We’d like to thank photographer Hugh McCabe for sending through this seductive and striking image of Swans taken at Supersonic last month. Hugh was specially invited by frontman Michael Gira to photograph the band using his unique double exposure technique, in which the film is exposed to different viewpoints for considerable time. This is a simplified explanation, so if you’re interested in hearing more about Hugh’s methods you can do so by reading his blog here.

Hugh, a musician as himself, has also written up an interesting piece on Swan’s latest offering ‘To Be Kind’ which can be read here. 

Image courtesy of Hugh McCabe

Festival headliners Swans are streaming their entire new album, ‘To Be Kind’, online at NPR Music. Listen HERE

Here’s what a few others have had to say about this 121 minute epic, but why not head on over to NPR Music and make up your own mind, before having your mind blown all over again when Swans take to the main stage at this years festival!

Last handful of tickets now on sale HERE.

“…‘To Be Kind’ is another remarkable achievement from a band that deals in nothing else.”4/5 – TimeOut 

“To Be Kind is the kind of record that Jim Morrison never lived long enough to make- a record of maturity after the madness, a record of exploration, extremes and subtle beauty and is the kind of record that the modern loveable Iggy is too scared to immerse himself in. It’s also a great glowering, rumbling two hours plus of music that you can get lost inside. A perfect soundtrack for late night drives and the solitude of the soul and also a very listenable journey into a heart of rumbling darkness.”  10/10 – LouderThanWar

“Frontman Michael Gira’s ever-abstract lyrics give plenty of room for interpretation throughout. Imagine Karlheinz Stockhausen’s jarring classicism, Captain Beefheart’s twisted blues, and the industrialism of Einstürzende Neubauten coalescing into a swirling musical miasma. Near perfection.” 9/10 – Clash Music

—-

Buy tickets for Supersonic Festival 2014 “Ltd Edt” HERE.

In the Mother of all interviews Michael Gira (legendary frontman of Swans) talks to journalist and music-enthusiastic John Doran of The Quietus (a legend in his own right). This is an extensive and fascinating interview which covers everything from Howlin’ Wolf to Haiti to Francis Bacon and well beyond…

Get a glimpse into Michael Gira head by reading the interview in full over at The Quietus. For fun, we’ve picked out a couple of quotes for you below. Swans bring their monolithic live show to Supersonic’s main stage in just a few weeks. Having just released their thirteenth album in just over three decades, To Be Kind, (which has been received rave reviews: 10/10 – LouderThanWar ; 4/5 – TimeOut etc.) our audience can expect a bold and uncompromising show from one of the world’s most powerful live bands. Don’t miss your chance to see these musical titans, the last few Supersonic tickets are available from HERE.

 —-

JD: Having attended Swans gigs between albums and the Kickstarter-style demo albums, you can hear this natural kind of evolutionary process taking place. What’s interesting to me is that although it’s undeniably an organic growth, there are things that do stand out to me on the new album. Yeah, sure, it’s still monolithic, but I think the grooves are maybe funkier, maybe even sexier… is that kind of a fair comment?

MG: Yeah, that was the intent, we did sit down and say ‘lets make a sexy groove’ because we’re so sexy…[laughs]

JD: Like Alexander O’Neal or something…

MG: What I discovered on the last record was that I wanted to push forward on this one. It was about this groove and how I could really focus on that, not necessarily these big sheets of sound, but more about the possibility to find something that could just keep going forever, without feeling mechanical. So we pushed that aspect. We often focused in on the rhythms, but the idea of us actually getting funky is pretty preposterous. It’s some kind of idiosyncratic version of that I guess, but it’s a fine line for us to tread, because I don’t want to be a white boy trying desperately to grow a big butt.

—-

JD: Something that I think is really interesting about Swans, is that you clearly came out of New York City, but if you asked most music fans, 99 out of 100 to talk about the continuum of New York groups, people would say Velvet Underground, Television, Modern Lovers, Suicide, Sonic Youth, maybe Glenn Branca, maybe Philip Glass, people usually wouldn’t say Swans. You were obviously from New York but you weren’t really a New York group, if you see the distinction?

MG: Well, I made a point of that. Whether it was career suicide or not, I don’t know, but I made a point of separating ourselves from other people in the scene, very quickly. At first we played with Sonic Youth quite a bit, we were friends, but that didn’t work out after a while and I just wanted to separate ourselves from that because I felt that was just another straitjacket, another cliché, and I wanted to make something that was ‘us’ or ‘me’ and not be attached to that.

