that concertgoers were known to lose their pre-gig dinner.
Like the Velvet Underground 15 years before them, Swans were an affront to almost everyone of decent sensibilities, and were also remarkably influential – most visibly as a blueprint for later US industrial artists such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. As with the Velvets, though, Swans were capable of subtlety and even prettiness. Later albums such as 1987's Children of God added acoustic guitar, flute and cello, plus smouldering vocals from gothic chanteuse Jarboe – one notable absentee from this new reformed lineup. This sparkling cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart proved Swans even had a pop side (although Gira was later scathing of the cover, dismissing it as "inept bubblegum music" – you be the judge).
It's easy to be cynical about the motives of solo musicians getting the old band back together, but there's plenty of evidence that this reformation is motivated for reasons other than a big pay cheque. Save for a brief period during which Swans were signed to a major label in the late 1980s, Gira has always stayed well clear of the mainstream music industry, going so far as setting up his own independent label, Young God Records to issue all his music.
Before the new Swans record proper, Gira intends to drum up some funds with I Am Not Insane – a hand-made package of new Swans songs played acoustically, plus two DVDs of live Gira music. A taster, Jim, is up now at the MySpace page, so if you like what you hear and fancy the chance of hearing Swans classics such as Time Is Money (Bastard) and Raping a Slave played live again, it's time to reach into your pocket and dig deep. Louis Pattison/London Guardian 1/12

Seminal New York noise rockers Swans have announced via their MySpace that they are reforming, planning a tour and new album. Leader Michael Gira notes that sales of a new largely acoustic set, which will include two live DVDs and a CD and will be limited to 1000 copies, will be used to raise money for a new album and a new tour. If sales of said DVD/CD combo go well enough, the new Swans album should be out in late 2010, prefaced by a tour this summer. According to Gira it will be out very soon, and he should know, since he's hand-packaging them. So people, get buying. We need more Swans in our lives. [Stereogum]
Andrew Winistorfer/Prefixmag.com 1/13