PRESS
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Clrvynt Interview
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Michael Gira of Swans Talks Rebooting, Larkin Grimm by J. Bennett For a man who openly uses the terms “maniacal” and “blind egotism” to describe the way he steered his one-of-a-kind band, Swans, through the 1980s, Michael Gira is unfailingly calm and polite over Skype in 2016. When we thank him for taking the time to speak with us, he replies, “It’s a pleasure and a privilege. I don’t take it for granted that people are interested in what we do.” Over the course of 34-plus years (including a 13-year hiatus) and 14 studio albums, it’s safe to say that more than a few people have maintained interest. In fact, those lofty-but-overused words "influential" and "groundbreaking" don’t quite cut it when describing Swans. They’re one of those rarified musical entities — like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges or Black Sabbath — that not only helped lay the foundation for bands that have gone on to become hugely influential in their own right (like Neurosis and Godflesh), but even influenced their own contemporaries (like Sonic Youth, whose leader, Thurston Moore, was apparently an early, brief Swans collaborator) and helped create entire genres. Swans’ latest, The Glowing Man, will be their last album to feature......
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Georgia Straight Preview
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Swans’ music transports Michael Gira into the naked now by Alexander Varty Michael Gira is talking about sex, but he might as well be discussing something that he’s only going to do one more time before abstaining forever: tour with the current incarnation of Swans. “Aside from the grunting animal aspect that it can have,” he says in an enjoyably glitch-free Skype interview, “when it’s a focused and honest and unguarded and exploring experience with someone you love, it’s absolutely a true spiritual experience.” Now, we don’t know what goes on in Gira’s New Mexico home—and, frankly, we don’t really want to know. But having experienced the brutally ecstatic maelstrom that is a Swans concert, we’re sure that, for Gira, performing is a kind of Tantric initiation: a sweaty, three-hour-long offering of physical and emotional extremity. How has immersing himself, night after night, in that kind of ritual changed his physicality and his consciousness? “My physicality? I’m a wreck,” the 62-year-old singer-guitarist says, with a dry chuckle. “But my consciousness? When the music is elevating, when the music is playing us rather than the reverse, it’s the closest I get to a kind of pure state of awareness—aside from meditation,......
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LA Music Blog show review
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SHOW REVIEW: SWANS @ THE FONDA THEATRE The masters of sonic exploration reign supremeBy David Fisch “Just let your freak flag fly.” My friend gave me this great piece of advice after I described to him too analytically how I needed to mentally prepare for Swans at The Fonda Theatre Friday night. You see, for as much as I or anyone might “plan” to expect the unexpected at a Swans show, you don’t really know what a Swans show is even if you’ve attended one before. That applies most specifically to seeing the band during this recent iteration of members, which leader Michael Gira has claimed is its last formation — for now. The band has produced four albums over the last six years, bending and stretching and ripping apart genres and soundscapes, engaging in absolutely epic explorations of highly experimental territory, each album one part of an organically connected sound collage culminating with this year’s release ofThe Glowing Man. In a live setting, with this band, they are just as organic. The way you have seen Swans before is close to nothing like how you saw them the time before that. They adapt the textures and landscapes of each......
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SLC Weekly Feature
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Mutating Grace Swans' new end marks a new beginning. By Kimball Bennion When Swans—Michael Gira's legendary avant rock project that helped shape New York City's post-punk scene in the 1980s—began to tour again for the first time since their break-up almost 15 years prior, there were some who assumed the band was embarking on a nostalgia-fueled cash grab. "I guess they anticipated a kind of reunion tour, which we thankfully didn't provide," Gira says in a recent telephone interview withCity Weekly. Instead, the band—featuring most of its longtime members except keyboardist/vocalist Jarboe—began what would arguably become its most artistically and commercially significant output to date. The stretch of albums that Swans released beginning with 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was a high point that Gira's perpetual exercise in viscerally transcendent experimentation had not quite reached until he decided to give the band another go. That period of rebirth is coming to an end—at least for this iteration of the band. Gira says The Glowing Man (Young God/Mute), released in June, is the last album to be recorded by their current lineup. "I didn't want to end up having to start imitating ourselves," he......
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Noise Art Intervew
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SWANS: THE RIVER RUNS DEEP by Jennifer Dohn | Aug 24, 2016Interview with Michael Gira Swans are looking to see where the river takes them. This year’s LP release, The Glowing Man, was the third and final epoch of an ever-evolving, coincidental trilogy summoning cathartic revelations: visions of illuminated brutalities felt from enigmatic vibrations; elevations in instrumentation between worlds above, and worlds below. It’s sonically pummeling and soothing, like bitter medicine. This manifestation of Swans—at the moment Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Phil Puleo, Christopher Pravdica, Thor Harris and Michael Gira—invokes images of the languid finger of man trapped in his corporeal self, lifting up and over to a god eager for connection. Swans’ main conduit, M. Gira, has written: “I chose the five people with whom to work that I believe would most ably provide a sense of surprise, and even uncertainty, while simultaneously embodying the strength and confidence to ride the river of intention that flows from the heart of the sound wherever it would lead us—and what’s the intention? LOVE.” [1] Where does this river flow? Gira doesn’t know where it will go, and isn’t worried about it, and that’s part of the point. On a Friday morning,......