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Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

1:16 am - В бедствующей Голландии есть ограничения скорости на автобанах

[grow a suicide]

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

12:03 pm - the blues stuff

crookedfingers

September 3, 2010
Never Say Never: Swans Return
By BEN RATLIFF

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.”

current mood:

contemplative

[5 failures - grow a suicide]

Friday, July 16th, 2010

8:16 am

crookedfingers	current mood: contemplative
[grow a suicide]

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

3:27 pm - News from Michael Gira new Swans record in the works

crookedfingers

from Young God Record site

About reconstituting Swans:

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, there was a point a few years ago during a particular show when I was on tour with Angels Of Light, with Akron/Family serving as the backing band. It was during the song The Provider. Seth’s guitar was sustaining one open chord (very loudly), rising to a peak, then crashing down again in a rhythm that could have been the equivalent of a deep and soulful act of copulation. The whole band swayed with this arc. Really was like riding waves of sound. I thought right then, “You know, Michael, Swans wasn’t so bad after all...” . Ha ha! It brought back – in a flood – memories, or maybe not memories, more a tangible re-emersion in the sensation of Swans music rushing through my body in waves, lifting me up towards what, I can only assume, will be my only experience of heaven. It’s difficult – and probably pointless – to try to describe this experience. It’s ecstatic, I suppose – a force of simultaneous self negation and rebirth. Really, I probably only experienced this a handful of times to such an extreme extent during the entire 15 year history of Swans. All the elements have to align perfectly, and you can’t force it, though you might constantly strive for it. I don’t mean to be too lofty here, but it’s a fact. I’m talking about my own experience of the music (though I’d hope people in the audiences along the way might have experienced a similar episode). When I ask myself if I believe in God, I start to say NO, but then I remember that sensation, and I’m not so sure. So I want more of that, before my body breaks down to such an extent that it won’t be possible any more. So I’m doing it.

Naturally, some of the material for this new record will be songs, centered around the voice and words. Other parts (I’m hoping) will be reaching for what I’ve described above. One thing I want to point out right now: 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. 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.

Here’s the main musicians (though probably a lot of guests on the recording). These are the people best suited – in terms of my relationship with them and their particular musical attributes - to help move the music forward :

I Am Not Insane - Michael GiraMichael Gira / guitar / voice / mendicant friar act (original swans)

Norman Westberg – guitar (original swans)

Christoph 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, keys, etc etc... (angels, now also with shearwater)

current mood:

contemplative

[2 failures - grow a suicide]

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

12:26 am - A somewhat steamy gothic CD sale

theunicursalhex

The following are CDs I want to sell, in order to buy more music. They are steampunkish or gothic in nature. Each CD is $7 and that is postpaid. Write me a comment here with the ones you want and I will PM you with my Paypal info in which to pay me. All CDs are brand new unless stated otherwise.

The list is:

Death by Doll --- Gasoline
Death by Doll --- Cabin Fever
Dawn Desiree --- Dancing, Dreaming, Longing
Regan Remy / High Priestess --- Sellisternia
Regan Remy/ High Priestess -- Advanced Bliss / Oaksong
Lavender Diamond - Imagine Our Love/ The Calvary of Light (2 CDs for $7)
Lisa Hammer -- Dakini (it's brand spanking new!)
The World/Inferno Friendship Society -- Live at Northsix
The World/Inferno Friendship Society --- Addicted to Bad Ideas
The World/Inferno Friendship Society --- East Coast Super Sound Punk of Today!
The World/Inferno Friendship Society -- Red Eyed Soul
Sophe Luxe -- Waking the Mystics
Tipton Lea and the Victorian Army --- Spectacle
Lemony Snicket Soundtrack
Rodentia The best of Dark Roots music, 2 CD set $7
The Sad Bastard Book Club -- The collected works of Carrie Anne Crowe (CD)
The Sad Bastard Book Club -- The collected works of Carrie Anne Crowe (Audiobook)

I do have a cheap list of CDs too, each for $3 postpaid!

