PRESS
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Digital In Berlin Recomended
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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 name had become a burden and the associations no longer fit with what I wanted to do into the future.“ Fast-forward 13 years, after pursuing Angels of Light and recording and producing a diverse roster of artists for his Young God label, Michael Gira decided to reconvene his legendary group Swans: „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.” There are signs that Gira himself has mellowed out over the years, although this shining veneer may simply be a sign that he’s learned to......
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Spectrum Culture Interview
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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 swift 20 minutes we talked about the idea of darkness, Spanish art and losing oneself in performance. I am proud to present the Spectrum Culture interview with Michael Gira. In the liner notes to The Seer, you wrote a special note asking fans to not upload the music to the internet. I am curious how much the internet has actually contributed to the resurgent popularity of Swans. It’s a double-edged sword. It has been a tremendous help in the sense that its tendrils reach everywhere. I don’t know why, but the music has reached a lot of people, particularly young people, to the extent that a lot of our live......
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New Yorker Bowery Preview
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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 record of this incarnation. (The group will disband after a lengthy worldwide tour.) Like its three recent predecessors, “The Glowing Man” relies heavily on repetition, ritualistic rhythm, and ecstatic, violent climaxes. But it also features many quiet, ruminative passages and a more varied sonic tableau, highlighted by a contribution from the experimental cellist Okkyung Lee and by the hundred different instruments played by the group’s periodic special guest, Bill Rieflin. With Okkyung Lee opening solo. Bowery Ballroom6 Delancey St.New York, NY 10002http://boweryballroom.com212-533-2111...
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Dangerous Minds Interview / Live Video Premere
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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 post-metal bands like Isis have veered admirably close. The first incarnation of the band reached its apotheosis with the utterly magnificent 1987 album Children of God (though this writer also favors the dizzyingly experimentalGreed/Holy Money era of the band), on which the band’s singer, leader, and lone constant member Michael Gira cut his trademark tales of self-abasement and profound suffering with heavy doses of religious imagery. It was fucking jarring at the time—when the band that became notorious for songs like “Money is Flesh” and “Raping a Slave” made a masterpiece double LP on the opening song of which its singer bellowed PRAISE THE LORD! PRAISE GOD!, that shit turned......
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MAGNET CLASSICS: THE MAKING OF SWANS’ “SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND”
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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 pointed notion of rage as the music itself pointedly raged (depravity, violence and power also fit nicely into Gira’s lyrical mien). “My interest in Swans—what attracted me, I would still argue in their currency—is intensity,” says Bill Rieflin, one of a dozen past-and-present Swans. “I was an intense young man in those days myself.” Fast and raging is a rough pace to maintain, though—even for a young man, a young woman (haunting, self-titled “buzz-cut athletic, non-drinking vegetarian” co-lead singer Jarboe) and an ever-shifting crew of young, schooled, inventive primal musicians—over the course of five-plus years; and by 1987, a bicameral sound process set in, a sonic architecture was erected. “One......