Usually, in interviews, there’s a brief bit of smalltalk at the beginning and the end. “Thanks for taking the call,” “Appreciate the time,” and that sort of thing. A question I get asked a lot is, “Hey, are you coming out to X show?” It’s something people ask mostly to be polite.

At the end of our interview, when Swans guitarist/vocalist Michael Gira asked me if I’d be on hand for either the I’ll be Your Mirror fest in Asbury Park that his band is playing or the Brooklyn show preceding, I said I’d like to hit up Brooklyn (to which David Eugene Edwards of Wovenhand has been added for an acoustic set), but that if I did, I’d have to deal with being surrounded by Williamsburg hipsters.

Gira‘s response — without a second of delay or hesitation of any kind — was, “bring a flamethrower.”

Shit you not.

It’s that kind of unbending will for confrontation that’s helped Gira and Swans cast a hugely influential net on underground music, be it Neurosis and the post-metal born in their wake or Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the avant-garde style experimentation they in turn have fostered. Swans are a root band, setting a lineage of distinct and aggressive crescendos. Their music feels like it’s crashing down on you as you listen.

Despite the long break between the studio albums Soundtracks for the Blind (1996) and My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky (2010) and Gira‘s shift in direction that took place with the dark acoustic-led Americana of Angels of Light (whose seven-album discography is a beast unto itself), that oppressive feeling has remained consistent. The personnel may have changed — and Gira‘s drive for challenge has led to a sound that’s moving forward rather than trying to harken back to something it would inevitably fail to capture — but new Swans is still Swans.

My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky was one of 2010’s densest and most crushing releases, and in the interview below Gira discusses what led him to revive the band, the development of even newer material — some of which has already been recorded — a forthcoming live album, the practicalities involved in putting out music on his own label, Young God Records, the relationship between Swans and Angels of Light and much more.

Complete Q&A is after the jump. Please enjoy.

You recorded part of the new album in Berlin?

We recorded the songs that we’re playing live in Berlin, and also a portion of one that is built up from my guitar, my acoustic guitar. Now we have, at the end of this month’s tour, we have another five days here in Upstate New York, we’re going to record a bunch of new songs that I have written, and just build them up from the bottom up. The album’s going to be sprawling. I don’t even know if you can call it an album – it’s just a collection of music happening at the time. It can’t be contained on vinyl, almost. It’d be like a six-vinyl set or something (laughs). So, I don’t know how it’s gonna be available, but we’re just gonna do it and put it out later.

Hey man, you’re putting it out yourself anyway. If you wanna do the six-LP set…

It’s a big investment! Fuck. I can’t afford that. The most I can imagine is doing a double vinyl, and if they want the rest, they can download it or something like that – I don’t know how it’s gonna work. But I don’t even want to think about that right now. Things are so up in the air right now in the so-called music industry, whatever. I just want to make the music and then figure out how to make a living off it later.

I thought what you did with My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky was a good way to do it. You had the regular version and the special version for anyone who wanted it.

There’ll be a lot of that going on. There’ll have to be. We’re doing this live record. I just finished mixing it and mastering it and all that stuff. There’s a special edition that’s going to be available in 1,000 copies just through the website very soon, right when this tour ends, that’ll help to fray the huge cost of this album. At least for us, it’s a huge cost. So it’s gonna be just for fans, you know, and it’s gonna have acoustic versions of us live. It’s about 80 minutes, 90 minutes, maybe more, of Swans live, and the second CD is filled out with five acoustic recordings of songs – demos, really – of songs that we’re going to be recording for the next album. People will buy that, and that’s a way to earn money to pay for this gargantuan recording cost.

You did that for the last record too, right?

Yeah. You have to resort to things like this these days. It’s okay, because I really appreciate that core amount of people are so supportive, but it entails, as you might imagine, hundreds and hundreds of hours of work. Printing things up by hand – because I make these hand-made packages – it’s sort of not what I had envisions doing at my time in life (laughs), but I’m a shipping clerk also anyway for the label (laughs), so I’m pretty good at repetitive tasks.

At Roadburn you had a CD of home recordings for sale. Was that the same one that you had for sale on the Young God site before the album?

No, there’s a bunch of them. I don’t know which one you have. It might just be a collection of home recordings, I think, called The Milk of M. Gira. I’ve made several of these hand-made packages over the last 10 years. You’ve got to be creative. Which I’ve always had to be. Swans has never been hugely commercially successful, so you’ve always had to figure out how to do things to make a living.

What can you tell me about the writing for the new record?

One way the songs are accruing is, I brought songs to the band while we were on tour, and we started working on them in soundchecks, and then introduced them live. They’ve just grown that way as band songs. One of them is called “The Apostate” – that’s probably 27 minutes long. It’s just these long sonic sections keep building and building the more that we play them. Those are really properly called “group songs.” I came up with the initial thing, but we all contributed to how it builds and develops. The other way of working is when I bring a song in the studio and I have it written on acoustic guitar and maybe I’ll just play with the drummer or something, get the basic structure down and people will start overdubbing on that. It’s a totally different way of working, but I like both ways, and it’s gonna give the record – if you can call it a record – a lot of dynamics, because it’s a completely different way of viewing sound. Then, once everything’s all recorded and maybe after they’re all mixed, I’m gonna take them and use a lot of the sonic sources and make long sonic passages, just abstractly.

How do you mean?

