Michael Gira & Swans

The singer Michael Gira had debuted in Los Angeles with the Bpeople, but then moved to New York (in 1981), where he formed Circus Mort. The group's only EP (Labor, 1981) still shows the disco-punk influence of the Bpeople. The leader�s dark, snarling vocals range from epileptic punk intensity to the dissociated despair of a metropolitan zombie, from dreamlike psychedelia to decadent vanity. Supporting him are Jonathan Kane�s violent, emotional drumming (a collaborator of Rhys Chatham and LaMonte Young) and the minimalistic keyboard lines with a muted timbre. Circus Mort�s songs are �danse macabre� reflecting urban alienation, though still expressed in uncertain, wandering tones (the driving pseudo-raga gallop of Swallow You or the B52�s-style trance/dance of Watch The Puppet).

Gira and Kane then formed the Swans, a quintet advocating a brutal, depressed rock with few precedents: dark and debilitated like British dark punk, aggressive and desperate like American hardcore, brutal and cacophonous like industrial music, heavy and thunderous like metal.

Their first EP, the four-song Swans (Labor, 1982), pays tribute to the new wave and no wave. Speak is a naive exercise in the disco-punk style fashionable at the time (the same year as Romeo Void�s underground hit Never Say Never), tinged with some Sonic Youth-style guitar paranoia. Laugh combines Arto Lindsay-like guitar dissonance, Contortions-style funky basslines, and massive polyrhythms reminiscent of Talking Heads. Sensitive Skin stages a limping pow-wow dance with estranged voices and derelict saxophone.

Gira's nervous breakdown makes Filth (Neutral, 1983) a kind of soundtrack for mass suicides or nuclear holocausts. The already limited musicality of Circus Mort is further �barbarized�: the metallic pounding of Stay Here derives from Chrome�s tank-like nightmares and Sonic Youth�s guitar Sabbaths; Blackout is a repetitive, obsessive, stumbling drum march with electronic blasts and spasms in the dark; Power For Power and Weakling belong to a grotesquely slowed voodoobilly; Right Wrong and Thank You are the most debilitated, android funk tracks in history. All collapses in Gang, where music �loses speed� until it goes out of tune and the voice repeats an unintelligible chant: truly the song of a suicide in their final moments. Gira�s songs paint an apocalyptic portrait of humanity reduced to ridiculous mannequins, stripped of emotion.

With two basses and two drums (Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane), plus Norman Westberg on guitar, the impact is explosive. The music represents absolute tedium, redeemed only by occasional �metallurgic� dances. Harmonic balance is precarious, cut into the powerful rhythmic shell by Branca-style metallic detunings and some tape dissonances. Gira�s furious roars endlessly replicate over the uneven rhythmic patterns. From the isolation cell of his delirium emerge only distorted echoes of life. In a climate of anguished terror, rituals of moral laceration and flagellation unfold, driven by a highly degenerate neurosis. The Swans� sound has been called �boom music,� meaning it merely repeats deafening instrumental �bums� over the leader�s agonizing vocals. This sound is the most powerful soundtrack of �pain� for its own sake�neither mystical nor cathartic, but purely painful, with no hope of relief.

The music of Cop (K422, 1984), with only Roli Mosimann on drums, emerges basically at the intersection of a Kafka story, a Freud treatise, a black hole, the last gasps of a suicide, and the first cries of a robot. The rhythm becomes even more funeral-like, now entirely subservient to a 2/2 cadence. Gira�s delirium is more desperately disconnected than ever. His nihilistic poetics increasingly focus on the mental state of fear (�you degrade yourself when you hide your fear,� he proclaims on Thug, over a strong, almost dub-like beat), and ultimately his music is nothing but an exorcism of the existential terror that grips a solitary human in the post-industrial metropolis. Now mainly supporting him is Norman Westberg�s guitar, unleashed in a tour de force of feedback and distortion.
The band performs tracked, slow, ponderous, thunderous music, evoking armies of marching androids, punctuated by horrifying screams (Half Life); ceremonial futurist music for industrial metronomes, abrasive dissonances, and hoarse shamanic wails (Clay Man); music of perpetual agony with anemic vocal spasms and violent background distortions (Why Hide). Chamber music for subhuman beings. Experiments in increasingly tempestuous polyrhythms reinvent the concept of tribalism in the post-industrial era (Your Property, a masochistic psalm in which Gira seems to self-flagellate).
At the same time, the most catatonic tracks (like Cop) push the music ever further from harmony, to the verge of theatrical, cold, expressionless, anonymous recitation, where sound serves merely as a backdrop of faded beats. These are litanies that retain little of musicality, suffocating in an unbearable climate of suspense. Sometimes it seems that Gira stentorianly repeats the same animalistic line without inflection. Sometimes it seems he utters a prayer, stunned before a mystical vision. Sometimes it seems he murmurs his last words before dying. The lyrics themselves are brief deliriums of turpitude, like the catalogue of atrocities in Job (an even slower �groove�). Gira is more than ever the quintessential tortured soul of rock. Tormented and flagellated in the most atrocious way, he descends into depths of pain previously untouched.