The Cure -- 3 Imaginary Boys
Daniel Ash -- Foolish Thing Desire
Front 242 -- Front by Front
Best of The Velvet Underground
Swans Related Projects CD, featuring tracks from Drainland and Sacrificial Cake
Bjork -- Homogenic
Nine Inch Nails --- March of the Pigs
The Damned -- Skip School to See The Damned

Thanks for looking!

[grow a suicide]

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

7:20 pm - Merch

kerd_vivisektor	Hi guys! I was just wondering if any one knows where it is possible to get a t-shirt like Devendra's. I would prefer print it myself becouse of specialities of my body = ) So I need find album-art from "Filth" in high resolution anywhere. May be any one could scan the Teeth image from the album itself? It isn't piracy, right?
[4 failures - grow a suicide]

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

7:08 pm - Michael Gira mini USA tour

deadpansev	MG LIVE USA Sun 2/8/09, Big Ears Art Festival, Knoxville TN Tue 3/3/09, Doug Fir Lounge, Portland, OR w/ Larkin Grimm Wed 3/4/09, Tractor Tavern, Seattle, WA, w/ Larkin Grimm Fri 3/6/09, Swedish American Cultural Hall, San Francisco, CA, w/ Larkin Grimm Sun 3/8/09, Echo, Los Angeles, CA, w/ Larkin Grimm
[grow a suicide]

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

6:26 pm - interview

contrasoma	New Popmatters interview with Gira in which he dishes on the denser sound of "We Are Him" and the possibility of ending Angels as a project.
[3 failures - grow a suicide]

Monday, October 1st, 2007

8:01 pm - Anyone in Europe? Gira is touring, here are the dates and places:

deadpansev

I got this in an email, if you are somewhere in Europe it might be cool to check out.

M.Gira European tour dates:

Europe | OCTOBER 2007

11/10/07 : AB-club - Brussel (B) (support Marissa Nadler)
12/10/07 : STUK - Leuven (B)
13/10/07 : Theater Kikker - Utrecht (NL)
14/10/07 : Vera - Groningen (NL)
15/10/07 : Paradiso - Amsterdam (NL)
16/10/07 : PTR - L'usine - Geneva (CH)
17/10/07 : Circolo degli Artisti - Roma (I)
19/10/07 : KC Belgie - Hasselt (B) (+ Boredoms)
20/10/07 : Sonic City festival - Kortrijk (B) (+ Boredoms / Deerhoof /....)
21/10/07 : Taylor John's House - Coventry (UK)
22/10/07 : Academy - Manchester (UK) (+ Boredoms)
23/10/07 : Arches - Glasgow (UK) (+ Boredoms)
24/10/07 : The Lemon Tree - Aberdeen (UK) (+ Boredoms)
26/10/07 : The Wire/Electra festival (Shoreditch Town Hall) - London (UK) (+
Boredoms)
27/10/07 : Monto Water Rats - London (UK)

[2 failures - grow a suicide]

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

9:36 pm - We are Him

deadpansev

Picked up my copy of Angels of Light – We are Him at the record store yesterday and I have to say that my first impression is that this might be the best Gira album in several years. I have to listen to albums a few times normally before I cement my impressions of them, but on first listen, I have to say that this album caught and held my attention. If you guys are debating whether you should get it or not, I don’t think you will be disappointed.

There is a link on the young god records blog to buy the album if you don't have any cool local record stores that carry it:
http://wearehim.blogspot.com/

Oh yeah for those in NYC, Gira is going to perform on Sept. 14th at the Highline Ballroom.

[2 failures - grow a suicide]

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

4:00 pm - A.O.L. download and new blog:

deadpansev	Gira and crew at Young God records have started a new blog at: http://wearehim.blogspot.com/ They have already placed a couple of MP3's on the blog including the Black River Song from the upcoming A.O.L. album. http://wearehim.blogspot.com/2007/07/black-river-song.html
[2 failures - grow a suicide]

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

5:27 pm - A.O.L new album coming in August

deadpansev	http://younggodrecords.com/product.asp?P_ID=46 Angels of Light - We are Him Available August 2007 http://younggodrecords.com/product.asp?P_ID=46 You can listen to two songs off of this album on the site. I like them especially the Black river Song, it was really cool. We are him is title track, but I didn't find it as appealing as Black River.
[1 failure - grow a suicide]

