SECONDS-interview 1996

by Michael Moynihan



Not that many of you probably care, but I'll state my not-so-humble opinion: Swans are one of the only rock groups left in the country worth a damn. During their thirteen struggling years of existence they have never forsaken the frightening purity of their work. And if you can think of too many other rock bands deserving the title "pure"-save maybe for the Stooges-then I'd like to hear about them.



Formed in 1982 by singer/songwriter MICHAEL GIRA along with the recurring core of Norman Westberg (guitar), Al Kizys (bass), and a rotating door of other members, the band began putting forth an uncompromising claustrophobic palpitation, driving Gira's Iyrical explorations of domination and servitude stripped bare of any notions of romantic eroticism. After building up their sound into a veritable avalanche of sheer, atonal power in tracks "I Crawled" and "Raping a Slave", singer/keyboardist Jarboe moved to New York and joined the band, bringing in new, hauntingly beautiful textures. What had previously been a throbbing black hole was now put in balance with tracks of harmony, melody, and more traditional song structures, as evidenced on the stunning 1987 double LP Children of God. It was at this point Swans attracted the attention of a major label, MCA, and signed with its subsidiary UNI for the release of 1989's The Burning World, in what would become the most sordid debacle of their career. Forced to surrender production duties to Bill Laswell, the result was a lavish, extravagant work which succeeded in alienating earlier fans while at the same time failing to gain a new audience due to the label's lack of any promotion and ultimate dissolution. Finally recovering from the lingering fallout of the disaster, Gira regrouped Swans and eventually signed to Sky Records for a pair of brilliant releases,White Light From the Mouth of Infinite and Love of Life, both of which sustain a compelling and crystalline canvas of sound.



Enough of history. Swans have just released The Great Annihilator (Invisible), their first studio recording in almost three years. Once again, it's unlike anything you'll hear coming out of the so-called alternative music scene, although there's hardly an aggressive band in existence who don't cite Swans ' as a seminal influence. Michael Gira has composed a work of mind-expanding scope, from the simple evocative beauty of songs like "Blood Promise" to the swirling, relentless vortex of the title track. There are no concessions to commerce (witness the vicious sarcasm of the first single, "Celebrity Lifestyle") nor is there any desire to simply create cacophony for its own cheap sake.



Besides his work in Swans, Gira has also finished a solo album, Drainland, and this spring will see the publication of his book The Consumer and Other Stories (2.13.61), which collects his prose writings from 1985 to the present.



There's no point in weaving any long arguments why the music of Swans deserves your attention. The bottom line is that it does, and if you're lucky, you'll realize it sooner rather than later.



SECONDS: The Great Annihilator was recorded in Chicago as opposed to New York , where most of the past Swans work has been done. How did you end up there?



GIRA: Actually, we've recorded in a lot of different places around the world, and this just came about like most things, it seems, through inertia. We got hooked up with what was supposed to be cheap studio time there. I spent three months living inside a windowless warehouse, never going outside, drinking far too much and making fresh enemies with whomever had the bad luck to come in to work on the album or stare at me like an evil troll on display. A real fun time! Jarboe and I slept in a tent in the room next to the recording console because the warehouse was infested with mosquitoes that bred in the toxic sludge outside in nearby Cabrini Green and worked their way in through the air vents, honing in on our blood. It was like camping out, except in a subterranean cell where nothing ever changes. Most of my time was spent shuffling around comatose in the debris like a zombie, listening to the same sounds over and over, trying to remember what I was doing there - this is my impression of Chicago. But don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed myself. That's why the album sounds so great!



SECONDS: The new record features musicians such as Bill Rieflin from Ministry. What brought him into the folds of SWANS?



GIRA: According to Mr. Rieflin, he was on tour a few years ago with Ministry and got hold of the tape of White Light From The Mouth Of lnfinity, listened to it quite a bit on the bus, and though he was familiar with our earlier albums, decided now that if he ever had the chance he'd like to work with us. Later, he met Al Kizys backstage somewhere, so when it came time to record The Great Annihilator. Al put us together. Jarboe and I have since gone on to record and co-produce, with Bill, my so-called solo album, Drainland, at his studio in Seattle.



SECONDS:Who else participated in The Great Annihilator?



GIRA: Martin Atkins played on the Jarboe song "My Buried Child", and Clint Steele and Norman Westberg played guitar. Ted Parsons played drums on a few songs, and Al played bass ...



SECONDS: I take it you wrote most of the album and produced it, as on the previous few SWANS releases?



GIRA: Yes. except for "My Buried Child" and the "outro" to the album, where Jarboe co-wrote the music with me. She is also a strong collaborator on the arrangements and obviously adds a lot with her singing too.



SECONDS:What was the extent of the SWANS relationship with Sky Records, and is the material they released still in print?



