Original subtitles

Okay, testing.. testing... This is, I Am the Sun.

I'm gonna play all of part A for you.

It starts out quiet.

And it gets more intense.

And when it's playing the...

When it's playing that part, the whole band's gonna be crashing on that,

so it's gonna be really intense,

and the other part's gonna...

Where does a body end?, actually it doesn't, does it.

I mean, in actuality it's quite porous

and we're completely, in a way, fluidly interconnected with the world around us.

And we're just a kind of temporary

agglomeration of molecules in the shape of a human body

that then, once we die, dissipates into the earth

and is fed on by other organisms.

And they release gasses in the air, people breathe it.

We're all just floating pods

in underwater environment,

just dissolving and feeding on each other.

I think it's specious to think that our individuality is

of really tremendous great worth.

And I'm still totally flummoxed

at the fact that I even exist.

It just makes no sense to me at all

that I'm here breathing or that this moment right now

just past passed and it's gone.

Where is it? Where am I right now?

A big question always is,

do I really exist?

Michael is a singular creator

and I think that puts him within a world

for which there are few members.

There's something sacramental about Swans music.

Michael is reaching in his...

whatever this is, you know,

in his yearning, to make something happen.

He's reaching into the mysterious and the sacred.

Which is what music is.

What makes Swans unique is that Michael is the real deal.

He's crystallizing this vision that he has had.

He's still able to tap into these fundaments of life

and very basic feelings.

And there's a honesty and a passion

and a realness to what Michael's doing.

And he does that at the expense of everything.

And when he's in the middle of that musical maelstrom,

that's all that matters, to create that moment of ecstasy

and that moment of euphoria.

The essence of music is regrouped one single band.

And I feel very lucky

to have been able to witness this era of Swans.

He's a survivor.

Sometimes you encounter people like that,

people that just won't give up.

Just, knock me down,

but I'm gonna just stand back up.

I think his self-consciousness

has just been whittled away at over the years.

So that when you watch him on stage,

you feel free.

Even when this music is really dark,

or the words are really twisted, or whatever,

watching a good performer like Michael and a band

so beautifully locked in,

is really liberating.

It's almost shamanistic.

He's taken on this job.

He's just, okay, this is my job.

I'm Michael Gira, I'm a shaman.

Anybody living a life,

if they look at it with a deep introspection,

would see their life as a spiritual journey.

It just so happens in my case, I leave track marks behind.

♪ I was born ♪

♪ Under a wand'rin star ♪

♪ I was born ♪

♪ Under a wand'rin star ♪

I think the first time I actually heard about

Michael Gira in New York was, my band, The Coachmen

and we were flyering our posters around for our next gig,

wherever that was.

And I remember being inside the club

and the rest of my band came in and they were just furious.

And they were like,

"There's this guy outside, he's a total asshole.

He's ripping down our Coachmen flyers

because we put them on top of their flyers.

It's this band called Circus Mort."

And the name Circus Mort sort of stuck in my head

because I did see their flyers around.

We put up posters all over the damn city

and worked really hard to try and get some kind of attention

and following, and just played all the time.

But the music, although I thought it was good at the time,

looking at it now, was your kind of

slightly psychedelic new wave music.

And I didn't know what the hell I was doing

because the music that I really liked wasn't like that.

We just decided that it wasn't working, I think.

I mean, I think the last show we did, we were all on acid

and that was a pretty strange experience

and it just kind of fizzled out, I don't know.

So when Circus Mort broke up, actually that night,

at the band meeting, Michael and I went out

to go to a bodega and pick up some beer.

And on the way out to walk,

Michael asked me if I wanted to work with him on a project.

He already had a name for it.

He said, I'm gonna call it Swans.

I've got a couple of different folios of stuff here

to show you of Swans.

Here's a couple versions of that shot.

Just a few different prints of it.

Now here's an early Swans poster.

That's the color Xerox original.

This is the kind of poster you'd flypaper around town,

put on all the derelict buildings with wheat paste.

At some point I took these pictures of Swans

in Michael's apartment in the East Village.

These are the ones with the noose.

Here you can see the noose in the front of the,

that was Mike's idea I think.

Mike was a very combative person in those days

and I think to make the kind of music he was making,

he had to be that way to a degree

because it was very aggressive.

He was really dredging deep into this

darkness, you know?

And it affected his whole persona.

It was a dark period in New York.

Mike was living in the midst of that

East Village war zone when it was very a heavy time.

Just garbage everywhere in the streets.

There were intense epidemics of heroin use

and a lot of drug-related crime and violence and break-ins.

New York was a dangerous place.

I got mugged... a guy held a knife to my throat,

pushed me against a wall, while another guy hovered

with a knife, and they took my money.

Other than almost shitting my pants,

it was not fun.

And I just was so shaken that I went back home and hid.

How difficult it was to make it in New York,

to just survive in New York.

And I think Mike's aggression

towards just what one had to do to live,

like, in a way, you had to debase yourself

living in these shitty flats, and taking some crappy job

in order to make enough money to pay your rent.

I mean, I think, all of that stuff was an affront to Mike's sensibility in a way

and he wanted to throw it back

in a way that he felt reflected what he was going through

and what he saw around him.

Swans definitely had their own unique,

sort of, way of presenting things.

And it was very much a product of Michael's persona

and his aesthetic which seemed very stark.

Swans reputation preceded them immediately

upon their first performances,

as one of the loudest and heaviest, slowest bands to see,

and absolutely uncompromising.

And so, I had to go see Swans,

and of course was floored immediately.

And in love.

Swans were just absolutely brutal

but absolutely beautiful.

In the midst of that sound in some of those shows in the early days,

it was literally like I'm standing there

and I'm sort of body-slammed by this sonic event.

And it would propel me around the stage,

propel me into the monitors, falling on the monitors.

And it was just kind about literally

an act of very positive self-destruction,

wanting to make it sound as violent,

caustic and abrasive

and emotionally disruptive as possible

and basically having a desire for more sound.

More, more.

My first memory of seeing Swans was at the Pyramid Club.

I wasn't quite prepared for the overwhelming nature

of what Swans was all about, I mean, at that point

it sounded like it was really fully formed.

It was very all-enveloping.

That Pyramid gig, he was just like,

"I'm gonna come out here, I don't care who you are, I'm gonna decimate."

He was on it.

Just spreading his blood and guts

and everything into the audience.

And then I went downstairs

into the tiny little dressing room

and Michael was sitting there,

his eyes like this

and a stream of snot coming out of his nose,

just sort of hanging, and just like...

He couldn't talk. His brain, everything was gone.

He was just like, he had just expended himself

so much on stage that he was just like...

like he was like a feral animal

who just came running out of the woods

after being chased by a wolf or something

and had just been attacked and he was just like...

Well, the tempo of it, it was unusual in its tempo.

It was very slow.

I mean, it was attractive because of that.

It was singular.

There wasn't anything else like it.

It was notable.

We stood up and we took note.

It started slowing down naturally,

but to give Jonathan Kane credit,

he played me some blues music,

and particularly, Howlin' Wolf.

We gonna play, Evil.

There was a Howlin Wolf song called Evil, and by the way,

I'd been obsessed with that song

since I was about 14 years old.

I just found that to be most amazing, sensual,

primal groove possible, particularly the song Evil.

The rhythm to Evil was this swing time, break down, it was...

There's an early Swans song called Blackout

which basically, I was playing, Evil.

For me, creating the rhythm in Swans was all about

just to break it down, slow it down

and create a rhythm that nobody else was doing.

And I think we succeeded in doing that.

It really just was wanting to make a sound

that was just so overwhelming

that it just ripped out your

mind, your soul and your intestines all at once.

It's just wanting to experience it.

It was just the feeling of the time

and the feeling of my psyche

you know, it took a lot of work to get people

that could relate to that, actually.

