Long before these questions had been formulated, Michael Gira already took control of the conversation! Ten questions – none more, none less – are permitted!
Well, where to even begin. Michael Gira has, for the past few decades, conjured an entire mythology of personal history, where it’s oftentimes hard to discern fact from fiction. Possibly, everything is real, as a line in “The Parasite” suggests: “Crucified in fractured fields of blue / All information is equally true”.
Still, having met Gira, and having spoken to people who know him, a more complicated image manifested to me over the years, one of a man who is deeply complex, has lived a dozen lives: teenage coal miner, transgressive fiction writer, No Wave sage, pagan mystic. Once one digs through the old, tattered magazines for interviews and spin-off records, the story keeps expanding and details grow outrageous! Is it really true that Gira hears the voice of a “Joseph” inside of him, who is the spiritual origin of his music, as has been suggested over the decades? I don’t dare ask, and instead, choose to inquire about Gira’s direct interactions with the world he inhabits. How does he, a man borne by counter culture and transgression, experience himself within the current times?
These things rush through my head as I become eerily aware of another side to the man, as his responses slowly unfold to me: that of a really funny guy! Gira’s caustic wit shines as much as his sharp recollections of the past. In his words, images become a surreal stream of spiritual expression, as our exchange illuminates the origin of his latest works, explores his strict work ethic and investigates his relation to humour, before settling on a brief recollection of Swans’ mysterious guitarist Sue Hanel. At the end, there seems no dent in the stoic façade Gira curates of himself, but I sense deep honesty in his responses. As he puts it himself: “There are angels hiding everywhere.”
Thank you, Michael.
And here is what we spoke about.
You recorded Birthing in Berlin, which happens to be my city. I consider it a semi-mythological, nocturnal place, defined by parks and strange alleys, filled with endless (at times sinister) potential. To me, this energy has been perfectly captured by David Bowie’s albums he recorded while living here. I’ve seen fans point out parallels between the closing part of “I am a Tower” and “Heroes”. Thus, I am wondering if there is such a thing as a definitive aura to this city, that touches inhabitants and translates itself into all music (and art) made here.
The song “I am a Tower” needed a straightforward, rhythmically propulsive moment following the several moments of amorphous clouds that had preceded the ending, so I wrote more words using a D/G chord progression and we built it up as a band. It took me a while to realize that Kristof Hahn’s Ebow part on his lap steel guitar vaguely resembled Fripp’s part on “Heroes”. It’s fine that it’s there, but I don’t feel one way or another about it, and it certainly wasn’t an intentional reference. In any event, I enjoy Berlin, but in truth I see almost nothing of the city when I’m working there. My day consists of waking up in my tiny hotel room, drinking coffee, going to the studio, working, finding something to eat after work, sleeping, repeat. Nothing else. I’m too exhausted. On days off I hide in the hotel room and sleep and read. So I could be working anywhere really.
Friends of mine own a café. They told me you’ve been a recurring customer, and have voiced great fondness for ice cream. I can still recall the flavour of, then incredibly rare, chocolate chip mint from when I was a child, the specific make-up and store now long gone. I am thus very curious of your interest in this delicacy, that is locked between two physical states.
I don’t see how, but they must be confusing me with Kristof. I vaguely remember visiting an ice cream place in Berlin with him over a decade ago but I haven’t been back since. I think Kristof goes there, though. I don’t mean to be contrarian, but I have no particular feelings about ice cream, other than if it is put in front of me I will eat it all, everything in sight, so I avoid it, being quite vain about my weight.
There is a living mythology to the towering presence of Michael Gira, ripe with legends of brutal concerts, strange happenstances and intense exchanges. Yet in my experience, meeting you briefly at a show and observing you on stage – but also hearing from friends that met and interacted with you – you radiate an immense warmth, generousness and kindness. Breaking the barrier/boundary between the players and audience is, obviously, a familiar shock tactic from theatre, literature and even film. Is the persona that people project onto you something that feeds into your art, forming life-as-performance, or is this mere projection from the outside onto an organic process?
I certainly endeavor to be polite in my daily interactions with people, but onstage I’m not really that version of myself. The music controls me, rather than the reverse. I think it’s a good idea to keep knives off the stage or might be inclined to eviscerate myself, fling my intestines over my shoulder and sashay about the stage, shouting up at God until I collapse and die in a puddle of guts. Not a bad ending!