GIRA: The relationship with Sky was the typical disastrous and hopeless business blunder, and the material, though technically in print, is almost impossible to find. I don't want to single them out for particular contempt though, because managing Swans myself, as I have for the last twelve years in the US, I've done nothing but blow one opportunity after another and dig a deeper and deeper grave for the band the harder I work on it, so there's really no one to blame but myself, if things work out - and there's no guarantee of that - a large and extremely well-respected, honest, and wholly independent label which I can't name yet until it's finalized - will be taking over our entire back catalog, as well as a few new projects, in the near future.



SECONDS: Have your recurrent problems with labels been a result of your attempting to maintain as much direct control as possible over SWANS' destiny, or are they a product of dissatisfaction at how record companies (mis)handle the band?



GIRA: I think the problem lies with the fact that, even after so many years of persuasive reasons and believe otherwise, I tend to trust people and to assume the best rather than the worst and I give myself over to situations where I think I've finally found the place where our music will get a decent shot, because it feels so good to just give up on the pressure and responsibility of constant struggle. So then naturally I'm disappointed, and then I become uselessly vindictive and vengeful, alienating everyone thoroughly, and I develop a new camp of wounded and angry enemies. Then again, despite this obviously hopeless circle of naivete/cynicism, its allowed me to keep making music, because I'm always optimistic that the hardship will ease up a little bit with the new album, so I continue. For instance, I'm currently delusional enough to think that just because the Great Annihilator is an original and powerful piece of work, that even though it's not on a major label and we have a tiny promotional budget. that it will naturally - maybe a little slower than otherwise -receive the attention it deserves. Isn`t that stupid of me, and shouldn't I know better by now?



SECONDS:What led you to singing with Martin Atkins and Invisible?



GIRA: The deal with Invisible is only for this one album. We rehearsed for the recordings at the Invisible loft, and Martin always made it clear that if nothing else worked out we could release the album through Invisible. So after we wasted a year dicking around with major labels it finally just seemed logical to take Martin up on his offer.



SECONDS: You appeared on the recent Pigface album, which seemed a bit out of character. Given your less than positive opinions on most American music, why participate in what sounds to me like a somewhat contrived Alternative Rock supergroup?



GIRA: I don't view Pigface in the same way you do. It seems, to me the natural thing for Martin to do, being a drummer and a producer, to work with the wide variety of people he knows, according to how he thinks a track should sound. But anyway, I was in Chicago, and it was a trade-off for playing on the SWANS album.



SECONDS: What was your involvement with NO mag from LA in the early Eighties? One of my memories from around the age of thirteen was of my mother searching my room, finding a few issues of NO mag, and confiscating and destroying them as pornography.



GIRA: I started NO magazine with my friend from art school. Bruce Kalberg. We had started to go to the early Punk shows, videotaping them, and we really liked the destructive energy implied in the music and the scene. We admired Slash magazine at the time. Bruce once took out a full page ad in Slash, a photo of the top of his head in close-up with a strip shaved down the center and a greasy strip of liver filling in the bald area, and an obscure text beneath the photo. In fact, I think he'd even started shopping wearing the liver, going to gigs, letting it rot on his head. Later, I took out a full page ad in Slash myself, a picture of myself squatting in front of the camera in a straightjacket, my face made up to look like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, and an incredible long and knobby penis stretching up from my crotch and into my mouth, dripping, as I leered into the lens. The caption read, "Here I am Seen Thinking Of You.'' Naturally this was meant to be an anonymous photo, but later when I was doing an interview with the Go-Go's for NO they all recognized me ... We thought we could help bring out the more repulsive and negative aspects of Punk Rock in a magazine of our own, so we started NO. We had interviews with the usual suspects, like X and The Germs. both of which bands we admired and saw play every time we had a chance, but thought it would be good to include other aspects as well. We had an interview published of my personal god of the time, Suicide, as well as things like an interview with a working dominatrix from Hollywood who told about torturing judges and businessmen, alleviating her guilt by urinating in their faces or raping them with a dildo, things like that. We had a photo-spread of an autopsy which we made the cover issue number two. Also crude pornography, tentative but endearingly scabrous drawings and anonymous writing by me, and various excellent photo-narratives by Bruce. We also had the usual gushing interviews with bands, and on occasion some really bad jerky graphics surrounding photos of the scene, for which I take the full share of embarrassment. So some of it was good, some bad, but we meant well. I really liked Punk Rock at the time - I don't like its present day stylized devolutions - and absolutely loathed American consumer society, so I enjoyed it when we'd Ieave a gig at two in the morning and break every window in our path - that kind of thing. It was all really puerile of course, but again, we meant well. It felt good to have so much bilious energy in the air, a place to vent pent-up misdirected rage. Anyway, we couldn't get NO Magazine in LA. We had to drive up to San Francisco to the place that printed all the porn for the West Coast, and I'd drive back in Bruce's VW bug with 1500 full newspapersized magazines in the back seat and trunk. In the end we could never sell them anyway -Bruce later kept on publishing it and had some success with it for awhile - and had to give most of them away at gigs. Only one newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard and a few Punkish record stores would sell it.