The EP I Crawled (1985) slows the macabre procession even further. I Crawled is a Freudian psychodrama in the tradition of The End (Doors), immersed in the usual devastated landscape punctuated by chaotic metallic hits while the music hovers near stasis. Gira�s groan reaches hyper-libidinal paroxysms in Raping A Slave, catapulting the listener into a past of ceremonial gongs. Gira�s agony, reduced to a raw scream and lashed by percussive strikes resembling whiplashes, resembles the delirium of a nun tortured by blasphemous desires and terrible cilices as it sinks into the catalepsy of Young God, perhaps the most terrifying lied of their �gothic� phase. Austere, slow, and penetrating, the music relentlessly continues its obscene and shadowy journey into the tormented psyche of Gira.

The slowed and distorted harmonies invented by psychedelic bands to sonically convey the sensations of a �trip� are radicalized by the Swans to depict the feelings of mental dissociation and all its consequences. The tracks thus lose any harmonic attribute and rely solely on random percussion strikes, supernatural jabs from the guitar, and grotesquely solemn vocalizations by Gira. Two equally powerful pieces remained unreleased until the 1999 CD reissue: Sealed In Skin, a deep mantra over an expanded, dissonance-laden rhythm, and Fool, a high-pitched cry of despair over tragic piano chords.

The single Time Is Money (1986) completes the funeral service with a blasphemous and criminal homily (�you should be violated / you should be raped�). The surprise lies in the rhythm: a machine-gun beat that morphs into a grotesque disco dance.

Greed (PVC, 1986) indeed brings a ray of light into the dark tunnel of Gira�s depression. The renewal comes in the form of Jane Jarboe, from Atlanta, the singer�s new partner, who plays piano and accompanies him vocally. Thanks to her, the Swans� previously granite-like sound softens into a more lyrical style�still gothic and oppressive, but less apocalyptic. Roli Mosimann, however, is gone.

The contrast is striking. On one hand, Gira�s �singing� reaches an extreme of unpleasantness, reduced to a sinister voice that utters lugubrious lines with the communicative capacity of a robot, devoid of any modulation, sometimes prolonging the final syllable, reminiscent of monster movies. On the other hand, the arrangements are austere and occasionally symphonic, with gloomy organ phrases, metallic guitar chords, and increasingly twisted percussion patterns. The impression is that of a dark procession moving slowly and solemnly amid otherworldly choirs (Nobody, featuring Jarboe�s anguished counter-vocals and horror-movie-like piano) or a sinner flagellating himself in a deserted monastery cell, agonizingly repeating a magical formula (Fool).

This is the terrible fresco of their Heaven, the absolute minimum of actors, events, life, and emotion. Greed exists in this harmonic void, further degraded by intermittent guitar distortions; it is essentially Jarboe�s free vocalization in a trance. Clangs, roars, and thuds in Stupid Child and Money Is Flesh evoke �industrial� music stripped to its bare essentials (hypnotic and gamelan-like in the former, symphonic and metallurgical in the latter). The vision of this album represents some of the most minimal and harrowing music ever committed to record.

The other album, Holy Money (PVC, 1986), is equally permeated by sinister rituals and catacombal atmospheres, but the music is becoming increasingly conceptual, as if composed for a chamber ensemble rather than a rock band. At the same time, Gira�s obscene deliriums have turned into psychoanalytic confessions, depicting a soul ravaged by claustrophobia and solitude, a nervous collapse fading into a heroin-induced vertigo.
The catalepsy of Another You becomes a tangle of free sounds, always geometrically connected but traversed by an atmospheric tone resembling a trumpet.
Continuing the saga of Time Is Money are A Screw, a lascivious, sadomasochistic hip-hop piece with a manic rhythm somewhere between Queen�s We Will Rock You and a Native American pow-wow, and the almost ska-like yet equally robotic fanfare of Money Is Flesh (second version).
The other two pillars of the album belong to Gira�s liederistic side. A Hanging is another prayer repeated ad nauseam in his usual catatonic tone with minimal, violent beats, but now counterpointed by a choral lament of the damned. Fool (second version) is a high lament of the damned over a heavy, oppressive rhythm with dark piano tolls. These are expressionist lieder, bordering on Grand Guignol, admitting no emotional concessions and glorifying a hell without redemption.
Their natural predecessor is the masterpiece by the Stooges, I Will Fall, duly vampirized and mechanized. These are hallucinatory, horrifying visions of Wagnerian power. They are chilling pantomimes performed by a cast of psychopaths. The music has now become the quintessence of the �martial� cadence concept. Melodic invention, never Gira�s strong suit, serves purely as a diversion.