I somehow started catching things on WREK

on this show, Conceptions, a mysterious show late at night.

Power for Power from Filth came on

I was in my mother's kitchen,

I was making oatmeal cookies.

And I had the radio on.

And I was immediately attracted to it.

Found out that it was this band, Swans.

Could not find their album anywhere.

What really appealed to me was that it sounded very tribal.

The slow chorus of the guitar and the drums

and the sloganeering, the mantra, the repetitiveness

especially at the end when it's "Power for Power"

"Power for Power"

"Power for Power"

To me, it had the kind of processional vibe.

It was very unusual.

And I could not find this album anywhere so I drove to the station

and I

borrowed

the station's copy.

Swans and Sonic Youth formed

a really tight bond in those early days.

We really started out together, we rehearsed together,

we hung out a lot together.

We became really good friends and we were just bumming around.

We had no money, nobody had any money.

We would spend whatever quarters we could find

on playing Ms. Pac Man in these bars

on the lower East Side.

It really fit our brains.

We just kept doing it, and doing it, and doing it.

And we kind of found glory in our poverty.

I started a fanzine just then called 'Killer'

and I put Michael on the front

where he's screaming in a microphone

'Killer' fanzine.

Where we practiced was filled

with amplifiers and guitars and all that stuff.

And the front room just had a squalid mattress in one corner

and maybe a hot plate to cook on or something like that.

But, Mike had done these large drawings on all the walls

and they were really amazing drawings.

There was creatures with huge,

spurting penises on the walls.

It actually looked amazing.

When you see a spurting penis in graffiti

on a punk rock club wall, it comes across as

some kind of a juvenalia, hokum.

And that's not the sense I was getting

from what Michael was doing.

I didn't, I thought he was actually very artful.

The 'Bunker' became this real factory

of Michael Gira mind explosion.

We weren't really getting much love in New York City,

Sonic Youth and Swans, in the early '80s.

So we decided that we needed to play

somewhere besides New York City.

And it was Lee's idea, Lee Ranaldo,

to actually rent a van and tour.

And it was Michael who

said, let's call it the Savage Blunder Tour,

because the idea of, we were kind of just blundering about,

and it was savage.

Lee called these clubs up

and got some commitments to play

and so we had gigs.

We all got into this windowless van.

Nothing in the back except for our bodies,

slave ship style, like this, and we just took off

and we went down and we played in front of nobody.

I think there's some people in D.C. who came to see us.

Nobody made any money.

I mean, we were maybe able to pay for gas,

a donut here and there.

But we really got to figure out

what it was to play for people.

We played these places

and some of the people who would come were like,

young kids, who were just like, there's some

hardcore bands from New York in town tonight.

And they'd come and they wouldn't see hardcore,

they wouldn't see, the typical, hardcore,

Minor Threat style band.

They saw something else entirely.

But it was just as loud

and just as hardcore as hardcore could be, but it was us.

We would come out, generally first,

because following Swans was not a good idea

because they were so ferocious.

We were both in our own ways, pretty extreme bands.

I mean, Sonic Youth was playing in all these weird tunings

and doing stuff with our guitars,

drumsticks and screwdrivers under the strings

that people hadn't seen before.

And Swans were this incredible high volume onslaught

with double bass guitar,

and people banging metal percussion and things.

Though we didn't really sound anything like each other,

we banded together just because we needed strength.

And being together gave us strength.

I was about, let's see, 22, 23.

I'd never seen Swans.

I had heard about Swans, but I had never seen them.

Harry Crosby approached me and he said,

"You should come and audition for this band I'm in, Swans."

We're looking for a guitar player.

Michael's instructions were, you play low

and then when there's a signal you play high

and just, feel the music.

I suppose I passed, I guess.

There was personnel changes

right from the very beginning.

Sometimes they didn't work out musically,

but just as often I probably drove them away

because I was very dictatorial.

Even though at times I didn't know what I really wanted,

I just was pushing things

to try to find out what it was I wanted.

Try to find this sound

and I didn't have a very good power of persuasion.

I yelled a lot, drank a lot,

and I'm sure that I was a very abrasive person.

That's just who I was at the time.

I was just this broiling mass of

rage, love, anger,

pain,

fear,

all of those things, it was all broiling around in me.

I was at his place

and he got a fan letter

from Atlanta, Georgia.

And the person's name was Jarboe

and it was a really interesting fan letter

because it was asking kind of questions

about Swans music and himself that were kind of striking,

as if this person who wrote this letter

was really curious about this individual

and was kind of relating to this individual.

The letter that I sent up there to Michael

with a cassette of work that I had done and a photo,

it was introducing what I was doing

and what I was interested in as an artist.

So it was basically almost a resume or a portfolio,

in very avant-garde way, to show every possible accent,

tonality, breathy, really a full vocabulary

of what the voice I could do at that time.

So I put that on a tape and I sent it up there

with a hand that I cut out of a magazine,

with these claw fingernails, I photocopied it.

The hand was holding the tape and then there was a photo

with the person I was doing the zine with.

He was reading this letter to me

and he was like, "I don't know how to respond to this guy.

It's almost like he wants to meet me or something.

I feel really kind of nervous about this letter."

And I was looking at it and I was like, "That's a cool letter.

And I was looking at the photographs, and I was like, "Michael"

I don't think it's this guy,

I think it's the girl.

I think Jarboe is the girl, not the guy.”

And I remember Michael, all of a sudden go like,

"Oh, you think so?"

Jarboe was chosen because you don't know,

is that a man or is that a woman?

And that was the whole point, to be completely not

representing yourself as a female or a male,

just representing yourself as an artist

without any expectations.

And the next thing I knew, Jarboe was in town.

And they were, and I was like, oh that's the,

and she was really interesting.

Michael felt an openness with me for my input

just because we were friends

and there was some trust there.

And I think he was curious about evolving.

He invited me to come on the tour

and I flew over there in a heartbeat.

It's 1984. Zurich, Switzerland.

I'm outside the vocal booth

where Michael is recording the vocals

for the Young God E.P.

At the time in Swans, Michael was shouting

and screaming his words.

I suggested he try something new, something different.

I really wanted to hear him attempt to do long,

heavy, deep in the chest notes,

instead of just this shouting

and the talking and the screaming.

Do more vocalizing, from the singing point of view.

And I had suggested during a break,

just through the door, just try that.

And he actually did it and it was so exciting

to hear him do the long, descending note.

And it's in evidence on I Crawled.

And this was really I think a major move forward

in my opinion for his vocal style

and for the way he would approach music.

♪ We'll ride ♪

Jarboe taught me to sing from your stomach.

It was hard for me to grasp how to sing from down here,

rather from up here.

I would constantly lose my voice

because I was singing from here.

But if you push the air up and out

without occluding it with your vocal chords,

or tightening your throat, you're less likely to lose your voice.

And you'll have more bellowing power,

which of course I wanted.

And at the same time,

Michael and I were developing feelings for each other

and developing a relationship that was very, very intense.

The show at The Loft in Berlin,

he took his entire earnings of that show

and he bought me roses from a street vendor in Berlin.

And this was kind of a powerful moment for us

in terms of our communication

and bonding, you know.

♪ I'm wearing your flesh ♪

♪ Your flesh in my face ♪

That's the front room and over here is the bar

and I was actually working at the bar.

Actually I took them there

and I was working at the bar,

yes, and he got piss drunk.

♪ You're superior ♪

I know that I was very, very impressed

with the shows that they played in Berlin,

with Roli Mosimann as the drummer.

This ultra, ultra slow and loud period.

I liked that very much.

♪ You're corrupt ♪

I wanted to be a part of Swans.

I was an unstoppable force.

I saw the future of Swans, I saw the power of Swans,

I mean, I really believed in Swans and I believed in Michael

because they were doing something

that nobody else was doing, in my opinion, then.

