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LA Music Blog show preview
SHOW PREVIEW: SWANS @ THE FONDA THEATRE Probably the last time you’ll see them this way…August 29th, 2016 David Fisch You can say you’ve been to the Eight Wonders of the World. You can say you’ve gone skydiving. You can say you’ve taken a SpaceX flight to the outer reaches of the atmosphere. Can you really say you’ve experienced a Swans show, though? Okay, so all of the thrilling things above are pretty cool, but there’s nothing like a Swans concertexperience. The incredibly experimental rock group headed by the one-and-only... Read more...
Digital In Berlin Recomended
Swans + Anna von Hausswolff at Huxleys Neue Welt / Tuesday, 18.10.2016 By Ani Samperi · On 29. August 2016As he who owns the voice of God, we let Michael Gira introduce Swans himself: „I started Swans in 1982 in NYC. At the time, I had no musical skills whatsoever, just instinct and a need to make something happen. The music changed constantly over the years, and I’m gratified it reached, and continues to reach, a fair number of people. After 15 years, I decided to end Swans, as the... Read more...
Spectrum Culture Interview
Interview: Michael Gira of Swans DAVID HARRIS AUGUST 30, 2016 “Certainly, we are not Kanye West.”It was a bleary morning when Michael Gira called me via Skype from his New Mexico home. Twenty-plus years my senior, the Swans front man sounded wide awake and alert for such an early hour, ready to discuss The Glowing Man, the new double-album that will likely be his last with this iteration of the band. Although Gira is one of the most intense musicians making music today, he was amiable and good-natured. During a... Read more...
New Yorker Bowery Preview
Night Life SWANSJuly 29 2016 In 2010, after a thirteen-year hiatus, the restless musical provocateur Michael Gira reformed this iconic No Wave-era group. Consciously avoiding nostalgia, the band began an exhilarating second life, as vital and occasionally terrifying as its first incarnation, when it was the confrontational enfant terrible of early-eighties downtown New York. The reformed lineup includes many former associates, among them Gira’s visionary alter ego, the guitarist Norman Westberg. Last month, the band released a new double album, “The Glowing Man,” which Gira has said will be the last studio... Read more...
Dangerous Minds Interview / Live Video Premere
NEVER BEFORE SEEN FOOTAGE OF SWANS IN CONCERT; A DM EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE In its nearly 35-year history, the utterly singular band Swans has elevated American underground music to high art, appealing to fans of goth, no-wave, industrial, experimental noise, and doom metal without ever actually expressing or even properly fitting in to any of those genres. By the late ‘80s, the band’s very name became a badge for a musical chimera of brutality and grandeur that nobody else has ever quite matched, though some black metal bands like Ulver and... Read more...
MAGNET CLASSICS: THE MAKING OF SWANS’ “SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND”
The making of Swans‘ Soundtracks For The Blind By A.D. Amorosi Born from the jolting, speedy clutter that was New York City’s no-wave movement of the early, dirty ’80s, Michael Gira’s Swans were cuttingly abrasive in their sonic locution and lyrical force. Swans were no mess, though. Their roar was succinct and surging, their pace often blinding, and Gira’s attack, though brooding, was riveting and blunt—he was a sharp-shooting sniper, not a bullet-spraying machine gunner. To this rapier-fast, roaring exactitude, he added scorched-earth texts that were as much about the... Read more...
Rocker Zine Glowing Man Review
SWANS “The Glowing Man”: Prepare to be pulverizedby Chris AdamsChris Adams narrowly survives an encounter with Swans latest releaseQ: What’s the last thing that goes through a fly’s head when it strikes a windshield? A: It’s ass. This joke occurred to me after of listening… correction: surviving… The Glowing Man, the magnum opus of legendary Noo Yawk art terrorists, Swans. In this case, I was the fly, and the windshield was the album, which is apparently the band’s… err… swan song. Oh, sure, it all started innocently enough. I merely... Read more...
KCW Today Glowing Man Review
Swans The Glowing Man Whilst most planned musical finales tend to fizzle rather than sizzle (stand up The Final Cut and don’t take a bow! Ever!)  Swans have had a career defined by a brutal refusal to play by anybody’s rules, even their own. (perhaps especially not their own) The Glowing Man, the final album by the current line-up of the 2010-era Swans, is yet another curveball that announces the band’s dissolution not with a bang but with a triumphant drone.   From 1982 to 1997, and then again from... Read more...
Prog Archives Glowing Man Review
The Glowing Man - Swans 4.63/5 A newcomer discovering the music of Swans through any of the band's recent albums must feel like Vasco Nuñez de Balboa seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time, confronted by something almost unfathomably vast, immeasurably deep, and more than a little intimidating. Their latest in a series of epic two-disc releases is also possibly the best of the bunch: a potential masterpiece waiting to be acknowledged, although the effort may require some patience. This is a group able to elevate Post Rock monotony to a... Read more...
Music And Riot Interview
Closing A Beautiful Chapter: An Interview With Michael Gira of SwansWith the release of their fourteenth full-length album,Swans are hardly surprising people each time they manage to blow people’s mind. It has been that way for some time now and for the look of things it will remain that way. We talked with Michael Gira about The Glowing Man, the unexpected trilogy, what the present looks like, and the exciting uncertainty of the future. You’ve been releasing music, with and without Swans, for more than 30 years. In a moment... Read more...

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