Speaking of perception – many people seem to consider your presence – or the music of Swans – as somewhat dark. Yet in recent years, you’ve shown a very humorous side – for example, in your exchanges with fans on Instagram, or having yourself depicted as a pink poodle in relation to The Beggar. And then there’s the cover to Birthing, which sent fans on a wild goose chase, and finally was found to depict a photo of garlic seeds. Possibly, humor has always been part of the mix (such as the bunnies that make up much of the artwork during the early 90s), but I do see parallels to how David Lynch expressed a mischievous absurdism. Is this humor something which has, gradually, become more visible in your creative expression?
Anyone that knows me can testify that I’m a laugh a minute, always joking, a regular Sarah Silverman of modern music, especially in our marathon rehearsal sessions and live performances – what a joke! As to the cover imagery used for the Birthing album, I wanted some extreme close ups of soil (the place where things are buried and where things grow), flat and analytical, so I found some images of dirt that I assumed to be obscure online and I used those. Little did I suspect that, regrettably, some random geek would trace the origins of the imagery on the net. Oh well. It’s just dirt! I did toy with the idea of using actual dirt glued to the surface of the vinyl sleeves but that was impracticable.
You have a teenage daughter, who has also appeared as a vocalist on your recent albums. I am curious if having this direct link to the ‘Zoomer’ generation has opened your periphery to current day pop culture, and if there is an exchange in how your daughter consumes the media – and music – popular in her generation, influencing your own art.
I often use other people’s voices for the songs as one way of taking things away from me personally. In fact, I’m thinking of hiring various children to sing all the songs on the next album, or just using my dog, who has a tendency to howl melodically, and is actually quite talented. But yes, I have used the voice of my children in the music, and my wife too – anything to take things away from my leaden, croaking voice. On the current album I used the voice of my infant son. Why? Because he’s there, available and compliant. As for any link to a “Zoomer” generation, I don’t even know what that means. People that don’t read books and are on their phones constantly, judge everyone except themselves and are scared of sex?
The Beggar was a very personal album, reflecting on mortality, with a decidedly autobiographical element running through many songs. Birthing struck me as a polar opposite, concentrating on instrumental compositions over specific narratives. I sense a cyclical motion, almost buddhist, to how (re-)birth and death are like tides that reoccur – the former a state of a clean slate impressed upon by the senses, while the latter reflects on a lifetime scarred by consciousness. After all, the album opens with the line “I am the mother…” and ends with you repeating the word “gone”. I might likely be wrong, but I am curious to what degree specific themes and topics consciously perfumed the body of Birthing – or if, by now, your music is a kaleidoscopic sensory reflection of wild, lived history.
That’s a very broad question, so I’ll just describe the process: Even though I was there every step of the way, I’m sometimes amazed at how the songs grow and mutate from the simple versions I first played on my acoustic guitar alone in my room. If I put my ear to the sound hole in my guitar as I repeat the open chords I can hear the swirl of comingled notes conjuring the future, but the work begins when I and my friends and collaborators gather together in rehearsal and the songs themselves lead the way to their evolving form. Soon, as we perform the songs live they transmute further with each performance, until towards the end of a tour they have mutated so completely that only the barest vestige of the original remains. Though I’m the impresario of the group, it’s a collective act of will, commitment and imagination that allows the music to find its fullest form, often resulting in a piece that is 30 or 40 minutes long (in one case, recently, a piece stretched out to a duration of 82 minutes in concert). In the end, I believe the songs are guiding us, speaking through us, and we’re simply the vehicle the music is driving. Towards the end of our last tour we took a brief break and went into a recording studio in Berlin to record the music in this state. Later, after the tour, I returned to the studio and further manipulated and embroidered the performances, which is what you hear on the final album. Lyrically, I use whatever words God has decided to siphon through my mind. It’s a matter of giving up completely, letting a greater entity speak through me. I am unaware of the distinction between one album to the next. They are one long unbroken stream of sound and words. Each album is an extension of a river that began to flow long before I was born.
The voices of Laura Carbone, Lucy Kruger and your daughter are a recurring motif on Birthing, giving the album a unique character. You’ve used these voices in a way where they become a very interesting instrument of their own, at times seemingly in dialogue with your vocals. I was especially struck by this element on the incredible “The Healers”. I am curious of your process in creating this ‘choir’ in contrast to your own vocal parts, in the case of “The Healers” breaking into a strange glossolalia midway through the song, while the female voices morph to an almost ghostly presence.