Rob Collins had started a satellite label

of Some Bizzare called K422.

And it was Jim that gave us a cassette of the

Swans album, Cop.

Swans recorded Cop pretty soon after I had met them.

I was friendly with Rob and I said,

"You gotta listen to this."

And Jim said, "You should work with this band, they're just incredible live."

"This is gonna blow your head off."

The offer was made, yes. We want to put out your record,

we want to record you.

And I remember walking through the streets of London

after that meeting and Michael was just on Cloud Nine.

He had this big smile on his face,

he was almost dancing on the sidewalk.

He was so happy, cause this was a huge, huge moment.

We hadn't heard anything like it really.

It was kind of just really exciting.

Michael is a person I feel that had such an

incredible early life filled with

a lot of intense experience and intense emotion that

if he had any musical training,

it might have gotten in the way of him

accessing those emotions and releasing those into his music.

And so in a way, when you listen to Swans,

you're getting an undistilled pipeline

back to Michael's psyche that is really,

really very much his own.

From a young age,

I felt completely separate from other people.

I didn't really have a relationship to

society in any clear way.

I felt self-sufficient and also kind of

abandoned and on my own in the world

and it was my place to claw my way out of it.

My mother, she was a tragic alcoholic

and didn't really raise me in any way.

I was a pretty messed up kid.

I was in a lot of trouble all the time with the police.

I was arrested constantly for breaking into houses

and vandalism and taking drugs.

I started taking a lot of drugs at a very early age.

When I was thirteen

I had a big baggie full of Sekanol on me

and I was just falling over and stumbling

and someone called the police and they came

and they arrested me with all those drugs.

And that's when the police laid down a condition

to my mother that I could no longer live with her

or else I was going to go to juvenile hall until I was 18.

So my father, who was then living in Germany, came out and got me.

So then we moved to Europe.

He took me to Paris first with him

and I ran away from there.

Just feeling the call of the wild of the times.

I met a bunch of pretty scraggly hippies and I went with them.

Wildness was in the air and I just left.

I didn't have any sense of who I was or what I was doing.

We hitchhiked to Amsterdam,

panhandling barefoot on the streets

and living in squats and the whole thing.

And the police came and arrested us all

and I spent a couple weeks in jail in Amsterdam.

After having been to some of these rock festivals

where I saw some really great music on LSD,

I saw Amon Duul, I saw the Art Ensemble of Chicago,

I saw Frank Zappa, I saw Soft Machine.

I saw early Pink Floyd around the Umma Gumma time.

I remember seeing them perform that and it was just,

cause it's such a slow, tense build and that scream is just...

That's beautiful.

I mean, it was definitely an influence, not stylistically,

but just in terms of the dynamics.

Turns out that the police contacted my father

cause he of course had Interpol looking for me.

And then we had a meeting, my father and I, I suppose

and the deal was that I was going to either work

in this factory in Solingen, Germany.

And I guess he figured that would show me what's what,

or I would go to this Swiss boarding school.

And so I chose the factory, of course,

cause he thought I'd last a week or month or something.

To me, this Swiss school just seemed like prison camp.

So the next day these older hippies and I,

we decided to go to Israel.

So we hitchhiked from Solingen down through Germany

and through Yugoslavia and then through, into Greece.

And then went from Greece over to Turkey

and stayed in Istanbul,

pretty penniless.

We left Istanbul and we went to a kibbutz in Israel

and they had procured a bunch of hashish

and then hitchhiked down to Jerusalem

and ended up in a hostel in Jerusalem,

and I was attempting to sell it there,

and the police walked in with uzis and I was arrested.

I ended up staying a month and a half in the jail in Jerusalem.

And then I subsisted in Jerusalem by panhandling,

and then I sold my blood.

I went to trial and I was given an additional month.

It was supposed to be a juvenile prison, but I was sent to an adult prison.

It was horrible and it was something that a young boy shouldn't have experienced.

In prison, I realized the most important thing was time

because anybody that's been in jail knows that time crawls

and there's virtually nothing to do.

I did read a great deal for the first time in my life.

And that probably helped me a lot.

Do you think that had any bearing on the rest of your life, and. also maybe a sense of urgency?

Yeah, sure, it was like a panic to get shit done.

To make sure that I actually did something.

And I still have that, to a certain extent.

I think we all should.

It was the Dalai Lama that said that

if death was staring you in the face at every second,

you'd be in the correct consciousness.

My father must have been out of his mind with worry.

And that's the kind solipsism of youth.

Once he found me, my father sent me back to Southern California.

I thought I was an artist and I had found my calling.

I was drawing constantly.

I was kind of obsessed with Robert Crumb

and read somewhere that he recommended

drawing 50 drawings a day, so I had notebooks

and I would just draw constantly, do 50 drawings a day.

I got pretty good at drawing.

This must have been 77 or something.

All these bands played just around the corner from OTIS

at some kind of Masonic hall

and since I had been listening to punk on the radio,

I was really interested.

That concert was just so shambolic and so violent,

that it just clicked with me.

I had seen Suicide play in Los Angeles

and they played at a tiny little place with no stage at all.

So the audience was at the same level as them performing.

And they were typical LA, audience, pretty closed-minded

and couldn't deal with Suicide.

And so they were spitting

right in his face as he was performing.

And he'd just go, ah, ah, and he'd put it in his mouth and say,

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you."

Hit himself with the microphone and then continue.

And to me, that was just utterly inspirational.

Punk just seemed to be saying all the right things

which was, it kind of embraced,

swallowed up consumer culture

and then spit it back out at you in a kind of mangled form.

I remember Michael thinking at some point

something was gonna happen to bands like us.

♪ Wrap your skin ♪

♪ Around my skin ♪

I saw Swans

February '86 at U.L.U.,

and reviewed that gig,

and that was it for me, that was it.

I don't mean to speak in cliches,

but I didn't actually have words to describe it

except when I had to put it down on paper.

And to this day, I still don't have proper words

to describe what happened that night.

It was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

It was louder than Neubauten

and Neubauten were pretty loud.

Swans were not into protecting your hearing

so there you go...

Swans really went way past music.

Michael and Swans at that time were interested in finding out what sound did

Just raw sound. Seeing what it does.

Almost like a gun pointing at somebody's head. And see what happens.

It was an almost transcendental experience when you were hearing it.

There weren't many people who wanted to review a Swans record,

or go to a Swans gig and review it.

In fact, hardly any.

You could sit down and try and persuade people, and they'd be like "No, no, you know...

You're off your nut!"

And even if you read the music papers,

you had to go into very specific, specialist shops

to be able to actually get a copy of those records.

Having thought about art a great deal, I realized that

iconic images were very important towards

conveying a message,

but the message to me was important that it be blunt,

but also obtuse and hard to parse.

I had a great affinity for writers that wrote

in very cold language about

horrific events.

And I kind of liked that idea of having this blunt language

but it didn't really mean what it said.

And that's kind of how advertising is as well.

You have these bold statements

and then there's always this tremendous amount of subtext

that are designed to send tendrils into your consciousness

and lure you into their world,

so all that kind of went into

the use of that iconography and those images.

♪ Open your mouth ♪

♪ This feels good ♪

♪ Open your mouth ♪

♪ Here is your money ♪

Michael, he'd always say these really primal things like,

"I love you", "Walk away."

♪ I love you ♪

♪ I'm worthless ♪

♪ I'm worthless ♪

♪ I love you ♪

Jarboe was playing keyboard and doing backing vocals

and wearing some sort of see-through smock.

And it was something else

people didn't know what to make of it.

People did not know what to make of it.

But Jarboe was brilliant.

I I'm sorry I

♪ I won't do it again ♪

Secret Weapon, and Attack Dog.

Both expressions Michael would use in interviews about me

and what it meant to me was, the unexpected element.