Gira and Jarboe then take an intellectual retreat with Skin, accompanied by a troupe of non-rock musicians on violin, viola, oboe, piano, and bells. Both the EP Blood Women And Roses (Product Inc, 1987), credited to Jarboe, and the EP Shame Humility Revenge (Product Inc, 1988), credited to Gira but containing tracks from the same sessions�later anthologized on World Of Skin (Product Inc, 1988)�are in fact dominated by Jarboe�s avant-garde folk ballads.
The hypnotic, cataleptic, and rarefied atmospheres, imbued with deep mysticism, of Everything At Once and Nothing Without You recall Popol Vuh�s Hosianna Mantra, the pan-ethnic spiritual ensembles of the hippie era, and Oriental liturgies. The accompanists help sculpt otherworldly instrumentals like Cold Bed. Jarboe�s delicate, flexible soprano�closing the passionate phrasing of spiritual wailing in a cold, marble-like operatic solf�ge�stretches like a bow in the arduous meditations of Still A Child (almost a cappella), Blood On Your Hands (punctuated only by drum and clapping), 1000 Years, and My Own Hands, almost always arranged in a spectral manner; it soars in epic, biblical-march choruses (24 Hours) or whispers from afar (Red Rose).
Gira�s lieder, by contrast, retain the grim essentialism that has become his hallmark, from the simple catacombal recitations of Breathing Water and Centre Of Your Heart to the mantric overtones of Small Sacrifice. For Gira, this represents an arrival in striking contradiction to the rest of his oeuvre, yet it may also be the long-sought masterpiece he so persistently pursued.

The chamber-expressionist rock that Gira and Jarboe had been theorizing finds its full realization on the monumental Children Of God (Caroline, 1987). Performed by Gira on keyboards and guitars, Westberg on guitars, Jarboe on keyboards, Algis Kizys on bass, and Theodore Parsons on drums, the album embraces both melody�albeit �alienated� and pushed to emotional extremes�and emotion, often distorted by Nietzschean superhuman intensity.
Gira�s animalistic alter ego continues to dominate the gothic theatrics of New Mind and Our Love Lies, delivered in his characteristic low, solemn, and monotone register, while the last vestiges of �metallurgic� rhythms and hallucinatory deliriums appear in Like A Drug and the danceable Blind Love. Yet the calm, acoustic sensibility of Jarboe�s Skin persona permeates the tender ballads In My Garden, Blood And Honey, Blackmail, You're Not Real, and Real Love, often approaching the threshold of enchanted lullabies. Jarboe�s folk paints exotic and medieval atmospheres, especially on the first three tracks, sung in her �Gregorian� soprano over delicate, spare, and dreamlike accompaniments.
The two personalities merge in the apocalyptic choral grandeur of Beautiful Child and the almost Hare Krishna-like anthem of Children Of The God. Dominating the album is a biblical vocabulary of sin and redemption. The ensemble now functions as a quintet centered around the trio of Gira (vocals and keyboards), Westberg (guitar), and Jarboe (vocals, piano, and acoustic guitar).
Gira and Jarboe present themselves as priests of a new spiritual-musical creed, engaged in intense and contrite contemplation.

For Burning World (MCA, 1989), the trio of Gira, Jarboe, and Westberg expanded its lineup to include Nicky Skopelitis on guitar, Garo Yellin on cello, Bill Laswell on bass, Ravi Shankar on sitar, and various Eastern percussionists. The album continues Gira�s evolution toward a more �musical� harmony and a spirit that is less industrially dark and increasingly mystically hippie. Elements of prairie country (Saved, See No More), Gregorian chant (Monnalisa), Native American-inspired dances (Jane Mary), and folk ballads (Universal Emptiness and especially The River That Runs With Love) all emerge within the album.
It is, however, Jarboe who crowns the work, particularly with the spiritual-lied I Remember Who You Are, which exploits the most poignant registers of her soprano.

In the 1990s, Gira finally gained recognition from critics and part of the public. His music was reevaluated as a precursor to noise-rock and industrial groups. In truth, Gira was redeemed by the angelic and pastoral Jarboe. His new direction deserves the utmost respect: he neither compromised with the music industry nor followed prevailing trends; if anything, he distanced himself just as fashionable music was reaching toward him.

With Jarboe, Gira invented a �near-future medieval� folk, sung in a dark, low register (a harsher echo of Peter Murphy). It deals with themes of power, sex, money, and the vulgarity that is both their cause and effect, sometimes dramatized with Shakespearean tragic intensity, all arranged with chamber-music sophistication punctuated by sudden electronic detonations.

Ten Songs For Another World (Young God, 1990), the World of Skin side project of Gira and Jarboe, is evenly split between the two artists. On one hand, Jarboe contributes ethereal, esoteric vocal experiments�timeless, languid ballads that communicate everything without saying anything explicitly (Dream Dream, Black Eyed Dog). On the other, Gira offers dark melodramas immersed in paroxysmal atmospheres (I'll Go There, Take Me Home, You'll Never Forget). His cold, otherworldly delivery (Please Remember Me, The Child's Right) increasingly conveys deep nostalgia, profound pity, and naturally, a biblical resonance.