My daughter hasn’t sung on a record in a long time. I think you’re confusing her with my wife, Jennifer. In any event, for “The Healers”, I wanted something like gospel choirs to occur, so I hummed something rudimentary and Laura and Lucy took it from there. Larry Mullins is also in there, singing falsetto. Everything happens by intuition, in the moment. I trust the people with whom I work to read my mind, or to reach back in inside the music and reveal what was hiding there all along. Every sound you hear is ordained in the resonance of the chords being played and it’s just a matter of allowing the overtones to sing. There are angels hiding everywhere. You just have to invite them to come and play.
“Birthing” is an incredibly cinematic song, featuring these euphoric guitar parts that I find incredibly moving. As the song progresses, there is a cosmic gravity to it – especially with how the narrator describes the voices of children drifting in and out of his presence, as he moves through the elements. It also includes the voice of a child – which makes recurring appearances throughout – and what sounds like a brief appearance of a female, then male, announcer. I would love to hear about the history of this song, how your process of composing it progressed, and if your initial vision has changed much in the process of finalising it.
Lyrically, this song began when I was driving through the endless farm fields near where I live and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the absolute urgent certainty of my death as I drove. It was electric. Every molecule was ultra-vivid and charged with it, but it screamed with life. This experience – or state of mind – lasted for days and infused the mundane events of daily life with a sparkling, psychedelic hyper-intensity, terrifying and ecstatic… Musically, the song began on my acoustic guitar with the “song” part of the piece as well as a few ideas for sounds and rhythms that would precede and follow it. The rest was worked out with the band in rehearsals and live performances and it grew and morphed over the course of a year of touring. The thing I like about much of the material on this album is that none of us could have anticipated when we started working on it how it would transform itself over time, where it would end up. It’s all through intuition, and most of all listening for what’s there beneath the surface, aching for release.
I love the mischievous tone of “Red Yellow”. The opening section especially reminds me of an occult ritual. The song feels playful in how it assembles mantras, saxophone improvisation and an infectious groove – it seems to stand in direct contrast to the more masculine, almost bludgeoning energy of “Guardian Spirit”, which follows it and seemingly reconnects with the sound of the band’s early years. Thus,“Red Yellow” strikes me as a new evolution in Swans’ catalogue, possibly a modernisation. Do you agree with this assessment?
No. But thanks for generously speculating! Though I had a map in my mind of how the song might develop, it grew, like most things, through trial and error, disaster and recovery. Musically, this song was trying to find its way up until the very end. Lyrically, it began with a memory of a sort of vision I had decades ago. I used to unintentionally starve myself daily, wouldn’t eat a thing all day – I would just forget to do so – and would drink endless amounts of coffee and as the day progressed I’d switch to copious amounts of beer, punctuated with numerous cigarettes, all the while working 12-14 hour days in the studio. Ultimately, my body and mind would short circuit of course, and I’d be assaulted by rushing waves of yellow, tinged with red. I was rushed to the hospital a few times with this condition, which turned out to be nervous exhaustion and panic attacks, but despite the obvious chemical nature of the malady, seeing the world in this way, through a yellow lens, held and possibly still holds a sort of truth for me.
For my final question, I want to return to the beginnings of Swans. Sue Hanel is a name friends would recurringly bring up while discussing the band. From what I understand, her unique playing style highly influenced the band (and others – Thurston Moore mentioned her as a direct inspiration), yet there is little of her playing preserved in recordings. How are your memories of playing with her, and listening to Birthing, is there, after so many decades, still some of her aesthetic DNA retained within this material?
Sue was a ferocious guitar player, but wholly undisciplined. She was fantastic, but she was incapable of playing anything twice. She reached great heights. Perhaps one night she’d play something and you couldn’t imagine how it could be any better, just fully transporting, Jimi Hendrix level of playing, howling up into the stratosphere. Then the next night, what she played would be abysmal and awkward and would have nothing to do with the previous night’s performance or for that matter anything to do with the basic song itself. She was an absolute loner. I don’t think any of us even knew where she lived. Then, one day, she just disappeared, completely and absolutely. No one knows if she’s alive or dead. God bless her!
Birthing is due out May 30 on Mute / Young God Records. You can pre-order the album here. Follow Swans on Facebook and Instagram.