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

4:22 pm - Swans Mentioned in Spin

deadpansev

I was reading this months Spin magazine (April 2007) and in a section called “Essentials” they highlight a genre of music and place a handful of albums they think are essential to a collection of that genre. This month it was “noise rock” and Swans Cop was listed. Here is what they said:

Swans
Cop
K.422, 1984

A torturous, droning version of room 101 in Orwell’s 1984, where your worst fear resides. Frontman Michael Gira later traded degeneration for compassion, but this is one of the era’s most disconcerting moments.

[grow a suicide]

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

11:20 am - Gira live in May

contrasoma	In case anyone hasn't checked the Young God site lately, a few solo Gira shows were recently posted. Thu 5/3/07 - Sound Lab - Buffalo, NY Fri 5/4/07 - Music Gallery at St. George the Martyr Church - Toronto, On Sat 5/5/07 - La Sala Rossa - Montreal, Qc
[3 failures - grow a suicide]

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

9:48 pm - "NY Girls" lyrics

realgone	hi. could anybody transcribe for me the "New York Girls" lyrics by the Angels of Light ? can't find it anywhere. thanks in advance.
[5 failures - grow a suicide]

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

6:07 pm - SWANS - the Burning World

myreccollection	I'm reviewing my record collection...here's my entry on my favorite swans album: ( Read more...Collapse ) current mood: determined
[10 failures - grow a suicide]

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

11:57 am - "Anonymous Bodies" question

contrasoma

Hi all. Been meaning to join this community for a while and finally getting my mitts on a copy of "Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room" today has given me the impetus to do so.

I'm wondering if the copy I've bought is "legit" in as much as a gray-area "official bootleg" can be. All of the images I've ever seen of the album have the album and band name printed in dark green lettering on the front. However, the (CD) copy I now have doesn't have anything on the front cover: it's a single black piece of glossy paper. The spine of the CD reads "anonymous bodies" on one side and "in an empty room" on the other. The CD itself just has the title and the catalog number. In short, the word "Swans" appears nowhere on this CD. I've checked the discography on the swans.pair site and it looks as though there's only one CD edition of this record.

So: do everyone else's copies look like this and am I panicking* for nothing, or do I have a bootleg of a bootleg?

Thanks in advance.

*I'm not really panicking, just curious from a record nerd perspective.

[5 failures - grow a suicide]

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

12:02 pm - Origin of the name Angels of Light?

resonantserpent

Has Gira ever stated where he aquired this name? I ask because I was followed by a guy in Waco who wanted me to join his band named Angels of Light. I know, of course, that it wasn't Gira. I still have his card and the name is Rev. David Koresh.

BTW, the new interview in TapeOp with Gira is great. Grab it if you can. Probably the most shocking thing he says is that he 'threw out boxes of samples' after he was done with the Body Lovers. Agghh. He could have given them to me for safe keeping.

[2 failures - grow a suicide]

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

1:32 pm - hello,

_sallycinnamon

so I am in possession of a lovely copy of the consumer by mr. gira.

I know that there are still a lot of fans that would love to get their hands on this so I'm going to share the love and am offering it up so that I can pay me some rent.

its been read a couple times, with love. the spine is in immaculate condition, there are no dogears, turned down pages, highlighting or anything of the sort.

I can take a picture if anyone would like.

I'm offering it up for the highest bid. you can post here or email me at afleshparade@yahoo.com

I have feedback available for viewing. 4 pos on ebay, and many positives from years of selling on and off on lj.
shipping will be $4 with delivery confirmation if you live in the us. paypal is very highly preferred but cash or a mo will be considered.

[9 failures - grow a suicide]

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

9:38 am - MICHAEL GIRA INTERVIEW

exodontia	my boyfriends most recent interview w/ michael gira is now up. http://www.hermeticorderofarcana.com/interview.html michael also used an article rw wrote as his bio on the young gods web site. http://www.younggodrecords.com/PressDetail.asp?PT_ID=76&ArticleID=508
[grow a suicide]

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