I remember the first time I opened a show singing,

I was alone on the stage singing to a loop on my keyboard.

It was like being a sacrifice, a sacrificial lamb

and I actually kind of enjoyed that

because it was a way of reflecting how strong I could be.

And so we'd go out there cold, alone, and open the show.

I'd be kneeling on my knees,

singing Blackmail.

♪ Close your eyes ♪

To go out there in front of an audience, primarily male,

that has come to be bludgeoned with loud, heavy,

percussive music, is a very extreme place to be.

Here you are, you're offering yourself, you're completely vulnerable to them.

So coming out, alone, a woman, and singing to them,

It's like they're being set up for what comes later.

And I think in the case of those days,

before I developed my own audience in the band,

it made them angry, so I had things thrown at me,

yelling, spitting, every insult you could possibly hurl.

Show us your tits, was one of them.

And I didn't miss a note because the attitude was like,

you're not gonna even phase me, I'm not gonna even react.

Now Al [Kizys] reacted to it in England one time.

And I heard these cowboy boots come stomping out

and he came up to the edge and started screaming at them.

"Shut the fuck up, shut up!"

And of course, I still continued to sing, un-phased.

Un-phased by Al or by the audience.

♪ I'll be your body when your body is broken ♪

As a performer you get really strong

when you go through stuff like that.

Jarboe was a good foil for working alongside his intensity.

I think she offered some more subtleties.

Between them, there was some light and shade.

[Algis Kizys] He don't look American, but he is.

Whooo, look at those tongues.

They be all hairy and pimply.

Uh-oh, we got to go.

[Radio] This is American Top 40, my name's Casey Kasem,

and our countdown to the number one song in the land continues.

♪ Number 20 ♪

Here's a song that hit number one in five countries, including the U.S.

Who's That Girl by Madonna.

Children of God was just like a bolt from the blue.

Because you don't know what to expect, what's coming next

after...

what had gone before. You don't know what to expect.

What Swans had done up 'til then was very specific

and then they started branching out.

And they thought they could bring their ideas,

which some people would say were extreme,

into the mainstream.

How different Swans music was

compared to everything else going on at that time.

There's times I got off stage in those days

for sure I knew at that time, on that day,

we were the best band in the world, for sure.

Children of God kind of grew organically

out of being obsessed with the money thing.

I was just thinking about religion and sex

actually as being one more kind of way

of subsuming yourself in

an entity or ideas outside yourself.

Sex being the way that it's perceived in the media and things.

I just started writing with that theme in mind.

[Jimmy Swaggart] He's coming again, he's coming again,

I remember seeing Jimmy Swaggart who was a great

rock performer, actually.

But it was Jesus that hung upon the bloody hill

And just being amazed at that and seeing the power in that

and wanting to access that idea

with the notion of God and religion.

But it is a gift of God!

I was just accessing that language because it seemed right.

♪ Come into me, Lord ♪

♪ Come in now ♪

Without really moralizing about it.

Get in it and serve God and worship Jesus with all of your heart.

♪ Praise God ♪

♪ Say His name out loud ♪

♪ I am sexless ♪

♪ And I am impure ♪

I'm not making a comparison to Bowie,

but I think Michael's got this ability to reinvent,

change direction, he's not afraid to mix it up.

He's not afraid to sort of

confront his fans with something completely different

and if they don't want to go on his journey, that's fine.

Gradually, I started to suffer under the illusion

that I could actually sing songs

and I started to write songs on acoustic guitar,

which were tentative affairs at best at the beginning.

But I eventually taught myself how to do it,

fairly well I think.

I remember having a conversation with Michael

before they made Children of God

and he was telling me that he wanted

to bring in acoustic guitars

and have more of a song-based structure to that record.

And I was a bit shocked 'cause I was just,

"No, just keep it loud."

Just keep the volume and the intensity”.

Hopefully, people were able to get something

real out of it.

I was consistently trying to break through things

and get to a place that had a light in it.

♪ Because I love you ♪

♪ You can trust me now ♪

You know, the sound was never that loud

just for ya-yas, it wasn't this macho idea of anything.

For certain things, you need certain volume, and then stuff happens.

There's this thing called 'opalescence',

which is sort of a phase transition, you know, that happens

and sort of gives off this little bright light.

That's why they call it opalescence.

So that's what would happen with the sound.

At a certain volume, there's this phase transition

where the sound becomes almost liquid.

The sound starts to dance, it becomes this other thing.

It's a beautiful thing to see

and that's what we were trying to do.

I remember on stage, it was really a good feeling,

a good atmosphere, the sound was so good

because it was where it's supposed to be.

We were so loud, we went over the curfew

and so they pulled the plug

on everything but the vocal mic.

So all the instruments were dead

and so we just walked off stage and Michael continued

to shout and scream through the microphone,

alone on the stage.

So I don't think that was particularly polite that they just

cut you off.

I remember him coming in to the dressing room at the end,

just furious.

And the press in England didn't help by saying that,

I never saw happen, that people were throwing up

because of the volume and all this business.

You know, it kind of got this reputation

that the reputation preceded the name

when it was just known for nothing but bludgeoned loudness.

And that was not the idea.

Do you find that there's a chance that you may break through now and get some attention because

you've been around eight years

and still Swans are only contained within their group.

Well, I think that's natural because

what we did for so long

wasn't exactly

mass market potential.

Although I was reminded by a friend of mine just recently,

that I never could understand why it wasn't on the charts,

but considering what it was,

I don't think that was a very realistic outlook.

I was seduced by the potential to actually make

a decent living at music and acceded to these things.

I know that I didn't want to live in

a dark, dungeon on Sixth Street and Avenue B anymore.

I think our aesthetics

were not necessarily correct for each other and so something

less than stellar resulted.

You know, God forbid a band changes a sound.

As a person you change, you can't become

a copy of yourself or a caricature of what you're supposed to be.

As a human being you change, your music changes, your ideas change.

At the time I thought it was working out.

But it just seemed that, that record went so far afield

from my core or who I am as a person.

What I would have seen was that as a transition

was these song-based things

with really cinematic and interesting orchestrations.

And instead it turned out these kind of

discreet orchestrations that were not expansive.

And I lost control of it.

But it's my fault that I lost control, it lost its center.

The gloss of Burning World to me was the issue.

This was a terrible, terrible, misstep.

The songs themselves are fantastic.

The songs themselves are amazing.

But still we weren't allowed into the mix, you know.

We weren't even allowed into the studio.

It was just too artificial an experience.

I think it was just kind of a shock for the fans

in terms of the whole machinations of that monster.

It was not a positive experience.

When I think about The Burning World,

I think it was an adventure

sideways for Swans.

So I look at it as just a very specific record unto itself.

I was happy that I signed Swans then.

I was thrilled, and I'm still thrilled

that I had that one document

that is unlike any other Swans record.

It had some good songs on it. It has the song God Damn The Sun on it which is

one of the best, lyrically one of the best songs I've ever written.

The classic Swans asthetic is there.

God Damn The Sun, like if you think of God Damn The Sun, that lyrics

I mean, that says all about the Swans asthetic which is this sort of

very personal, existential looking inside.

It's disconnected from the universe even...

It's disconnected from the universe even... "god damn

It's disconnected from the universe even... "god damn the sun"

that gives us all life.

When you sign to a major label your expectation is that your record does really well

and it sells in hopefully the six figures.

But sometimes that just doesn't happen.

It's about timing.

And I think

the timing of UNI Records was off.

The damage from that just psychologically

to me... there was a loss of confidence.

It always seemed to me that

Swans were waiting

to be accepted.

And it had nothing to do with the sort of material they were putting out

because The Burning World was a very accessible record.

But it seemed like

it was Sonic Youth that were getting more attention.

After The Burning World was finished,

I was left penniless as usual at the end of the whole affair

and had to claw my way back out.

