PRESS » Michael Gira
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Freq Live Review | M. Gira Solo in France
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
Michael Gira/Ulan Bator (live at les Abattoirs) Bourgoin-Jallieu1 March 2014 Tonight’s show at les Abattoirs provides a chance forMichael Gira to share a stage with Ulan Bator, a band he worked with on the Ego:Echo album in 2000. The venue is an unusual one, sat on the corner of a roundabout on the outskirts of a small town on the road to Grenoble from Lyon. Taking place on one of the busy weekends in the sprawling school holidays (when it seems like the whole of France goes on co-ordinated trips to the Alps with subsequent lengthy tailbacks along the autoroutes into the mountains) means that – alongside the supposed distance from the city centre – that, for a Saturday night, the venue is unfortunately not very busy at all. Undaunted, Ulan Bator take the stage and commence a live soundtrack to Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel‘s Un Chien Andalou which matches the surrealism on screen with music which follows a similar symbolic trajectory into the depths of the human psyche. Opening with a hissing intake and exhalation of breath as Buñuel strops his razor under scudding moonlit clouds, the band crash in with full force and vigour as the infamous and still-disturbing eyeball-slicing scene flickers into goo-dripping view. It’s a cinematic tour de force which......
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Robert Barry Interview with Michael for the Basinski Series | The Quietus
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
A Place To Dream: Arcadia, The Kitchen & The History Of NY Lofts With William Basinski's Arcadia Series opening this week in London, Robert Barry speaks with Basinski, Michael Gira and Rhys Chatham to trace the rich history of New York's artist-run loft spaces and the pioneering music they fostered. "Since the high renaissance, society has always found a place to go to dream." I'm speaking via Skype to Rhys Chatham, composer for 400 electric guitars and former curator to New York's legendary venue, The Kitchen. "Whether that was in Bohemia or one area or another area. For art to work," he says, "you need either patrons or government grants, you need press, and you needcheap rents." For Chatham and his contemporaries, those cheap rents could be found Downtown, in the southern end of Manhattan. A few decades later, when William Basinski was looking for a space to work, no struggling artist could afford to live in Manhattan, so he went to Brooklyn and opened his Arcadia in a former ironworks. It was "a beautiful, magical place," Basinski recalled wistfully in an interview last year for Tinymixtapes. Even the very name Arcadia evokes a utopian promise, an unspoilt idyll. In......
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Being And Nothingness: The Meditations Of Michael Gira | Clash Music
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
From the corrosive angular aggression of 1983’s ‘Filth’ and the following year’s ‘Cop’ LPs, through their ‘gentler’ but still uncompromising middle period,Swans have been intermittently howling into the void for over 30 years. Resurrected in spectacular fashion in 2010, after a 13-year hiatus, the experimental avant-garde noise merchants have since released three albums to considerable critical acclaim. Discussing their latest album ‘To Be Kind’, the art of collaboration and live performance, frontman Michael Gira shares his muscular meditations and ministrations with Clash. Swans’ music is about immediacy, capturing the ‘moment’. Are the records simply consolidating what you’re creating in a live environment? There’s a couple of different ways of describing the experience of Swans. One is the live experience, of course, which is utterly immediate, and it’s always a challenge to keep it so. We have structures that we work with, songs in some cases, but you always want keep it alive and for that reason over the last couple of years we’ve decided just to let the songs be malleable and let them change into something if they decide that they want to [do so] of their own accord. And the performance for us is hopefully an all-consuming experience. If it’s working, it’s......
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This Is My Sermon: M Gira Of Swans Speaks To John Doran | The Quietus
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
Ahead of the release of magnificent new Swans album To Be Kind, Michael Gira speaks to John Doran about that LP's ferocious grooves, his role as band leader, Haitian history, the early days of the group, and his terror at the ever-increasing commercialisation of our society. Photography by Jennifer Church, Sebastien Sighell and Matias Coral I read something very smart about Swans that was posted on the music discussion board ILM about twelve years ago. A poster made a comparison which was so unusual it threw some fresh light on the subject at hand (often the best kind of comparisons to make). After saying Michael Gira's rock group were philosophically similar to the hip hop duo Clipse, the person known as EC said: "Both Clipse and Swans find social reality at the intersection of sex, money, and power. They view everything else as pretty fluff, designed to obscure the harsh truth. The difference is, Gira and co. sound traumatised by this discovery, whereas Malice and Pusha T sound like they're doing a gleeful dance." I mention this comparison to an unfailingly polite, dapper and healthy-looking Gira at Mute's in-house studio in West London. Swans are releasing their thirteenth......
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Pitchfork Interview with Michael Gira
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
Sixty-year-old art-rock godhead Michael Gira talks about how Swans managed to return without losing any potency, the impressive power of St. Vincent and Nina Simone, and how nearly choking to death inspired his band's latest opus. The Seer was the kind of record that seemed impossible to follow up. The nearly-two-hour 2012 LP nailed a deeply transcendent mix of drone, noise, and blues; songs that stretched to 20 and 30 minutes never felt excessive or overdone. It was my favorite album that year by a mile and contained some of the best music of Swans long career. And the band, led by eternal badass Michael Gira, hasn't given up on any of their widescreen ambition on new album To Be Kind, which is even longer than The Seer—and quite possibly better. To Be Kind has a bluesier feel than its predecessor, with a heftier dynamic range aided by deep horn blasts and almost-shimmering production from John Congleton (St. Vincent, Baroness); 34-minute highlight “Bring The Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture” features the sounds of galloping horses woven into its mix of cinematic drone, pummeling post-rock, and bloody incantations. The group has sounded this massive live, but never on record. The album features the core Swans group of Gira, Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Phil......