Gira, this �Christ redeemed� by his Magdalene-like Jarboe, is not heading toward Calvary but descending from the cross. He returns to the people to preach salvation from suffering, presenting resurrection not as eternal life but as immunity from pain. In effect, the album feels more like a direct successor to Burning World than to the first two World of Skin releases.

The Swans proper returned with White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity (Young God, 1991), a double album performed by nine musicians (including Anton Fier and Nicky Skopelitis, Norman Westberg, the original Swans guitarist, bassist Jenny Wade, and drummer Vincent Signorelli), giving many of these ballads an orchestral grandeur. The work, far removed from the monolithic structures of the past, is instead immersed in lush, celestial harmonies and stands as another of Gira�s masterpieces (it is primarily his solo album, as Jarboe�s role is limited to backing vocals).
The melodies and arrangements are among the finest of his career: Better Than You carries the spirit of medieval fair dances while simultaneously incorporating steps of Eastern dance; Power And Sacrifice is marked by a funereal drum gallop and a hypnotic guitar raga, as well as choruses of supernatural intensity; Song For The Sun is a martial country piece whose crescendo first resonates with epic bagpipe jingle-jangles and then organ chords like celebratory bells. These are three of the most powerful ballads Gira has ever written. Everything is immersed in a magical, unreal, dreamlike atmosphere. Jarboe�s vocal counterpoint is essential in transporting the listener into this world, where Gira�s cold, cavernous words echo with metaphysical resonance. (Jarboe appears only on Song For Dead Time, one of her whisper-ballads, and the anguished When She Breathes, sung almost in the style of Sinead O�Connor).
At the other extreme of the emotional spectrum reigns an atmosphere of anguish, nothingness, defeat, and moral hell: funereal tolls accompany the arc of Failure, a sinister music box creeps into the sermon of The Most Unfortunate Lie, and above all, Gira emulates the darkest Jim Morrison in the apocalyptic You Know Nothing, like a master of dramatic tension. These are often timeless allegories of sin and desire.
His art of spiritual transcendence, eternal damnation, and moral ambiguity reaches a peak of lucid madness here. It is an art of unresolved existential doubts, but also of archaic amnesia and primordial magic: in the paradisiacal exultation of Why Are We Alive, Gira confesses, in a narcotic tone so subdued it seems moribund, or in a Buddhist-like trance: "I can't remember/ why we're alive." Listen to the delirious Nick Cave-style sermon of Love Will Save You, in another angelic triumph of keyboards and choruses, which Gira concludes with the lines: "Love may save all you people/ but it will never ever save me."

Love Of Life (Young God, 1992) is an even more solo-oriented album (Jarboe�s contribution is limited to She Cries For Spiders) that confirms the ongoing transition. The music is indeed more vehement and aggressive, more rhythmic and orchestral, and makes frequent use of conversation or spoken-word samples (from the dialogue in Her to a poem recited by a child in the apocalyptic quadrille of Identity). In resonant and explosive sermons, such as the overture and title track, the kinship with Cave is felt more than ever; yet Gira indulges in symphonic arrangements, dizzying polyrhythms, and angelic-infernal choruses that unleash all the primal forces of his art of suggestion.
It is in this form of solemn and fatalistic ballad, in the grandeur of these supernatural visions, in the archaic nobility of these rhymes, in the epic tolling of their choruses, that Gira finds his true vocation; The Sound Of Freedom is a perfect example. A glacial minstrel of a future era, Gira lets himself be carried by the raga of Amnesia in a game of mental associations, then plunges into the delirious �black� liturgies of In The Eyes Of Nature. Gira�s albums increasingly resemble masses officiated by a priest-android.
Many tracks are devoted to the traumas of his childhood, starting with the dream of The Golden Boy That Was Swallowed By The Sea, �narrated� in an extremely low, cold, calm, seductive, and fairy-tale-like register, counterpointed by phrases and thuds with the emotional impact of a flock of funeral bells. A terrible pain underlies the myriad lavish disguises of his art: �Every breath is drunk with tears,� recites the child in Identity�

To that apocryphal Bible of Children Of God, his religious proclamation, there then followed an intimate trilogy, opened by Burning World, continued by White Light, and concluded by Love Of Life.

Meanwhile, the true story of his childhood has come to light, which Gira had always carefully avoided revealing. Raised in Los Angeles virtually without family, he spent much of his childhood in reform institutions for vandalism, theft, and assaults. Drugged from a very young age, by twelve he was so dependent on LSD that he needed it daily. At thirteen, he was forced to move with his father to a small town in Indiana. He ran away from home and eventually arrived in Los Angeles, where he began to play music. All his songs have their roots in that terrible childhood.

Die Tur Ist Zu (World Service, 1996) collects seven lengthy live improvisations.