Somehow I stood up again and put things together and moved forward.

But any number of great musicians have made really crummy music.

I've certainly made my share of crummy music

with some high points along the way.

But that was just a failed

avenue, like a dead end.

I found threads in The Burning World

to continue that were fruitful

to develop in the next record

which is pretty much how I always keep going.

There's someting in there that's worth

taking and moving forward with

and discard the rest and then move forward with that thread.

But I took control of production, and

I was listening to lots of Ennio Morricone then at the time, and Phil Spector

and I really wanted to try my hand at that sort of

uber grandiose production.

The whole M.Q. or basis of Swans was the idea of

have a sense of urgency and persistence

you know... keep going

There's that quote about talent... you know, talent is everywhere

the world will never hear from them, the world will never see it because they don't

leave their comfort zone and just be persistent.

Keep going, keep going, sense of urgency.

I like the way that White Light From the Mouth of Infinity was recorded.

It's got a sort of majestic precision.

I met Kirk Cobain while I was in Atlanta.

And he was a big Swans fan and he was like,

"Ahhh Swans, I love Swans",

I gave him my only cassette of

White Light from the Mouth of Infinity because it had just come out.

It's interesting from the recording process around the White Light era.

He was really working on making accessible music

He was still thinking you know, commercial music.

It was funny, because the music he was making was far from it.

White Light

had the intensity of the early music.

But it had more musicality.

I wouldn't have accrued the knowledge necessary to make

White Light without having

completely fucked up on Burning World.

So in a way failure is very good because

that's how you learn.

I write to create a mental or experience.

I did not sit down and say, 'Well I failed at MCA, now I'm going to write a song called Failure...

It's like that was within my vocabulary as a human,

thinking about failure / work.

And really that song, I think I wrote that in like an hour.

It just came.

♪ I've learned nothing. I can't even elegantly bleed ♪

♪ out the poison blood of failure ♪

I had this rudimentary bluesish riff and I just wrote the words and it came.

I was trying to steer him more into this Americana potential that he had.

He didn't really have the confidence in his own voice as, say like, a country singer.

Man, you have the potential to be like a Ray Price or something.

When I was fifteen years old, my boyfriend gave me my first Swans tape.

And like there was Swans!

And I didn't love heavy music

but when I heard Love of Life

I was like, "Oh my God, I get it"

It's not only heavy, aggressive music

It's also inviting and melodic and it's this ocean of sound and words

and all of a sudden I could understand wanting to listen to really loud music.

And I remember thinking like, The Burning World and Filth and Love of Life, sound like three totally different bands

what's the deal here?

To me, my ears, those are beautiful melodic,

dense and melody orchestrated albums.

Almost symphonic, they're so orchestrated.

Those albums have depth to them that are new.

You'd be hard pressed to find a band that occupies such a vastly different sonic identity.

Over that period of time.

But still remains very much kind of in and of itself.

Drainland is the record that actually really sticks with me.

I remember listening to

You See Through Me

Listening to that recording about his alcoholism,

I couldn't believe that this frightening figure like Michael,

is willing to make himself that vulnerable.

The alcohol was getting out of control.

I got to be somewhat infamous there in the neighborhood

because I would get so disgusted I'd head out the door and I'd hit every spot.

So I'd go into the bar looking for him to try to get him to come home

Sometimes he'd come home at dawn.

So that was a big problem all the time.

That was just an example of me recording,

because I wanted to show him later

what he was like.

I drank a great deal. I drank every day for 30 years,

and I drank copious amounts towards the end.

He is being shown in a very unflattering light.

It's not like opening up your heart, it's like dropping your pants and taking a shit in the room.

It's like "Oh my... what's wrong with you".

It's kind of like, that's the thing

He's standing up and saying, "I'm kind of a shitty person."

I don't know anyone else who has the nerve to do that.

I just happen to be a human, I'm sorry, and I just used that

recording because it was an interesting moment of humanity.

And then I captioned it with the phrase,

You See Through Me as an honor to her that this whole thing was placed there.

Having shown me what I was like, not that of course I paid any attention to it.

I had a call from the studio. My mother was not doing well

and I was taking care of her. I had to go at a moment's notice to drive

to do this vocal and then drive back super fast because of her.

And my dad had a small amount of really old whiskey in a cedar chest.

So I grabbed that bottle

and I drove really fast to where the studio was and tore up the steps

and it was literally slide in there,

press record, and I opened that bottle.

I just shot the whole thing back

to find that performer. And he left that in there

And he left that in there.

That stuff was nasty. That was me reacting to that.

I had to immediately go into character and do that ferocious vocal.

I knew Soundtracks for the Blind would be the last Swans album.

Kind of a summing up and an expulsion

of all the ideas that had happened previously.

Well, I've worked on it for 15 years, and

it's never really given me any brief rewards other than the music.

I still want to make music, but I just think that the name Swans itself,

after having been around so long in many journalists' minds or public

or even in my own mind, maybe it makes preconceptions that might limit it.

To me is best to just to set it aside and go onto other things.

The whole history of it, the aesthetic of, approach of it,

the perception of it in the public,

everything was a straitjacket at that point to me.

I just thought, it was time to end it. It just couldn't go any further.

I just thought, as an artist, it was time to...

kill it, so I did.

And simultaneously I guess, Jarboe and my relationship was deteriorating.

And I just felt it was time to just

cut the rope.

People would assume, because you broke up as a couple, the band ended and I would say,

"No, the opposite happened."

It was the death of Swans that ended the relationship,

because to me, Swans was our child

and I loved the group tremendously.

I mean, I moved heaven and earth

and left an entire life of people that loved me

to go live under those conditions and to go on those tours.

Now that was announced to me.

I was not asked my opinion of about it.

And because of that, I had an internal rage.

Soundtracks for the Blind, where you get that incredible exploration of soundscapes.

To me it was always a natural progression that that work would happen.

To me it felt very much like it fit.

There's an asthetic principle behind it all.

It's kind of Michael experimenting

with different ways of delivering the message

and playing with different musical approaches.

I started to think about the music as soundtracks and I started to look at it as

always emerging or evolving environments

that may or may not have some words in them.

My inspiration was to make soundtracks but not have a film.

That's what every record from White Light on has been.

When it comes to the production it's really about making a soundtrack of one big experience.

It's more about making a sonic environment for people to live in for an hour or two.

[Jarboe's mother] Today I don't have a fever. I feel about the same as I did yesterday.

The personal aspect of that album with the recordings

made with our family members.

With my mom and his dad who was going blind

[Michael' dad] I am what they call

legally blind

Our parents were dying

or near death, or losing their wits

and made a little homage to them.

You know, making it, putting it together and getting all the source material,

it was very, almost like

I don't wanna say diary but a slice of life

of what was really going on on a deep personal level.

[Michael's dad] They tried seeing together and couldn't and told me I'd lose my eyesight.

I just looked at all the material as being of potentially equal importance.

I had tons... I had trucks of floppy discs

of samples I had made over the yearrs.

Those were all fodders, everything was available to use to make this sonic picture.

I can hear the influence of Swans across so many different genres and so many different bands

and they don't get the props for it

Often in music there's no first prize

You don't get the prize for being the first person to do a particular thing

or among the first people to do a particular thing.

I think that was the right thing to do in his life, at that time.

It took a lot of guts

to shut that thing down, to shut Swans down at his age, at that point.

It made no sense to me after so many years of struggle

when I saw things getting better.

Everything was getting bigger,

the size of the audience, the choice of venue,

just everything was getting in my opinion so much better.

I'm gonna miss the music.

Thankfully I'll keep listening to them

as long as CD's last.

It seemed like the relationship was dissolving every night in one way or another

Not necessarily on stage but around the stage

during the travelling portion, soundchecks.

It was a very frought relationship.

I liken it to being stuck in a

weird kind of post modern version of

Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf?

