Boulder Weekly / Article-Interview January 1997

SWAN'S FINAL FLIGHT

by JEFF STRATTON

Usually, when you call someone a cantankerous bastard, they tend to take it the wrong way. But Michael Gira, the mastermind behind Swans, one of America's most impressively intense purveyors of sounds, laughs it off like it's a term of endearment. It's not unfair to characterize Gira as difficult to get along with. In fact, a word that's often used in connection with Gira, his singularly selfish vision and his intolerance for ineptitude, is tyrant.

"That's very well put," concurs Curtis Harvey of the band Rex, who suffered through an opening stint for Swans on their 1995 U.S. tour. "Michael Gira is a very difficult person to work with. He's very focused about his music; so much so that he's very hard to deal with on any other level. He's a very intense guy - but not high on the personality scale."

That's misleading, since in my conversations with Gira, he's always been pleasant and affable and certainly not without a sharp and visceral sense of humor. But you don't want to get on his bad side - which is what Rex apparently did.

"We did a tour with the band Low recently," Gira mentions. "They were great - really nice people. But with Rex, I thought they were real shits. I liked their CD but when they played live I thought they were too rock; I didn't like it. They just seemed to be trying to make it in the music business and there's nothing that disgusts me more than that. They wanted to be the next MTV stars - they seemed to always be looking to get over. I couldn't stand that, so I was very unpleasant to them." Going back to the interview with Harvey just a few months ago, I see what Gira means. When I asked Harvey how the tour with Swans went, he starts to answer with a bubbly, "Oh, it was really fun..." before he reverses himself and glumly admits, "Musically it was great, but it was really hard for us personality-wise."

Gira can be quite unpleasant, and he suffers fools not gladly but with venom and contempt. When Swans last visited Denver in July of 1995, the band - Gira, an always-changing lineup of hired guns plus Gira's constant conspirator/vocalist/instrumentalist Jarboe - performed a set of music that literally blew everyone in the Bluebird Theatre away with its overwhelming force and form. Playing endlessly on shades of light and dark, horror and beauty, pleasure and pain, soft passages and monstrous, Wagnerian tumults of aggression and rage, the musicians wrestled and grappled with the tremendous sonic weight. During one of the show's quieter moments, Gira was disturbed by a pair of attendees who were busy having a conversation about five feet in front of him.

"You're making it very hard for me to concentrate with your talking," he snarled after the song's end. "It's very rude and very distracting." It shut them up, but as Rex's Harvey pointed out, "that happened almost every night."

"Usually the atmosphere is not conducive to idiot-rock behavior at our concerts," Gira states. "I just feel that if I've gone to the effort to come and sing a song and it happens to be a quiet song, people should show me the respect of shutting up and listening. As for the kids who come to rock or whatever, I'd just as soon they leave anyway - so I don't mind telling them to go to hell."

Does Gira thrive on living out this role of a demanding, egocentric dictator?

"I don't know if it's a role. I just take what I do seriously. Hopefully I don't take it to the point of being pompous about it. But I guess that is a persona I have, though I don't really cultivate it intentionally," he laughs.

Intentionally or not, Gira's reputation precedes him, and Swans are still regarded in some circles as nearly unlistenable nasty dilettantes, pushing, churning, nauseating grind-core with song titles like "Raping a Slave" and tales of cannibalism and murder. True, that was the sound of Swans when Gira first formed the band in New York City back in 1981, but today, to say that Swans' music has matured doesn't even begin to describe the perfect and beguiling beast it has become. Most of Swans' ultimate development can be traced back to their watershed 1987 release Children of God - a stunning album that finally provided a reference point for dealing with the harsh invincibility of the band's heaviness. The record's sequencing places a track like "New Mind" - with a relentlessly punishing BOOM-crunch - next to the saccharine fragility of Jarboe's vocal delivery on "In My Garden."

Swans followed that work with 1989's The Burning World, an atypical outing that paired the band with a producer (Bill Laswell) for the first and only time and encouraged the lighter side of things to shine through. But Gira was unhappy with the results. Many of the songs on the next two releases, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life followed in a similarly acoustic-based vein, though the flexed musculature of the band was lurking just beneath the surface. The Burning World album has been out of print for years, as has much of the group's catalog from time to time; a situation Gira intends to rectify soon, planning to release the old Swans material on his own label, Young God Records. With the material from the late '80s and early '90s, he says he'll eliminate much of The Burning World and include previously unavailable tracks from that era in their place.

"I'm just getting rid of certain material I don't like," he explains. "Since I have access to most of the music that I've done, I'm able to at least get rid of the things that embarrass me." Even on Love of Life, a very strong record in retrospect, he says there's stuff he can't bear to listen to. "I'm pretty happy with that one, but there's a few songs that are regrettable," Gira claims. Which ones? "Ah, never mind." But he laughs again.

He's proudest of Swans' most recent works, The Great Annihilator album from 1995 and the brand-new two CD set titled Soundtracks For the Blind. Both works use extended passages of spoken word segments, tape loops and found sounds from various sources to supplement Gira's deep baritone and Jarboe's unexplainable acrobatics. With Soundtracks, ordinary song structure is largely forgone in favor of extended soundscapes; barren wastelands often populated by spoken narration; banal topics or gnomic chatter "manipulated and mutilated" and emerging as part of the musical realm. It's a direction Gira isn't finished exploring, though he's adamant that Swans won't be the vehicle he'll be traveling in. He's declared in no uncertain terms that this is Swans' final tour and that Soundtracks for the Blind will stand as their last studio release.

