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The SWANS' Epic Soundtracks

"Do not ask me who I am, and do not tell me to remain the same." The words

belong to the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, but they might equally

apply to the musical career of SWANS mastermind Michael Gira. Over the course

of the last fifteen years, Gira, backed by a revolving cast of collaborators,

has worn many musical masks, from raging post-punk nihilist to

strumming Leonard Cohen-styled existential troubadour to avant-garde

experimental neo-classicist. Yet, like the aforementioned French

philosophe, and the artistic mentor to both men, The Marquis De Sade,

Gira's thematics have nevertheless remained fairly constant: tearing away the

superficial societal veil to delve into the taboo, the abject, all the

"unspeakable," aspects of human existence, is for him is an act which holds

the tantalizing promise of enlightenment, perhaps even the reclamation of

lost innocence.

Gira has paid a price for being an original, an innovator, seeing others

commercialize certain aspects of various SWANS incarnations and make a pile

of money whilst he himself has struggled just to keep his band afloat. Listen

today to the relentless, apocalyptic sonic attack of early SWANS songs like

"Raping A Slave" and "Time Is Money (Bastard)" and you'll literally hear the

invention of the "industrial" genre which has made worthy disciples like Al

Jourgenson of Ministry and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails rich men. But

while the ability of his artistic progeny to evolve is still open to question,

Gira has relentlessly pushed forward into unknown musical terrain.

Soundtracks For The Blind, the penultimate SWANS album (their will be

a limited edition live recording from the current world tour) sees him tying

together the various elements which have fuelled different editions of the

band over the years, creating a sound that is, as always, unique.

While Tricky expertly evokes the claustrophobic feeling signified by the

phrase "pre-millennium tension," Gira and his significant (artistic and real-

life) other, Jarboe, whose haunting, ethereal vocals changed the musical

direction of the band when she joined in the mid-80s, create what might be

labelled a "post-millennium" sound. True to the implications of its title,

SFTB is an unsettling score for the time after the millenial collapse--

societal, psychic, whatever--has taken place. It is the sound of a new

mythology being born, exhibiting at times an epic, neo-religious intensity.

While Gira utilizes "found" sounds, snippets of recorded conversations,

cassette loops, and a variety of other objet trouves, the result

is far from the anxious and neurotic "problematization" of such

elements that is a typical feature of "postmodern" art. Rather, the music

here is flowing and seamless, the opening of a space where "reality" and

"fiction" blur to create a new world.

Over 26 songs and 140 minutes long, SFTB is a primordial musical

stew from which the defined shapes of songs emerge, momentarily shimmer, and

then finally return. Evocative, ambient passages such as

"Red Velvet Corridor" help set the mood for epic tracks like "Helpless Child,"

in which Gira, in an emotionally naked, fragile voice, details his

helplessness before the power of the archetypal female, and perhaps even

Mother Nature herself: "The muddy water runs, beneath your folds / You

won't let me breathe, you won't let me go . . . You'll blacken my innocence,

with sugar and opium." Here, as elsewhere, delicate, reflective,

acoustically-based musical segments are finally resolved by epic,

neo-classical flourishes whose power approximates the kind of intensity found

on early SWANS records in a new form .

Interestingly, where previously it was Gira who would rant and rave in

declamatory fashion while Jarboe provided melodic relief, these roles are now

more often switched: Gira croons his existential ballads in a deep,

narcotically soothing voice, while Jarboe provides moments of Dionysian

psychosis on songs like the live "Yum-Yab Killers," (also featured on her

solo album of last year, Sacraficial Cake) where she screams lines like

"We are the wild / We are the risk / Come little Yum-Yab / Come slash your

wrist" in an unhinged fashion over a raucous musical background. Also

interesting is the pulsating "Volcano," a thinly veiled homage to Courtney

Love in which Jarboe returns to her melodic vocal style to lyrically play

with rock and roll gender stereotypes: "You wear a dress of blood and lace

. . . Your lipstick smear across your face . . . Strap on your guitar, now

spread your legs just like a star / And I'd like to eat her breasts and know

God." The result is tantalizingly erotic.

SFTB's most intense moments, however, belong to Gira, who, for all

his previous excursions into the dark side of existence, has never sounded

quite so open and vulnerable as he does here on songs like "Animus" and

"The Sound," where his voice quivers and cracks with a mixture of

passion and emotional torment. "But I will contain all, that ever was or

will be," he sings during the former track. "Then I'll watch my skin

erupt, in a symphony of flames / Screaming out your name, screaming out your

name." No, we're definitely not in "Live Forever" musical territory here.

Gira even includes, on the medieval sounding "How They Suffer," taped

conversations with his father, who relates, in a voice of calm resignation,

the details surrounding the gradual loss of his eyesight, and with Jarboe's

physically failing mother.

The effect, however, is far from morbid, but instead compassionate.

Where once, in his youth, Gira justifiably lashed out against the

inequalities and fascistic elements which control our lives, making a virtue

out of his alienation, he has, in this final stage of SWANS, broken through

the barriers of his own ego to recognize and embrace the suffering of humanity

as a whole, to realize that the young man or woman all too quickly becomes the

old, that strong man eventually becomes sick, that we are all finally equal

in suffering and death. And in these final moments before the death of that

entity known as SWANS, Michael Gira stands revealed in his essence as a

philosopher in the oral tradition the Ancients, one whose public

journey has been as profound as any that the rock world has yet witnessed.

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