 —-

Read in full here. The last few Supersonic tickets can be bought HERE.

Swans return to the UK this May for a headline slot at this year’s Supersonic Festival. Expect an epic set of pulverising tunes from the visionary frontman Michael Gira & his 6 man ensemble of music veterans. Having recently unleashed their extraordinary new album ‘To Be Kind’, we know it’s going to be one of this year’s highlights, so grab your chance to see them whilst you still can. Tickets here.

UNCUT recently reviewed the album giving it a highly respectable 8/10. They also had this to say:

“…these are not delicate symphonies. Nor do Swans jam, or employ anything as rhythmically complex as syncopation or tricky time signatures. Instead, these songs roll in like dark clouds, heave and grunt like a galley slave under the lash, or beat relentlessly, like a forehead hammering against a wall. It is much to Gira’s credit that he manages to make such music not just tolerable, but gripping.” – Louis Pattison, UNCUT.

Uncut also did a short Q&A with Michael Gira:

Q: When you were interviewed while touring The Seer, you were talking about writing ‘tender’ music…

A: “Exactly, that’s “To Be Kind”. It’s a song written for my fiancee. But whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m reading, whatever I’m watching, it all goes into the records. When I am blessed with a subject or a string of words that feel coherent, I get down on my knees and lick the ground in gratitude. For me, it ins’t an easy thing to write. Subject matter isn’t really an easy thing for me to control. I find it builds gradually over the course of the record.”

Q: Is “Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)” about Howlin’ Wolf?

A: “It’s not about him, no. I just kind of felt he was there with me as I was singing it. I don’t know what those words are, except me reaching back into this inner child place, which is not a sweet place necessarily. I noticed when I was singing, I was doing what the Wolf did, a bit – reaching into this unbridled id. And he did some really stupid things onstage, as did I. He’d do things like get down on the floor, get under some woman’s skirt and go like a-woooo! So I dedicated it to him.”

See Swans when Supersonic Festival returns next month! Due to the addition of a second stage and a whole new bill of exciting artists we’ve been able to release a limited number of additional tickets which have already selling fast. Don’t miss out on Swans and so much more this May 30-31st! Tickets here

Michael Gira says that being in Swans used to be like “trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you”. In which case, why has he resurrected the project, asks Frances Morgan

“Well, first of all, the correct term is disinter,” says a deep-pitched, sardonic and instantly recognisable voice in response to my first question about the reappearance of Swans, over a decade after their last album and tour. “Re-form… I mean, re-animate… er, re-start?” I flounder, stumbling over semantics, before I realise that the band’s originator, Michael Gira, is having something of a laugh with me.

This is something I never expected. From their formation in New York in the early 1980s with albums like Cop and Filth to dissolution in 1997 after live album Swans Are Dead, Swans’ music certainly changed and grew, the band’s sound spreading and blooming from dense No Wave assaults to sprawling, haunted songs, like ivy climbing and eventually claiming a derelict factory building. But it never let up: viewed in retrospect, Gira and his band were remarkable in being not only prolific and experimental – delving into different sounds, characters, atmospheres – but also remaining steadfastly intense, rarely sounding tired or predictable. Something big is always at stake in a Swans record, whether Gira or former co-vocalist Jarboe are roaring in anguish, hammering out a deadpan chain-gang chant, or steering a wistful melody with lyrics touching on pain, performance, sex, blood, God, power and control, damnation and redemption. But beyond the lyrics – and the stories of dysfunction and self-destructiveness within the band – it was the sound of Swans that hinted most at what that something might be. Gira has always been a brilliant arranger, adept at juxtaposing dissonance and almost sentimental melodicism; visceral intimacy and alienated machine-noise. As far back as 1987’s Children Of God, every song has its own well-defined world, every corner obsessively shaded in, whether a waterlogged country lament like ‘Our Love Lies’, Jarboe’s silvery psychedelic ballad ‘In My Garden’, or snarling, vast tour de forces ‘Sex, God, Sex’ and ‘Beautiful Child’. Later, field recordings would be added to the picture, but not necessarily in the ambient way the term suggests: taped conversations, overheard dialogues from parents, lovers, strangers, appeared in the mix, the effect both poignant and unnerving.

Read full interview – The Quietus

Michael Gira has reactivated his No Wave/industrial/apocalyptic folk project SWANS for the first time in 13-years, The Quietus asks him for a track-by-track review.
Read full article + listen to tracks here