Like I did on the extra CD, the one that was available [on the Young God Records website]. I don’t know what it’s gonna be right now. Right now, it’s completely out of control. We’ll see. Eventually I’ll strangle it into submission.  I like that, when things are completely chaotic and you have to fight your way into some kind of form.

What’s the difference between working that way in Swans and putting together and Angels of Light record?

Angels of Light was primarily – except for one instance, which was the record How I Loved You – just the latter way I described. I would go in and play the song on my acoustic guitar with somebody keeping a groove or something, and gradually orchestrate it up. That was the way those records were made. Except for How I Loved You. I had a band we were touring with and we played the songs live, and so that record reflected that way of working.

That was Akron/Family?

No, that was Larry Mullins [formerly of Swans] and Dana Schechter [of Bee and Flower] and Thor Harris [of Shearwater, now Swans] and that. Akron/Family, when they recorded with me, none of those songs had been played live when we recorded them. Those were built up. Later, they did play with me live, of course.

I remember reading the story of playing with Akron/Family and that leading to doing Swans.

Yeah, it was just a particular moment that I thought it would be a good idea. There was something there that reminded me it wasn’t all bad. I’d sort of vilified it in my own mind, tried to cut it off from my history – which I think was a bad idea; it’s like trying to deny your true nature – but I needed to do that at the time. Once I decided to accept it again, a lot of things opened up, and it was a good decision, it turns out.

Were you surprised at the reaction you got to Swans coming back?

Shocked, yeah. I knew that the reputation, or the imprint on music, had grown over the years, just through the internet and new generations coming up and discovering it and things like that, but I didn’t realize the extent to which that had happened. It’s been very gratifying.

When you were going back to Swans, did you have some idea of what you wanted it to be?

That’s a good question, because yes, I did, but it was more in images than in music. Or it was vague notions of sound. I knew that there’s a kind of sway in Swans. It’s related to blues somehow, but it doesn’t sound like blues. In the feel of it. It really goes deep into the groin, but also seems like it could keep going on endlessly and lead into a kind of trance state. Also, the big sonic waves and crescendos, from Soundtracks for the Blind was an interest. Not that I wanted to go and do something that sounds like that – and we haven’t – but that kind of long, sweeping sonic maelstrom. I wanted to get back into that somehow. So that’s what we’ve done. Fortunately, it’s led into a new kind of sound, rather than a harkening back, though it’s pretty distinctly Swans, I think.

It’s distinct, but I didn’t think this record sounded like you were trying to capture something from an old album. You can always tell when the reunion band –

Fuck that shit (laughs). I don’t even like to call it a reunion. It’s not a reformation, either. It’s a reconvening or something like that. I just restarted the project. It wasn’t like trying to get the old pals together and relive the old days. Get the old fans together so they can relive the old days. It’s more like re-instigating the project to find a new way to work that’s interesting. I was getting a little bored with Angels of Light, so I wanted to do something that challenges me, and it just turns out that starting this again is doing just that.

For the new record, is it the same personnel involved?

Yes. With a host of guests as well. I haven’t settled upon who all the people will be. I’m starting to call guests, but I’m not sure yet.

How did it work out that you wound up splitting the recording time like that? It’s going to be October before you go back in. You’re going back in after the I’ll be Your Mirror fest, or do I have the timing wrong?

I hadn’t finished the material, for one thing. And another thing is, we were all together in Berlin, so it made sense to record there, since we could all get in the studio, since we were all in one place. We all live all over the fucking place, so it’s kind of expensive to fly everyone around just to record, and then you have to put people up and all that kind of stuff. So, again, at the end of this tour we’re doing now, we’ll kind of be all in the same place, so we’re just going to come up here to Upstate New York and record for another five days. That’ll be it for my cohorts, and then I’ll start orchestrating getting people in. I have Bill Rieflin coming in again, and several female singers from different semi-famous or famous groups that I’m gonna approach that I’m not sure yet.

Do you see yourself at any point going to Angels of Light? Would you trade off one to the other?

I don’t know. Right now, I’m too busy with everything I’m doing to even think about it. I would like to do that, but really, that’s so lyric-intensive, that I would need a lot of mental space to just read. I think one of the reasons I had this writer’s block I had for several years was I just had no time by myself, to read and cogitate and develop that side of my mind again. Since Angels is so lyric-oriented, I would need a break from everything, and right now, that’s not in the cards.

Whereas with Swans…

The words are very important, but the music is more the thing. The words qualify the music. They create, hopefully, a picture in the listener’s mind, but at least this version of Swans, it’s not as lyric-intensive as Angels of Light.

That makes a lot of sense in terms of the sway you were talking about before and the builds in Swans.

If you had a lot of lyrics over that, it would ruin it. So I need to find usually one or two phrases that are open-ended, and I’m always thinking about gospel music or religious music having these kinds of incantations. To try to find those is really hard without them drawing too much attention to themselves. They have to be in the music and part of the music and part of the sound. It should be evocative, but if it becomes about me, the singer, or something, I think that destroys the overwhelming quality of the music.

I think on “Jim” you did it with one word.

(Laughs) With “Jim?” (Laughs) Yeah, maybe.

Do you know when the record will be out?

It better be done by the end of December, because I want to get the record out by March/April, so that gives three or four months’ lead time to do it right. So I don’t know. It’s a lot of work ahead of me.

Any idea of the title yet?

No, but I do know the title for the live album that we’re putting out. That is We Rose From Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head. (Laughs) It took a long time to come up with.

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Tags: New York, Swans, Young God

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.