SWANS Soundtracks for the Blind - originally released in 1996, and the band’s last studio album prior to their 2010 reformation.
“This album has everything in there – all the ideas from Swans’ initial 15 years of work. There’s some contemporary recordings of the band as it existed in ‘96/7, with Larry Mullins on drums/percussion, Jarboe singing and playing keyboards, Vudi playing electric guitar, and Joe Goldring playing bass and electric guitar, and me singing and playing electric and acoustic guitar, but there’s also a huge amount of sounds and recordings that Jarboe and I collected over the years. These are reassembled, looped, mangled, and in many cases overdubbed upon to create new pieces of music… I really set my own trap, dug my own grave on this one. There was SO MUCH material to deal with, to sift through (whole trunks full of decomposing, moldy cassettes and discs with samples and sounds), and the task of making it into something coherent was at times debilitating. Really like climbing up a mountain of sand. I don’t remember why I set this goal for myself, to somehow incorporate such a ridiculously disparate amount of material. I think maybe it was so I could justify throwing all that crap into the local dump, which is what I did when I finished the album. But in the end, after centuries of picking at this huge iceberg of material with a toothpick, my trusty engineer Chris Griffin and I managed to sculpt something out of it. It actually breathes, seems to live, in most places I think. … When I decided to reform Swans in 2010 Soundtracks was what I referred to as a starting point”.
- Michael Gira / Swans 2018.
“Now that this last phase of Swans is over, I'm not quite sure it actually happened. It's already fading, like most things. I think we achieved something there though, and it was good after shows to go out and meet people and get a sense of how the music has affected them, either that night or through the years. I'm always touched when I hear the music has had a salutary effect on someone, since it's had the same effect on me - which is why I do it. So, even if the details are increasingly hazy, I feel we've left something positive behind, and perhaps contributed something worthwhile.
Now, as is natural, I'm looking towards what comes next. I'm currently writing new material for the next phase of Swans, some of which I'll perform on my upcoming solo tours. Sitting there alone on stage with a dead piece of wood and some wires and just my voice is a challenge I set for myself a number of years ago, trying to fully inhabit the same thread that's run through the music all along, with the simplest of means. I think I've gotten pretty good at it over time. I play the guitar my own way. I've never really learned how to play it conventionally and I don't care to do so. I could just as easily be hitting two rocks together. It provides a context for the voice and words, and just as in the music of Swans, when all the elements (known and unknowable) combine, it can lead to something beyond itself, which is always the place I'd like to go: somewhere else. I hope to see you there."
- Michael Gira / Swans 2018.
TRACK LISTING
VINYL:
A1 Red Velvet Corridor
A2 Helpless Child
B1 I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull
B2 Live Through Me
B3 Yum-Yab Killers
B4 The Beautiful Days
C1 Volcano
C2 Mellothumb
C3 All Lined Up
C4 Surrogate 2
D1 How They Suffer
D2 Animus
E1 Red Velvet Wound
E2 The Sound
E3 Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey
F1 Blood Section
F2 Hypogirl
F3 Minus Something
F4 Empathy
G1 I Love You This Much
G2 YRP
G3 Fan's Lament
H1 Secret Friends
H2 The Final Sacrifice
H3 YRP 2
H4 Surrogate Drone