Billed as the group�s final testament (that is, of Gira and Jarboe), the colossal album Soundtracks For The Blind (Young God, 1996) is simply a heterogeneous mass of material to be dealt with before it ages, a somewhat random stack of samples, found sounds, sound experiments, artificial orchestrations, occult lyrics�a hodgepodge of unfinished and imperfect pieces. Larry Mullins on percussion and vibraphone (a symphony orchestra member and session musician for Iggy Pop), Vudi (of American Music Club) on guitars, and Joe Goldring (of Toiling Midgets) on bass form one of the most aggressive line-ups of Gira�s career.
The album is effectively a Gira solo album. Jarboe�s contribution is limited to vocals. The lyrics that matter are Gira�s, and all the arrangements are by Gira; and the arrangements constitute a large part of the meaning of this record.
The key to deciphering the album may lie in the brief metaphysical watercolors scattered randomly, like Red Velvet Corridor and Live Through Me, which merely deform and agitate faceless sounds until they seem like desperate cries of the damned trying to speak to us from the afterlife. They are rehearsals for the major compositions, which share the same anxiety of incommunicability.
On this album, Gira reveals himself above all as an ambitious avant-garde musician, a sound illusionist who in I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull buries a symphony orchestra tuning its instruments and galaxies exchanging infrared signals. It is psychoanalytic nightmare music, culminating in a deafening drum crescendo. Gira swims in a sea of electronic music that stretches from the shores of Karlheinz Stockhausen to the maelstroms of Klaus Schulze to the icebergs of Foetus.
Nonetheless, in the end, Gira remains primarily a masterful architect of spectral requiems. The masterpiece is Helpless Child (sixteen minutes), from whose nebula of electronic sounds emerges a subdued, conversational voice, marked by the ringing strikes of the guitar; the speech turns into a barely whispered song, as if at the point of death, while chaotic clamor explodes all around, and gradually the ceremonial becomes an infernal orgy, amid the onslaught of percussion, the reverberations of increasingly powerful guitar strikes, the solemn chords of the gospel organ, and the martial blows of cymbals and tam-tams� Rather than accumulating sounds to build an impactful harmony, Gira arranges them in ordered progression to create an atmospheric effect.
Gira enjoys scattering compositions with cryptic signs, like the little girl playing in the dark whirlpools of electronics and voices in Beautiful Days, surfacing from the oceanic depths of the keyboards.
Animus (eleven minutes) hums its �maudit� serenade with the tone of a relaxed nightclub entertainer, accompanied only by the hypnotic guitar strikes and the dreamlike chords of the vibraphone, until it is devastated by violent electronic distortions. In the end, only the alien drone remains.
The copper side revolves around the mantra of Sound (thirteen minutes), which begins with an intense and slow tinkle, overflowing with spirituality, and which, in the purest psychedelic tradition, rises with an overwhelming progression of searing guitar distortions, celestial keyboard chords, and martial drumbeats, only to fade again into one of its desolate requiems.
In the heartfelt prayer of Final Sac (ten minutes), putting aside studio tricks for the occasion, Gira dilutes his melodramatic art to the point that it feels like listening to the tail of a Nick Cave or Jim Morrison song, slowed and extended infinitely. His words fade into a velvety silence of vibraphone echoes and cymbal flares.
The major compositions are allegorical �stories� in which Gira presumably recounts his version of human damnation.
Some other surreal pieces, bordering on musique concr�te (Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey, a prelude to the most radical symphony, I Love You This Much).
Jarboe does little or nothing: on Volcano she babbles like Bj�rk over a ramshackle techno backdrop; she recites the masochistic threnody of YRP in a suspense-saturated atmosphere, � la Nico.
Gira had the courage to seal the Swans project with an album in which he poured everything he had never dared to make public. The naked Gira of these �soundtracks� is a man burdened with sins and aware of his irrevocable condemnation.
The work could not be more diffuse, but when it manages to focus, it touches heights of genuine existential grandeur.

The Great Annihilator (Young God, 1995), the first studio album in about three years, features William Rieflin on drums ( Ministry). The album is an apocalyptic fresco of a mankind doomed to infernal tortures a sad and lugubrious "Divine Comedy". It also marks one of Gira's most metaphysical moments, as each song is basically an allegorical homily.
Gira's gift for terrorizing his listeners is intact, as proven by the instrumental In ouverture (laden with tension and suspense) and the pagan cerimony of I Am The Sun, over tribal percussion and children choir. The angelic music of the previous Swan albums has been replaced by a violent impetus of faith and fear. The loud, manic, develish orchestral harmonies hark back to Foetus' industrial symphonies (particularly in Alcohol The Seed and I Am The Sun). whereas the emphatic, melodramatic tones and pounding gospel rhythms are affiliated with Nick Cave's solemn balladry (particularly in She Lives). What is uniquely Gira-esque are the gothic choirs and the apathetic vocals.
Gira is tempted by mass appeal. Celebrity Lifestyle is possibly the most accessible song of Swan's career, a hybrid of Lou Reed's nonchalant boogie and Joy Division's danceable dark-punk. The Great Annihilator takes a stab even at conventional rock and roll.
Jarboe is not a protagonist, mostly a spectator. Nonetheless, her archaic and exoteric chant My Buried Child, her Enya-like lullaby Warm and her experimental Out for voice and electronics, are among the highlights. The personae of the two composers blend only once, in the chaotic mantra of Mind Body Light Sound, coincidentally the album's centerpiece.
Alas, too many tracks sound trivial and predictable and make this probably the least accomplished of their records.

