Swans Interview September 2010 [PART 1]
By: Tim Robins
Rockfeedback: We rang you on an American number. Whereabouts are you currently based, Michael?
Michael Gira: I’m currently in the Capscale mountains about 100 miles north of New York City where I live.
RFB: As a broad opening question, how are you feeling about the new Swans album and tour? Seeing as how it’s been so long (almost 13 years) and the tour is close approaching, are you scared at all?
MG: I suppose an understatement would be that I have a great deal of trepidation *laughs*. It’s been many years since I’ve done this…Swans that is. I’m looking forward to it. We’re about to begin rehearsing, 12 hours a day, every day for 3 weeks. I think and hope that we will all be ready. I’m looking forward to it. Although it certainly won’t mean much to anybody, for me, it’s a cataclysmic experience.
RFB: Especially with such an intense schedule including 12 hour rehearsals. It sounds intense…
MG: It has to be. The band has been all over the world, so we have to get together and become a band, you know? Such that people can play together intuitively, and that takes time.
RFB: Heading a little more in-depth I’d like to turn to the statement you made on in January 2010 on the Young God Records website. You stated that during your last tour with Angels of Light the song 'The Provider' “brought back memories...maybe not memories, but a tangible re-emersion in the sensation of Swans music”, and yet that your decision to reunite your old band was “not a reunion show, not some nostalgia [but instead that you] needed to move forward”. Did you treat Angels of Light as an endeavour that was completely divorced from Swans, which you are now returning to, perhaps with a different twist, or do you see the new Swans material as some kind of culmination of all of your musical endeavours so far in Swans/Angels Of Light/Solo?
MG: Yeah, I do see that, I do see a culmination. With Angels of Light I started flirting with the more Swans-y kind of sounds and it wouldn’t make sense to incorporate that on one of their records. With the new Swans record it made sense, tangibly and practically, to include all those sounds. Right up until the end of Swans I was doing more acoustic orientated things that were then orchestrated upon, so it makes sense to take in the more epic, large-scale sounds and mix that with the more “detailed” elements.
RFB: Briefly heading back to some of your writing and work on the Young God website, you have uploaded a piece of artwork which states, “life is short bursts of ecstasy filled by interminable periods of crushing drudgery”…
MG: Oh yeah, that one shows a character on a chair, and there are all these little worms looking at him. He’s the character on stage and they are watching him have his moment *laughs*.
RFB: Linking this to your comment concerning the reactivation of Swans as a way to “keep moving forward”, is the ever-revolving lineup of the band [although original member Norman Westberg is included in new lineup], as well as your decision to restart the band in the first place, a way to mix things up avoid those periods of “crushing drudgery”, to keep your relationship to music fresh?
MG: Yeah. I wrote much of the songs on this record over the course of a year and a half, and I guess I presumed they were going to be an Angels of Light record when I had finished. But when I started to think about that, it just seemed kind of predictable and uninteresting to me to go about it that way.
I had this notion of wanting to experience these more overwhelming sounds…electric guitars and just waves of sound, so I thought why not just start Swans up and I can look at them that way. The outlook will naturally change, especially as I would have been working with different people. As long as I expanded parts and made certain sections longer etc. etc. I could change them into Swans material. I haven’t dealt with that in so many years that it opened up a lot of possibilities for me; just making the record itself was an incredibly static experience.
We had this program where we would take one song and play it for 12 hours a day, in this large recording studio with concrete walls and 18 foot ceilings. The sound is just reverberating and going everywhere! It was really like a peak experience in church or something. We just kept playing this riff over and over again. It would keep growing until it became something really active and magical…and then we recorded it. That was a great way to make the album.
RFB: After Holy Money (1986) there was a definite style shift for Swans, and on a lot of the new album material, like 'Reel the Liars In', there is obviously a lot more focus on melody than in the older stuff. Have you gone off the older, heavier material; call it “noise”/ “post-punk”/ “industrial”/ whatever? Is the “noise” side of the band something you feel you have grown out of?
MG: I never embraced the term noise music. What we did is just manipulating sounds, you know? Noise sounds to me like something annoying and buzzy or high-endy. I was always interested in big chunks of sound using primitive rhythms that would hopefully destroy your body. The intention was very positive, in a way like a kind of penitence. I wanted to achieve a period of ecstasy, and at time I achieved that. Now, the notions that I’m using in the new music go all the way back to the beginning [of the Swans back catalogue] and all the way to the end. There’s just not much in the middle that interests me. So, Soundtracks For The Blind and Swans Are Dead as well as the more intense, brutal, sound oriented, chronic orientated stuff…that’s what interests me. Live, we’re going to be doing some material from Cop and Filth, and a bit from Holy Money. I’m not going to do it like it was, I’m going to take that as a starting point and make it something new.
RFB: So would you say you’re using this tour as a way to revisit older material, and yet look at it see it with fresh eyes and new parameters, then?
MG: I just wanted to take certain things which are rightfully mine, and incorporate them back into my work again, though not in a nostalgic way. I don’t want to go and play an old album from beginning to end or some horrible crap like that. I didn’t and don’t want to sound like the old Swans, but it is Swans. The new album is unmistakably Swans; I just didn’t want it to be that way.
RFB: To go back to your “mission statement” from the Young God site, you said that you want more of the sensation that Swans gave you in past, that which you were reminded of during 'The Provider' “before your body breaks down so that it won’t be possible”. Do you feel that, particularly the brutal styling of early 80s material- Filth and Cop etc- is just too physically taxing to play nearly 30 years later?
MG: Certainly if I were to perform it the way I did in those days, I would probably die half way through the first set! I’m not gunna jump around with my shirt off like Iggy Pop, you know? That’s a young man’s sport, and I don’t want to be jumping around like some lizard on stage. I’m going to try and perform with some dignity. Still, it is incredibly physically taxing just to play it. So much concentration and intensity goes into it, so I can’t picture doing it forever, that’s for sure. I know I’m going to continue Swans now though, I can tell you that for sure; I have some ideas for the next record. I honestly don’t know how long I can do it, but as long as it remains something vital and authentic I’m going to keep doing it.
To read Part Two of the interview click here
Artists in this article: Swans