Just being there you felt like you were in kind of like a

willing participant in this psycho drama that was happening

so it was a lot to be in that band at that time when the two of them were kind of

going slowly into their separate ways.

In the life of a performer there are these moments

that are magical and transcendent.

When you're so engrossed in that moment

and so at one, that you know

that you are experiencing

something that you will remember for the rest of your life.

The I Crawled performance, that was in my mind, a whole theater piece of multiple characters

to let those come to life from almost like a seductive breathy voice

into a lost little girl.

And then come down hard with the beast.

A very, very low sub voice,

which is a growl y, deep, ferocious tonality.

I was completely going into that role,

and I was really in a trance like state

where I rolled my eyes into the back of head,

I had no idea I was doing that.

I looked forward to that brutal growl at the end.

I felt very powerful doing that.

I knew that I could go as far with that baby as I wanted.

I gave it everything I had

because I knew at that point there was nothing that could stop me.

The end was an homage to Michael, referencing his voice on that song,

and going into the sub voice deep, deep down in my chest.

This was my way of showing love

to the band that I loved.

It was poignant beyond description to be playing to these huge, for us, audiences around the world,

but it was the last, it was the end, and we knew it was ending.

For me, I cried on stage a couple of times,

it was just sort of a bitter moment, bitter and sweet of course.

It was the end and I didn't really know what the hell was going to happen next.

At the very last performance that Swans did at the Astoria

there was this extraordinary moment at the end of the concert

when he actually came out onto the stage

and he was completely naked.

It was to be a goodbye in a sense, but a very powerful one, at that.

I thank you for your kind attention. We leave you now forever. Goodbye.

I thought of Swans as a failure.

I thought I'd failed.

For those who are wondering who I am,

I am no one.

I used to have this band called Swans in New York,

but general attrition took its course. That disbanded.

Now, I have a group called Angels of Light.

Michael, on the Young God site, blogs that he's just been listening to this album by Devendra Banhart.

That was the first time I think my name had been on the internet

I mean, I thought "F♪♪k, I made it"

This is crazy!

He wrote me a letter and he just said "Hey

do you wanna put out this record?"

It changed my life.

I was so into Angels of light and I was so into Michael as a writer

and so into at that point already loving Swans

The songs would be based on the lyrics and the basic acoustic guitar performance,

and that was a huge challenge to me which made it interesting.

For me coming from the history of Swans that was a huge challenge, so I pushed that.

The credo or the agenda was always the song had to be good,

just played by me on acoustic guitar and singing. It had to be good that way,

it should not require anything else besides that

to be convincing and hopefully powerful.

That's where it started and then I orchestrated on top of that.

Angels of Light unfortunately was a failure in terms of reaching a large amount of people.

[Jarboe] He never wanted to be a romantic hero or be worshipped.

This is going [back] to the whole punk attitude.

Refuse to be put on a pedestal.

Refuse to be a star.

Michael called in the end of 2008 one day out of the blue and it was just like,

"Hey, Todd, I'm writing songs and they're kind of angry.

I haven't written any angry songs like this in a long time

and I'm actually thinking about calling it Swans again."

I guess I viewed it as a last gasp,

the last chance to do this

and I wanted it to be as forward-thinking and as challenging

to both myself and the audience as possible

and to lead us to a place we didn't expect to go musically at that moment,

but try to do it in a way that is

in the moment and not nostalgic, for God's sake.

I think Swans needed to come back.

They had unfinished business.

Michael staked absolutely everything on a fresh roll of the dice,

on a complete creative gamble.

I was very nervous, but for someone who has had a lot of disappointments,

I was fully prepared to tank and fail completely,

and so because I was prepared for that,

the potential for catastrophe did not have as much weight.

So, when it started to become successful,

I had no expectations for that,

but when it started to become successful, it was wonderful,

and I just appreciate it

and don't count on that ever, at all.

I think Michael has done something

which very, very few artists do,

which is that he has continued to stay true to himself.

It's a spiritual journey from the early 1980s to now.

It's a pure sound,

and the purity of what he's doing is just like really,

I don't know whether it's healing or what it is,

but you know, there's something there

that's not available anywhere else.

When I saw the Swans play for the first time,

it was at the Bowery Ballroom and I'll never forget it,

because usually before a band starts there's this sort of,

pre-show mix tape that they have playing

or something like this

that people are just kind of mingling to,

but Swans, they just had a tone playing,

and it was just a really loud tone.

So, instead of being able to sort of talk over

and mingle with whoever you're next to,

you just were immediately, you know, slightly brainwashed

and just by playing that tone,

they took that venue and they made it theirs, like immediately.

And so everybody was just blissed out on this tone,

and everybody was like, yes, this is Swans.

I'll never forget it.

Okay, it's time to go.

I just thought that before I died, I wanted to experience the kind of

maelstrom, the swirling tornado of sound again.

I wanted to be inside that sound again.

I remember seeing the Swans show at Alexandra Palace

and I remember thinking after that, that's it,

I'm going home, I've seen what I need to see.

When I listen to Swans, especially when I see them live,

I feel like I'm seeing the whole history of music

being replayed in front of me.

It's not about what they're playing.

It's just a feeling I have.

Alexandra Palace, Gira kind of looked like

he was in a trance.

He just kind of started crying like a baby,

and at first people were kind of sniggering.

There was no music,

and it was becoming really uncomfortable

and then you noticed that people stopped laughing.

They weren't smiling, they were just like, what is he doing?

And suddenly this kind of cry

developed into just like a scream.

Like this kind of human scream of agony.

And then just the song kicked in.

That was so bizarre, and so moving, you know?

I've never see a band do anything like that before.

Performance is important to me.

I like the fact of music being a struggle,

being a physical commitment to make it happen,

trying to figure out how to make something

undeniable happen, just through your own physical energy.

To me, just being in there and just expelling sweat

and just feeling your body torn down

as the music's happening, it's kind of like penitential.

It feels right.

It's basically music that you want to play,

you want to write, but you never dare do,

because in order to achieve that,

you need to have to lived beyond consensus,

lived beyond expectations, you're absolutely mature

and you are ready to express yourself with no compromise.

[Norman Westberg] I had no idea that Swans would have these kind of legs.

I felt that back in the day we were doing something...

right.

You know, making a stand.

I felt it was important.

Michael's not a normal person. I mean, to have that kind of drive.

You're not a normal person.

Michael, he's always had zero

tolerance for anything that will get in the way of

him being able to do this.

Michael's always whipping the sound

into a fury and into an ecstatic release

of which, as an audience member, I had to surrender to

or it would have been too intense and probably driven me out.

That music is not for the weak.

It is about surrendering to the sound,

because it's like, why fight it?

You can't fight it, you know, just like, surrender instead.

The music becomes like a vortex that sucs you in and

it doesn't let you go until the music stops.

You become an animal that consists of all of us

You could call it a beast.

There are moments during a Swans show

that you're wrapped up in that ecstasy.

The stage becomes hallowed ground.

For a very brief moment, it becomes a spiritual ceremony.

It's Michael shocking us into presence.

I've seen him go into these trance-like states,

where he's punching himself

and slapping himself and hitting himself,

and he's doing that to shake himself out of himself.

He's doing that to get out of the way.

Behind that initial, very male and aggressive and some of the brutality of Swans

there's something very very sensitive, very very beautiful

and very very feminine.

Michael always

making a play for transcendence.

Reaching for divinity reaching for peace.

I think it really is Michael reaching for peace.

And you can see it in the live shows

That's where the shamanic quality of his

performing comes into play.

He's trying to claw his way into heaven.

It's like self-immolation.

He's trying to light himself on fire,

to just be free of the bondage of this sack of fucking flesh.

It's a beautiful thing to see.

I've thought about why that volume

two and a half hour bludgeoning is so cathartic for people

and that I think gets into the realm of

neuroscience that I am not qualified to speak about.