Swans' demise was followed by a deluge of recordings: Omniscience (Young God, 1996), the live Swans Are Dead (Young God, 1998), the official bootleg Public Castration Is A Good Idea (Thirsty Ear, 1999).

In the meantime, both Gira and Jarboe have released a number of astounding recordings on their own. Gira Body Lovers/ Body Haters and Angels of Light. Gira launched a new project, The Body Lovers/ The Body Haters, which released two electronic collages of samples and found sounds: Number One of Three (Atavistic, 1998) and 34:13 (1999)

Jonathan Kane debuted solo with February (Table Of The Elements, 2005), that sounds influenced by his tenure with La Monte Young's ensemble Forever Bad Blues Band.

The Angels Of Light albums included material that had originally been released on two limited-edition discs, Solo Recordings From Home and I Am Singing To You From My Room. They were compiled on Songs For A Dog (Lumberton Trading, 2006).

Gira resurrected the Swans for My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Young God, 2010), an album that is more predictable than implacable, and, generally speaking, more pomp than genius. The symphonic cacophony of No Words No Thoughts surrounds Gira's gloomy, apathetic and hypnotic recitation without leading to a climax. The whipping riffs My Birth are not supported by an adequate melody (or, for that matter, by an adequate vocalist). The grotesque orchestral coda of You Fucking People Make Me Sick is interesting, but totally unrelated to the lame lullaby that it is supposed to frame. The pounding instrumental overture of Inside Madeline is indeed intimidating, but it leads to an insipid litany. All the hard-rocking clangor of Eden Prison is wasted in a weak declamation. The campfire singalong Reeling The Liars In lasts only two minutes but easily outshines all the lengthy bombastic songs. Gira is now exorcizing demons rather than preaching nihilism, as he did when he was young and terrifying. Somehow this has drained his ability to shock.

The band is built around Gira and Norman Westberg: second guitarist Christoph Hahn, percussionist Phil Puleo, drummer Thor Harris and bassist Christopher Pravdica (plus Bill Rieflin on bass, guitar, piano, percussion, keyboards; Jason La Farge on violin, Kenny Siegal on piano, a mandolin, a trombone, a trumpet).

We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head (Young God, 2012) is a live album.

30 years after the Swans gave their first masterpiece the good news was that the world had finally caught up and by 2013 the Swans were widely recognized as one of the greatest rock bands ever. The bad news is that it was time for Gira to monetize the name that had yielded no commercial return for so long. Hence the double album The Seer (Young God, 2012) that begins with the frigid bolero crescendo and Pink Floyd-ian litany of Lunacy (with Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low) and ends with the Doors-ian blues-jazz shuffle of The Apostate, which blossoms after a lengthy preamble of sentimental guitar glissandoes and a manic collective explosion a` la Glenn Branca.
For a two-hour album, there are precious few ideas, and they are mostly (very) antiquated, bordering on the ridiculous when they borrow Sonic Youth-ian guitar repetition for the ten-minute Mother of the World and when they indulge in the free-jazz jamming of 93 Ave B Blues, or when a loop of tolling bells can't do more than trigger a monotonous litany in the eight-minute Avatar. Jarboe appears on the 19-minute Piece of the Sky, at first an effective piece of cosmic music until the drums kick in and turn it into a slow languid aimless sleep-inducing coda, and yet another repetitive section.
The 32-minute The Seer begins promising with hysterically strummed guitars (Glenn Branca again) and early Pink Floyd-ian suspense, and peaks when Gira pits mantra-like vocal repetition against country and western drumming, but the remaining 15 minutes are awfully pointless. The Seer Returns employs Roger Waters' strategy of revisiting a theme in a different tone (hence memories of The Wall), and pushing it to an obsessive degree, reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, does cause shivers of primordial shamanic hypnosis.
There is one touching ballad, Song for a Warrior, sung by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' vocalist Karen O, that is the exact opposite of the lengthy compositions and that for a couple of minutes matches the romantic intensity of, say, Gram Parsons' version of Love Hurts.
Song for a Warrior, The Apostate and The Seer Returns (and half of Piece of the Sky and one third of The Seer) deserved to be recorded, but the rest perhaps could have be edited away. Anyway, this album has virtually nothing of the sound of the Swans. It should have been credited to Gira or to one of his many side-projects.
Needless to say, the very same critics and publications that ignored the Swans when they were releasing one masterpiece after the other hailed this mediocre senile work as a masterpiece 30 years later, finding all sorts of hidden meanings in what was simply an astute sellout.

We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head (2012) documents the live performances of this reincarnation of the Swans.