"It's definitely finished," Gira insists. "I'm not going to tour as Swans again. This new set is extremely loud in places; I can hardly hear most of the time. After this I don't ever want to do loud rock music again." He believes that Swans, as a trademark name and as a selling point, has proved to be more of an albatross. "It's just not worth it to me after 15 years to keep banging my head against the wall. I'm incredibly proud of the amount of work, but it's time to move on to a different name. The whole process of touring and making records when you don't sell many records and don't have much money is very arduous, largely unrewarding and fraught with anxiety. I just think it's wiser to put it to bed. I suspect that I'll still be burdened by the name in the future," he laughs again, "but at least I'll have tricked myself psychologically into feeling like I've moved on."

The Great Annihilator was probably the most accessible album Swans had ever produced, but like all their work, it remained largely ignored by the public. In a better world, some of its material could have wound up usurping the place of more commercialized music with a dangerous edge, and though Gira readily admits lack of success is the main factor in pulling the plug, it's unlikely he'd want to be on the radio next to Stabbing Westward and Tool.

"I can't stand most alternative music I hear. It's so stylized and its false anger disgusts me. It's teenage stuff. Doesn't interest me," he mutters. "I like music that has some kind of soul or personal risk involved."

Risk abounds on Soundtracks for the Blind, opening huge, gaping reality fissures for a listener who tries to take in all 143 minutes of it in one sitting. On the first disc, called and colored "Silver," a typical bipolar instrumental intro sets the stage for a male narrator who suddenly appears as if the host of a bizarre late-night radio program. Addressing an unseen adversary, he carries on in a dementedly giddy fashion. Gira explains that the tape was found in a desk belonging to Jarboe's father, an FBI agent, and he surmises that it could be a circa-1970s surveillance recording of a criminal or perhaps an informant. "Nice guy, huh?" chuckles Gira. At any rate, it nestles and coils comfortably in the context of Swans' seductive surrealism.

Much of the record follows the same audio-collage thread; there a few bona-fide songs. "I didn't feel it was necessary for my or Jarboe's voice to occupy the center of every piece," Gira explains. On the second disc, "Copper," a 10-minute anthem called "The Final Sacrifice" becomes one of the more terrifying vocal pieces Swans have ever recorded, advancing Gira's constant theme of submission/subjugation/humiliation before a wrathful God. Another standout is Jarboe's "Volcano," a shuffling, beat-driven fairy tale of violence and lust. But somehow, the ambient-and-sampled-voices material carries a kind of haunting dread; more than even Gira's own lyrics. To be sure, when he sings, "The dogs are ripping at your feet/I see you bleeding out your happiness/... and I feel good/I finally got back what was always rightfully mine" on the threatening "All Lined Up," it skillfully reflects the cold steel of the executioner's blade. But on "How They Suffer," when a tape recording of Gira's father (who died last month) - detailing his experience with glaucoma and retinal problems in a clinical and dry manner - ends with the phrase "I am what they call legally blind" followed by a cold ghostly draft from a far-off keyboard, the effect created by the schizophrenic assortment of sounds is positively devastating.

"That's one tangent I'm going on," Gira says of an upcoming project called The Body Lovers, which will feature extended soundtrack pieces with tape loops and other non-musical source material. Simultaneously, he'll be working on The Pleasure Seekers, an outlet for him and Jarboe to explore "mostly acoustic-based narrative vocal pieces - songs, I guess." The Pleasure Seekers will probably perform live, Gira explains, and he'll also produce and put out other people's records on his Young God label, mostly within a genre he calls "ambient," he says, "for lack of a better word. It's not the kind of ambient music you'd hear in a club. It's more menacing and it has a psychology to it. I'll just put out music that I want to hear, without any consideration for commercial potential."

Which is how Swans entire career has been. Though the records have never made anyone wealthy, Gira has stockpiled every critical review written about his band, using the material - "selectively edited, of course; you don't see any negative statements in there" - to whip up an almost propagandistic frenzy about the greatness of Swans. On the promotional copy of Soundtracks for the Blind, one writer proclaims, "Swans are one of the only rock groups in the country worth a damn. They have never forsaken the frightening purity that lies at the center of their work." An exaggeration? Not even slightly. Gira's work ethic is nothing if not rigidly pure: from Swans' base of operations, now in north rural Georgia, he reports that he and his cohorts "have been rehearsing 10 hours a day for the past five weeks. To my chagrin, they insisted on flying back to New York this week to enjoy Christmas with their families. Since I don't ever have a full-time band, I have to create one in a very short span of time and it takes intensive work. I'm always working. I haven't had a vacation in more than eight years. I never take time off. I just don't see any point in living unless you're working."

All this sweat and toil will hone Swans for what is being billed as The Final Tour. This time around, Gira has selected an opening act called Windsor for the Derby, which he describes as weaving a kind of trancy vibe. A bit of advice for them:

"What I've heard on CD sounds great," Gira enthuses. "I haven't seen them live yet, though. If they come out and do some rock and roll set, I'll be a little pissed."