Swans now, it's a minimalist symphony orchestra

that happens to use amplified instruments and goes to 132 dB.

That volume is part of what allows what we do to transcend just music.

Michael wants to build the mountain as big as he can make it.

It's not a wall of sound, it's a mountain of sound.

It's a mountain range, it's like Mount Everest of sound.

Swans, they are so massive but also minimalistic in the way they compose music

using the same chords over and over and over again

but it always grows into something unpredicted and unknown

and the sound keeps changing all the time so you have to be very present

and you have to get into this meditative state of mind

and just be absorbed.

Much of the material does not have

a time structure or rhythm, even,

is that it's necessary for me to conduct

the waves of sound.

So, I've discovered that if I use my arms and my body,

it's almost like I'm playing an instrument,

but it's five other people.

I can move it, like a classical music conductor would

move the dynamics of the sound, with my body.

Those are things I do naturally

because the music kind of forces me to do those things,

and so I do them.

To me it's all about just atomizing

and having the music just completely erase you

for a brief moment of ecstasy.

They demand so much of an audience.

They demand a complete submission.

Michael as a performer really forces

everybody in the room into a

eviscerated space

where time and

space itself becomes so irrelevant to the experience.

Michael has suffered trauma when he was younger,

physical, spiritual, psychological,

and I think if you look at the arc

that his songwriting and music-making career has taken,

it goes through various stages,

almost like the stages of grief,

but I would say these are like the stages of...

existentialism.

You start off with trauma can induce this idea that

life is random,

it is violent and it has no purpose.

And often horrific things happen

to people who are innocent or have done nothing wrong

and it can take a lifetime to reconcile yourself to this fact

and I think you can trace almost like a history or time scale of how

you deal with existential trauma over the case of a lifetime.

And now what I think you've got in the autumn of their career

is something that's closer to almost like Zen Buddism

You've got an acceptance of like, yeah

life is random, it is violent, and terrible things

kind of happen to people who don't deserve it, or also

an acceptance of this fact and an ability to celebrate it.

At the core of it now is a celebration of life, I think,

and the possibility of love,

where you'd be hard-pressed to find that

in Swans' early music, though, I think.

Michael's creating a world

that takes you outside of yourself.

You're transcending yourself and your body

and the music takes on a dimension

and I don't think it's any accident that it has that dimension

with the volume, with adding that dimension of feel

hitting you so loud, you actually feel that resonating through your body

The music is so physical, so circular.

You fall into it.

It's not there, it's all around you and you're falling into it.

Definitely, that's the very heart of it.

We know we're making something that's strong

and has truth in it,

and then seeing an audience actually

receive that 'SonicTruth', to quote Thurston [Moore],

seeing it going into their psyches

and having them really feel the kind of joy

that we experience while were playing it,

is so incredibly rewarding.

Picture a snake moving along,

it's just, that's the music, the snake just moves along

and finds new ground as it goes,

and that's how it's developed,

but it's just allowing yourself to be enveloped

by the sound and just letting the sound push you forward.

I'm scared, make me not scared, Charles.

My children need this to be a good record.

It's on you, my children's welfare is on you.

With each chord change, with the same tuning,

so at the beginning...

♪ Glittering hands ♪

Michael is not really a musician

in the way that I think about a musician.

He's like a curator of noise, or sound, or something.

The music is the sound of the id.

This is what Swans is all about to me.

It's something...

that can't be attained in words, is what he's looking for, and therein lies the challenge.

It's a feeling and the only way to understand that feeling

is to try to get inside of his head.

But that to me is exactly what makes Swans work.

He surrounds himself with these

intellectual musicians that he beats to a bloody pulp.

It's just D-A-D

Right?

Low D, then A

then a high D

Thor, try dealing that last downbeat on the big drum too,

so itf'd be... da-da-dun dun — dun

Michael is not a fearless human, but he is a fearless artist.

Michael is more like a big picture visionary

with just a strange world view that comes across in everything that is Swans.

It's hard.

These are some lyrics that I wrote

when I was sitting at my typewriter

in my rehearsal space in 1982

and Sonic Youth asked me if they can use them

and I said, sure. It's called World Looks Red.

It was a popular song they did.

It's on Confusion is Sex, I think.

I haven't looked at them or thought about them in years

that I was playing this song, I'm gonna use them on.

I thought geez, I'll just use those words.

Let's start with you coming in before I sing,

doing what you just ended with.

It needs something else, it just sounds, again, like Samba,

and I'm this close to just ditching it.

I'm playing the, naturally I would play the G

in the break there, my part is in between.

Norman, I think you did, when we played it yesterday,

I believe that you did that strumming like that,

a little more often, I think that added a lot of tension, which I like.

Yeah, that's the part I liked.

So, let's try to see if we get in the song.

Otherwise, we're just gonna ditch the song.

Working with him has challenges.

It's hard to understand him sometimes, you know,

I guess the hardest part is really like

just the communication, misunderstandings

and the little details and the nuances

that make it difficult to communicate such weird concepts.

He just says conceptually what he wants you to do

and it can be difficult, and he can get frustrated

and everybody can get frustrated in the process.

- Start lower. - I know, I did.

- That's your lowest E?

- That's my, what do you mean by low?

- Lower. - I start lower?

On this final E.

That's my higher E.

You start lower on the final E.

- You do, you do. - You said the opposite yesterday.

No, 'cause it needs to go somewhere, start lower.

- Ready? - I need...

- Ready, one... - I need to understand.

- I need to understand. - This is what you did.

I'm just confused, explain it to me.

Go down the neck, play your lowest E.

Right, that's where your chord was, somewhere like that,

and you had a chord down there.

And then you do that for a bit then you go up higher

"cause we're staying on this chord now."

That's right, I went to the high chord...

- Okay. - Wait, wait, wait.

No, it's fine, whatever you want.

It's fine, I'm not arguing with you, do what you want.

Okay, let's just go without him, ready?

No, no.

He'll be back in a minute, he'll be back in a minute.

We gotta get this straightened out.

What? What am I supposed to say, that's the case!

I think I could've explained it to him.

I get caught up in the heat of the moment

and it's almost like yelling, you know,

arguing with family members.

Michael doesn't compromise, with us, as the band too.

He doesn't let things pass.

If there's something that bothers him,

he voices it and it gets fixed

because we're all adults here, we'll fix it.

That's the best yet.

I don't want you to ever lose that feel.

That's totally fucking righteous.

It sounds sonically great, too.

Michael sometimes has a reputation as being...

difficult.

Oh, he's very difficult, but you know, this is,

I learned this through working with Nick Cave,

or The Cramps or Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

All of these people I've worked with,

and Michael is one person I've worked with,

they share this very admirable trait

of defending their vision above all.

There's just no room for compromise.

It's a life's work.

Stay on the E.

Add a little eh-eh in the Es, okay?

Better feel.

You could pare it down even a little more, just drama.

You were playing more dramatically, too.

Then, come in after all that thing is what it needs.

We do this thing before all of our shows

where all six of us hug each member before we go on,

and it's a huge important part of the show

because sometimes when you're touring,

the day is just miserable and boring

and maybe you're getting on each other's nerves a bit,

but then there's that hug right before the show,

and it's like, remember,

we're here to do this thing for these people.

And it's good, important work, you know.

Swans have always been an epic sounding band.

And now finally the music has literally an epic form.

They're big pieces with lots of layers.

It is ear-damagingly loud.

On stage it is, doing it every night, yes.

That's another reason to wind it down.

I'd like to hear my children's voices.

Michael wants to stand in the middle

of the maelstrom of the sound

and I don't know how he's done that for so long

and still has any hearing left

because I have hearing damage

and I can't handle loud volume for too long.

There's these operations they can do now for ear damage.

They replace every little hair.