The double-disc To Be Kind (Young God, 2014) does not fully redeem the generic mediocrity of Seer but at least scales down the pomp or infuses it with more real deas. Nonetheless, the Swans remain unrecognizable (note for the younger generations: no, your parents were not listening to this "stuff", they were listening to Filth and Cop, much darker "stuff").
The looping hypnotic strumming Screen Shot (8:04) is perhaps an attempt to get in synch with the era of Animal Collective (seven years too late). Just A Little Boy (12:40), dedicated to blues deity Howling Wolf, ends up sounding like Led Zeppelin performing a cover of the Doors' The End: not a bad idea, but hardly worthy 12 minutes of our time. A Little God In My Hands (7:08) fares better, with the guitar intoning the rhythm of Indian-style dancing while the tom-tom percussion fuels the choir of an esoteric rite. One gets used to the method of stretching an idea to its limit (in terms of duration). Hence the expressionistic melodrama Kirsten Supine (10:33) and the noise-folk litany Nathalie Neal (10:15).
"Repetitive" is the first word that comes to mind when listening to these extended songs. And those are dwarfs compared to the giant that takes up one fourth of the album: Bring The Sun/ Toussaint L'Ouverture (34:05), a Pink Floyd-ian rock opera about the hero of Haiti's independence war, replete with the suspenseful pace of Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, with a percussive crescendo a` la A Saucerful of Secrets, and with a Buddhist-inspired vocal psalm that sounds suspiciously like the beginning of Shine On You Crazy Diamond repeated over and over again. The second part consists in a loose jam of guitar tones, Zen-style vocalization, theatrical screams, and martial percussion. (Whatever it had to say, it could have been said in three or four minutes). With this second double-disc album, and the second colossal suite, one suspects that Gira has been affected by the "Roger Waters syndrome" and will start producing psychological concept albums that will become more and more pessimistic as he gets older. In fact, the album's finale, To Be Kind (8:22), was probably intended as a Roger Waters-kind of apotheosis, except that it fails miserably (Gira has to listen a few more times to Two Suns In The Sunset).
Amid all the pomp and presumption, there is however more substance than on Seer. The 17-minute She Loves Us (17:01) is the ultimate "acid trip", a slowly rising nebula of percussion and guitar (that Acid Mothers Temple would pay for) that solidifies as an insistent post-blues dance with visceral shouts (that would have been a better tribute to Howling Wolf), which in turn becomes a transcendent chant of sorts after the refrain gets repeated a million times (marred by lyrics such as "Fun fun fun/ Mau mau mau/ Fuck fuck fuck/ Your name is fuck/ I'm going home/ I'm going home" that hopefully will teach a generation of aspiring songwriters what happens to you if you drop acid in high school instead of studying). Despite all the sins of excess and redundancy, this is indeed a powerful piece, a 21st century version of Amon Duul II.
The album is often annoyingly redundant and predictable, but then again those are precisely the main qualities that one admires in wallpaper and in supermarket muzak.

Gira announced yet another ending for the Swans, and the double-disc The Glowing Man (Young God, 2016) was meant to be the swan song, as well as the end of the trilogy begun with The Seer. Less claustrophobic than its predecessors, it however further indulged in the vices of Gira's middle age. First and foremost, Gira's tedious declamation, that cannot rescue the simplistic structure of Cloud Of Forgetting (12:43): hypnotic collective rhythm against an organ drone. Secondly, the limited compositional skills. Cloud Of Unknowing (25:12) is a messy and childish prog-rock suite that tries to make sense of incoherent sections. It begins with countless minutes of inconclusive collective improvisation and rising synchronized percussive sounds. Then Gira sings a melody that sounds like a cross between a muezzin's call for prayer and Velvet Underground's Venus in Fur over a plodding rhythm. Then church bells introduce a section that evokes the morbid macabre suspense of the Doors' The End. Again, it takes ten minutes of tidal "om" choirs for Frankie M (20:54) to begin but don't get too excited: that's just the beginning of the collective percussive section, everybody banging together on whatever they can get their hands on. The real singing begins only after 12 minutes and it's as unappealing as it gets (sung by one of the most unappealing singers around). After 16 minutes the guitar and cello intone an atonal pattern that launches the final percussive crescendo (the best part). The Glowing Man (28:53) is a revision of Bring the Sun/ Toussaint L'Ouverture which was a revision of The Seer. It begins with an undulating organ sound, followed by collective pounding. Then, not knowing where to go next, the band simply stops, and the piece restarts with another childish section of collective noise. After 17 minutes the singing restarts with a Lou Reed-ian litany and that's a much more interesting song, if no less repetitive. Then the piece crashes again, and so on. It all sounds improvised on the fly in the school's gym by a group of teenage students. A little better is The World Looks Red / The World Looks Black (14:32): an Indian-esque lamentation in which the droning and frenzied repetitive patterns make more sense, echoes again of the Doors' The End (alas minus the dramatic genius). After six minutes the music adds a minimalist couterpoint of a trumpet-sounding instrument, soon turning into a techno locomotive, and then the vocals and backup vocals intone a gospel-like chant a` la Nick Cave. The piece ends with an "om" gliding over an organ drone. The shorter songs come as a breath of fresh air: the harrowing duet of When Will I Return?, that describes a rape, and the Leonard Cohen-esque choral singalong Finally Peace.
Out of two hours of music, there are interesting moments: the instrumental ending of Frankie M, the Lou Reed-ian section of the title track, the Doors-ian section of Cloud Of Unknowing, and most of The World Looks Red/ The World Looks Black; but too much sounds amateurish or redundant. It is funny that the music made by a middle-aged man can sound more childish than the music that he was making as a very young man. The fact is that Gira never acquired a sense of what counterpoint is, and therefore his ability to stretch his compositions over ten or twenty minutes is limited like the ability of a beginner, something less evident in shorter pieces. His compositions are fundamentally static: the longer they drag on, the more evident this becomes. Besides the usual sextet, this album features Bill Rieflin on several instruments, cellist Okkyung Lee, a violinist, mandolin, banjo, trumpet, trombone and flute.

