The term “Zen” is part of the cultural vernacular. Used as an adjective, a noun, even a verb, the mainstream usage typically refers to someone being laidback, going with the flow, or practicing acceptance. But at the heart of Zen, and Buddhism more broadly, are principles regarding the intricacies of suffering, impermanence, and, more elusively, non-self. Re the last item, the notion points to self as a construct or psychological function; the idea that there is some independent, enduring, unchanging entity called “me” or “I” is considered a fundamental delusion.
These notions, of course, are incorporated into art and artistic processes in myriad ways. A Zen practitioner himself, Leonard Cohen implicitly questioned the existence of the/a self in his music and poetry. With later albums, he captured the challenges and mysterious nature of aging, how the “I”, at best, is an interdependent and contextually defined variable. Laurie Anderson has posed questions about and inquiries into impermanence and what might be dubbed the non-cumulative life (she also popularized the saying, “learn how to feel sad without being sad”, which she and partner Lou Reed learned from their teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche). There are numerous examples of artistic works that, intentionally or inadvertently, incorporate Buddhist principles.
With their 2023 release, The Beggar, Swans offered their most deconstructive and Zen-inflected project, Michael Gira navigating his realization that what we experience is not personal or even “ours” to claim. In some ways, the project would’ve been a fitting coda, as the sequence systematically and cogently operated as a metaphor – alluding to the dismantlement of an ego, a personhood, a particular “I”. Gira explored how a person’s life is tantamount to a cascade of thoughts, sensations, and actions that occur within a context of consciousness, though that flow and the overall context have no inherent meaning or substantiality. The Beggar was Gira’s way of saying: there is no Gira, never has been. The album served as a funeral for his identity, which, as he came to see it, was no more than a persistent mirage.
With their new album, Birthing, Swans and Gira revisit the demiurgic impulses explored on earlier releases without losing sight of recently gleaned awarenesses. Though the album clocks in at approximately two hours in duration (no surprise there), it feels oddly succinct due to the band’s ever-evolving gift for unified composition and precise performances. Though five of these seven tracks are 15-plus minutes in length (again, no surprise), they rarely if ever drag, as was occasionally the case with earlier epics. The sound is palimpsestic, dense, mesmerizing, and while comparisons to such precursors as To Be Kind and The Seer aren’t inapt, Birthing is a more symphonically structured and streamlined project. In fact, with Birthing, Swans become the consummate torchbearer for post-rock classicism, fleshing out Romantic motifs, expanding those motifs, and crafting hypnotic movements, all while reveling in understated yet impressive chemistry.
On opener “The Healers”, Gira occurs as a cross between The Lizard King, Kurtz from Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, and a pagan cult leader with benign and apocalyptic intentions. “My wings spread out across the sky”, he declares, positing himself as the mother of “our daughter” and “our slaughter”. This is the voice at the top of the canyon, the one that wafts through the trees, that wakes you from a dream. Melodic threads drape across a protean sky. Around eight minutes, an echoey drum enters the mix; a throbbing, vibrating drone ensues. “The wolves are swimming in our harbor / our lungs are breathing in black water”, Gira continues – employing lyrics that could’ve been taken from Revelation, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or William Blake – fleshing out a narrative/tableau that is at once a creation story, a myth regarding cosmic power dynamics, and a commentary on the environment (“our mother”) as it languishes via our contemporary treatments.
The title cut doubles down on the world-building of “The Healers”. Chimes and tinkles suggest promise, goodness. A vernal lightness recalls Hiroshi Yoshimura’s work, particularly the recently re-released Flora. At the same time, a dark synth-y line dangles from the heights, running through the heart of the track. Later, a child’s babblings are contrasted with heavy percussion and layers of resonant sounds, chanted vocals, and accents that swirl in the periphery (segueing into discordant piano runs and prickly harmonies). In this way, archetypal paradoxes are conjured and sustained.
Clearly the band and Gira, in particular, are navigating the tensions pointed to in mythology: the hubris of self-sufficiency, the hubris of dependency. The consequences of clinging and aversion. How our actions (karma), stemming from our past, impact our future, right now inextricable from our origins, The Big Bang itself, the slow, febrile evolution and proliferation of forms. Birthing is a celebration of perennial cycles, the constancy and ephemerality of existence, how even the universe in which we live is fated to implode, giving way to a subsequent universe (i.e., the theory that myriad universes existed prior to this one and that myriad universes will succeed it).
It’s this persona – the merging of the micro human and macro divine – that appears throughout Birthing (the signature, throughout history, of messiahs, madmen, and certain artists). This demiurgic/demagogic presence is epitomized with “I Am a Tower”, one of the more idiosyncratically hooky tracks in the Swans oeuvre. “I am gathering souls. I am gathering your scabs. / I am the best fucking fuck that you never will have”, Gira proclaims. The piece opens with, again, vernal sounds surrounding a weightier thread or leaden umbilicus that vibrates at the core of the track. Midway, the field grows more spacious, making room for synthy atmospherics, though the mix soon tilts – sounding like a druidic hymn punctuated by heavy drum parts (thunder) and droney guitars (earth-trembling), the sonic strain resolving into a desultory ending, in which Gira ecstatically repeats “I am a tower” over and over. The piece captures the band at their most mantric, Gira at his most charismatic.
As the album progresses, Gira continues to flesh out a corporeal-deific persona while also working with themes of interconnectedness. “Guardian Spirit”, replete with metronomic beats that complement celestial voices, recalls some of the ethereal elements of 2019’s leaving meaning. Gira’s voice, too, is softer, less combative, as he moans, “My bones are your bones. Now you’re never alone.” Then again, the soundscape soon turns metallic, cacophonous, resembling the audial analog to a blinding glare. “The Merge”, meanwhile, launches with a mishmash of electronic sounds that would make for a good B-horror backdrop. As the mix grows simpler, elements removed, we’re left with a roomy soundscape punctuated (and punctured) by trashy drum sounds and a catchy bass part. The piece serves as an intriguing departure/expansion and communal catalyst, moving between busyness and sparseness, the bass part operating as an unbudgeable anchor.
The project closes with “(Rope) Away”, which exemplifies Swans’ ability to balance repetition and subtle variation. Much of the piece is an elastic blend of synthy drones and hard-edged notes softened by reverb-y atmospherics. While the track never makes radical departures or leaps, subtle internal shifts do occur, micro-pivots that bring to mind Sunn O))) and Kali Malone. As the piece approaches closure, Gira bids farewell to “Alice, William, Catherine, and Simon” (individual iterations who/that no longer exist), as well as whatever traces of his own identity remain. He closes with the words, “Away, away, away, away, and gone”, which parallel the words “gone gone gone beyond”, attributed to The Buddha as a description of awakening or the enlightened state.
While Birthing shows Swans adopting a playbook that they’ve delved into before, the project is strikingly more focused. As mentioned, despite running for over 2 hours, the album feels notably succinct, even concise. Gira certainly embraces the deific/demiurgic voice, though he also, particularly toward the end of the set, doubles down on the self-effacement embraced on The Beggar. Actually, he elaborates on it, further funeralizing the illusion called “Gira” while also speaking to the impermanence and fundamental emptiness of all being. The Greeks knew about this – the reality of inconsequence – as did their distant predecessors, the inhabitants of those shadowy, undocumented days. Like dancers of old, Swans and Gira are alternately stoic and ecstatic, observing the world and themselves covered in wet placenta and bone-dry ash.
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