I would like it, my hearing's fucked.

[JG Thirlwell] Do you have tinnitus?

I'm beyond it.

But did you ever have tinnitus?

Not until this version of this band.

Yeah, because you know you can have hearing loss without tinnitus

Oh, I have tremendous hearing loss.

Every once in a while, I get the musical note thing.

But generally, it's like the waves of the sea,

it's just

If I'm in silence, it's like just...

Oh, so you do have that.

We had a great bonding moment the last time they came to Atlanta

about everything that was going on in his life.

We began to reattach as friends and really have the connection again.

For Michael to ask me to come and to sing Blood On My Hands,

it was a very healing moment for me, so it was

a very very important gesture.

I had a tremendous spiritual bond

and downright love affair with Swans.

It was something that you've given so much of your heart to

and you've worked so hard in for so many years.

Like you kind of feel invested in an intimate way

like your spirit is connected to it.

And of course I consider all those guys brothers.

I understood every millisecond of what was happening up there as an architecture.

I understood it and it felt weird to not be part of it. It felt weird.

At the end, the way they finish the shows,

they all come to the front of the stage and bow

and they're all smiling and happy.

You really feel they've gone through a battle

and they come out of it and they've done brilliantly.

And they stand there and they're smiling on stage,

they feel they've done a day's work

And I love that.

A lot of groups would just do feedback and walk off stage.

It all makes it very special

because he's so intense on stage, it's so 'other' onstage.

And then Michael goes straight to the merch stand

and starts interacting with the fans,

which I think is great.

I suffer from anxiety

and tonight shifted something for me.

- Oh good. - Thank you very much.

I'm glad it's positive.

It's like fuel to me when someone comes up to me

and tells me that the music

has helped them through hard times

or that they found something true in it

and how much it means to them, that's incredibly rewarding.

It's fortifying to know that I'm not doing it in a void

and that it actually has had an effect on people.

It's so sick how the way people get sucked up into the whole celebrity thing.

What a stupid way to look at existence, you know, you have this short period on earth

and you're going to wasted it thinking you're

some big deal. It's just stupid.

So people, they care about the music, they pay to come see it, they buy things.

I think it's important to meet them.

Find out what they're about.

Hello, I'm really unprepared, I don't have anything to sign.

Oh, I'll be happy to sign on that, yes.

It's my ticket.

Thank you for being here.

To Be Kind blew my mind

and it's changed the way I listen to music.

The way it's so brutal and vicious and hard to listen to, but the emotions are so raw.

It feels bigger than you are in a sense.

Something about it is kind of moving

in a weird sort of transcendental way.

When I listen to it I don't feel like I'm in control whatsoever

or I know what's going to happen even though I know the songs a million times

and it feels kind of like leaving my body.

Can you sign the back of my shirt?

Tonight, you really moved me to tears.

Thank you, just, thank you.

How old are you?

It's all there.

It was an amazing show. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Where'd you get this.

The sound is just amazing. Mindblowing stuff. Absolutely brilliant.

Yeah, first show.

It just completely blew me away like nothing I'd ever heard before.

Hey, you got a bootleg shirt on, take it off.

It's fantastic that some of these kids

are the children of people that went to the shows.

It's definitely the I word, legacy, I mean it definitely is.

[Michael] For your dad?

Thank you for the concert.

Sorry about my voice.

No, it was really good.

And the song from your wife point of view,

- I cried and it's amazing. - Oh, good.

I don't know, I cannot express it.

But it was really good, so thank you very much. - Thank you.

Seeing Michael again after all these years

was seeing like, my brother.

- How's it going? - I'm good, how are you?

Great to see you.

Historic occasion.

There's very few people I know in my life,

that I can just sort of like see after 10 years or so

and it's like, not a day has passed.

You alright?

Michael's certainly like that,

and it's been longer than 10 years.

I mean, he's still got his band. I don't have Sonic Youth anymore.

Oh, he's making huge statements now.

And Swans, their concerts are complete experiences.

Are you ready, we're gonna do a collaboration on I Wanna Be Your Dog

You wanna do that?

I'll play the bass, even though I can't...

To see Swans being so accepted right now,

that's really great for him.

And this place is completely sold out

and everybody's is standing there

and they're listening and they're all loving it.

For Michael to experience that in that part of his life,

finally, is such a glorification of being an artist.

Thurston Moore!

I was so happy and I was so proud that he was

able to be there and doing that.

I think Michael stands in the pantehon of

committed

artists.

Artistes!

Here was a guy who had a vision and he was not fucking around.

He did it and then he kept doing it and he kept doing it,

and he unflaggingly committed himself

to his muse and his inspiration.

He's had a huge impact on a lot of artists.

That's what matters.

I always thought that history

would be very kind to the Swans

because their output has always had

an honesty to it, and a real mastery

and an artistic vision that is so unique

and impossible to imitate really.

So they carved for themselves

the hard way, a very, very definitive, artistic niche.

And it will always be, I think, a really fertile well

of artistic content for people to return to,

in 20 years and 50 years

because of its integrity and purity and mastery.

There always has to be a next, an evolution.

As an artist, you're always gonna push until you fall over the edge,

so maybe Michael just hasn't found the edge yet.

I felt like as a group, as these six people,

that we have kind of reached the pinnacle,

the top of what we can do.

Anything else would be starting to

eat your own fingers or your hand.

It's just time to breathe a different air.

But we'll see you again.

It's incredibly spirited of Michael to call time

on this iteration of Swans.

When it's still building

and people now have very much a love for it,

and he can play to very large audiences around the world.

I think he's once again

doing the true artistic thing of saying,

this feels like it's about to get comfortable

and comfort doesn't equal good art

and now I'm gonna scrap it and start again.

The last one...

- Thor. - Such a pleasure and an honor.

You big galoot!

I arrived from [Republic of] Georgia from Tblisi

to New York City, especially for Swans concert.

I came from Tempe, Arizona.

I came from Providence, Rhode Island.

So, tonight I came from Montreal.

My son Joshua and I came from Vermont to see Swans.

Love of Life was the first album, I think,

I listened to by them and I was just really into it, yeah.

I flew in from Mexico City.

From Latvia, from Riga.

I came from Denmark.

I come from Sweden.

I came from Tulsa, Oklahoma today

to see Swans for the first time.

I'm 13 years old, I've been a fan since late 2016.

To Be Kind was my first listen.

My dad is also a Swans fan.

I got him into Swans, actually.

So, this was extremely important to me.

Swans is very special band for me

It's really emotional because it's Swans last shows.

Friends of mine came here from Paris..

And yeah, it's a big deal for people.

With some kind of quite stunning ups and downs,

they've had the kind of career

and dogged self-belief

and self-determination

that will make them an enduring name in music.

I think it's a name that will only kind of grow in time.

I want the music to continue to exist.

I think it's a positive force.

It's definitely an act of love, I've realized,

so that's a good force to have in the world.

And meeting people who experience it

and get something true from it

is a huge reward for me.

To feel like I've done and am doing

something worthwhile with my life.

I think I called Michael last year in a drunken state.

Not him, I was drunk.

I told him that I still consider him

a fellow traveler on the same strange path.

Unless you're making something, creating something,

you can't be actualized or whole or,

kind of, have a sense of being in your skin or in your body

unless you're doing it, you just have to keep on.

Some people might say it's a compulsion, but it's your DNA.

I can't see why he would stop now. You carry on till the bitter end, till you drop.

You drop and that's it.

You've had it.

Yeah, Michael Gira will never stop until a Samsonite shaped

tombstone rests six feet above his head.

I have to work, you gotta keep working.

A person's life is consumed largely by the work they do.

And if you're tenacious enough and fortunate,

you can figure out a way to, at least, subsist

on doing the thing that you were put on earth to do.

I mean, giving up is not an option anyway.

What else am I gonna do?