This album concluded the fourth life of the Swans. First they were a brutal "no wave" outfit (the era that peaked with Filth and Cop). Then they turned to austere psychedelic chamber folk music (the era of Children Of God and White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity) Then they joined the ranks of post-rock (with Soundtracks For The Blind). And finally they turned to minimalist and ambient techniques.

The double-disc The Gate (Young God, 2015) contains five unfinished Gira demos and six monumental live performances: Frankie M (29:25), A Little God In My Hands (13:12), Apost/Cloud Of Unforming (33:40), Just A Little Boy (16:40), Cloud Of Forgetting (11:33), and Bring The Sun/Black Eyed Man (28:16).

The double-disc Deliquescence (Young God, 2017) contains colossal live performances: The Knot (45:38), Cloud Of Forgetting (16:01), Deliquescing (10:09), Cloud Of Unknowing (29:22), The Man Who Refused To Be Unhappy (9:44), The Glowing Man (36:21).

Gira developed his own version of "crowd-funding" when he released the album What Is This? (Young God, 2019) containing ten acoustic demos that still needed to be orchestrated and properly recorded, a process for which the fans could help raised the funds by buying this album.

Sure enough, a little later the double-disc Leaving Meaning (Young God, 2019) was ready. Its meandering dirges heralded a new phase of the Swans, but closer to the 1990s than to the 2010s, perhaps also because the core players basically constituted an expanded Angels of Light lineup (Christoph Hahn, Dana Schechter, Cassis Staudt, Larry Mullins) with bassist Yoyo Roehm, pianist Paul Wallfisch of Botanica, violinist Heather Trost, digital soundpainter Ben Frost, and the Necks with minimal intrusion by the five ex-Swans (Pravdica, Puleo, Westberg, Hahn and Harris). He fails to entertain with the somnolent jazzy litany Cathedrals Of Heaven, with the calm ballad It's Coming It's Real, with Amnesia, which is an inferior version of the song on Love of Life, and surprises his followeres when he croones the viola-tinged neoclassical chamber lied What Is This?. But he succeeds in two kinds of songs. Firstly, there are the songs penned by the Necks, characterized by hypnotic ethereal atmospheres: Leaving Meaning (11:21) and The Nub (12:01), the latter with the addition of vocalist Baby Dee. These evoke psychedelic dilation, the latter sounding like the Grateful Dead's Anthem Of The Sun played by a jazz combo. Secondly, he succeeds in ritualistic pieces that emphasize tribal rhythms and psychotic vocals. Hence the standout, Sunfucker (10:44), that begins with a mayhem of infernal voices, implodes in a wall of noise, and then resumes as a pow-wow dance drenched in shrill drones; hence the theatrical The Hanging Man (10:48) over trotting rhythm and Glenn Branca-ian guitar repetition; hence Some New Things, another repetitive percussive dance; and hence My Phantom Limb, which morphs from a babelic confusion of vocals into a sinister buccaneering singalong. The album is uneven and seems to be a collection of EPs from different eras, performed by different lineups; but Sunfucker is possibly the best Gira song of the decade.

The two-hour The Beggar (2023), a concept on death, is one of the worst of his career. Most of the songs are underwhelming and/or too long. The slow, sparse, melancholy The Parasite, No More of This and Why Can't I Have What I Want Any Time That I Want? (best of the batch) sound like Leonard Cohen backed by a choir, albeit an uninspired and verbose Cohen. Songs like Ebbing (11:04) are built around trivial loops and predictable lyrics. On the other hand, the monotonous zombie chant The Beggar (10:15) rises above the mere imitation of Nick Cave. The wordless and symphonic Michael Is Done sounds like an unfinished sketch for composing his own requiem. The behemoth here is the 44-minute The Beggar Lover 3, but it is in part a collage quoting from Gira's previous recordings, his fourth attempt at a self-referencing collage after the two Body Lovers albums and Look at Me Go, the bonus track of My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. For a long time it is simply a repetitive, pounding, instrumental voodoo dance with ominous bass lines a` la Cramps. After 21 minutes it enters "collage mode" for 14 minutes, and it ends with ten minutes of lounge soul balladry. Not exactly breathtaking...