SECONDS: Was there a noticeable point for you when Punk lost it's attraction or appeal?



GIRA: Yes, almost immediately! As soon as Hardcore set in it kind of made me sick, because it took the most stupid and obvious aspects of the style and used them like an anthem or rallying call for meathead teenagers, drunk on their sticky sense of belonging, group bonding. There are a few exceptions to that though. I really liked Black Flag, because of the immensity of the sound and the erupting violence of it (especially live), and Henry's agony was always a pleasure to watch, and I also appreciated the Dead Kennedys, particularly Jello's hilariously poisonous black humor. But I immediately hated the Hardcore audience, because they seemed for the most part just like football jocks looking for someone to beat up. So I gravitated more towards things like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Public Image (who were far better than the Sex Pistols, musically, in my opinion), Suicide, then later Neubauten and, well. us!



SECONDS: What else were you doing in this period of your life?



GIRA: I started a bad Art band called Little Cripples, later called strict Ids, and finally just IDS. We played with the Bags, the Mau-Maus, X, and Negative Trend. Eventually I was fired, wisely, because I couldn't sing. The band went on to become the rather ineffectual B-People. I also wrote a few reviews of albums and live shows for Slash, did some truly, monifyingly stupid performance art, did construction work and painted houses for a living, and once had the opportunity to serve as an assistant in a Hermann Nitsch performance. Orgies Mysteries Theater, washing blood and entrails off the performers. Lately I've written a sort of homage to that period of time and to Bruce, in the form of a story called "The Young Man Who Hid His Body Inside A Horse, or My Vulvic Los Angeles." It was inspired by this performance Bruce wanted to do, but sadly was never able to execute. He wanted to get a horse, bring it into a gallery, slaughter it, and crawl into its guts wearing scuba gear. The idea was he would live inside its corpse as it rotted, breathing oxygen supplied by the scuba tanks. I've since found out that the Romans used to sew Christian virgins into the carcasses of animals, with just the heads protruding, and the poor girls would die slowly by their bodies rotting alive inside the animal's body. I don't know if Bruce was aware of this, though.



SECONDS: Tell me about what happened during the Nitsch performance you were part of?

GIRA: That was in Venice, CA, around1978-79. A woman I was involved with at the time ran an arts organization that presented stuff that wouldn't otherwise be seen in any institutional or established art context. The Nitsch event was more of a ritual than a performance in that it lasted about four to six hours and was right there all around you - not on a stage - in a storefront that had been emptied out for the occasion. Strung up in this white room were the skinned carcasses of two lambs, ropes stretching out from each limb to the floor and ceiling so that the dead meat was suspended in mid-air. Something like a hundred gallons of lambs' blood and entrails had been supplied in vats as well, and as a series of young boys, naked and blindfolded, were brought out on a stretcher, the blood, etc. was poured through the carcass and over the tender youth's bodies, into their mouths, etc. This obscure series of ritualized actions was directed by Nitsch himself, who was this little fat guy dressed in black like a priest without a collar, with a pasty white Austrian face with ruby red moist lips, sort of like you might picture a bloated and drunk Napoleon-figure, and he was wearing this one oversized black rubber glove on his right hand, and with it he'd direct people. He'd gathered a sizable orchestra of street people, punks, volunteers, and with a raising or lowering of his black hand they'd let loose with a really loud squall of noise played by horns, drums, whistles, anything that made sounds, so this roaring cacophony punctuated or egged on the Mass taking place. Everyone was drinking lots of wine from jugs that were passed around; the idea was to get drunk as possible and revel in the blood and sound, and eventually it just built to a point where the boy volunteer sacrifices started shaking in uncontrollable convulsions. By this time- after hours of the overwhelming surges of sound, the stink of the meat and blood- the room had filled a couple of inches deep in blood and offal and everyone was just wallowing in it. Really wonderful! A couple of the assistants, who were pouring the blood and just and just generally executing Nitsch's commands- actually it was the kipper Kids, who'd met Nitsch once in Austria- got carried away and cut the bottom ropes so the blood was flying everywhere. Half the audience was naked by this point and blood-soaked and in a drunken dream state. Eventually the blood was pouring out the door onto the street outside and the police came. It was funny to see them in their neat blue suits amidst the slaughter...I don't really remember too much beyond that, because I was so drunk myself and it was so long ago, but the main thing I took away from the event- besides a stink that I couldn't wash off for weeks- was the sense of being overwhelmed by the blood and sound, the way it slowed down time, and I wanted it to go on forever. In a way it was a really pure religious experience. I think I fucked like a wild beast that night. By the way, there are now a few CDs out of the music from Nitsch's rituals, and I highly recommend them, though naturally they're really hard to find.