Michael Gira
不同时期不同来源的访谈节选，无特定主题，只取决于个人喜好，如有版权问题请告知，不定期更新
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
老年团的正确打开方式：
rule #1 别跑狗
2011版本：
Jonathan Dean: I heard from a few friends who were at the show in Chicago, and they said there was some kind of physical confrontation with the audience that created a very tense atmosphere.
Michael Gira: A couple of bozos were slam dancing… I think that’s what you call it. They saw it on MTV so they figured that’s what they were supposed to do. They were slamming into people who were actually paying attention and listening. I kept spitting on them trying to get their attention, but they wouldn’t look up because they weren’t really listening, they were just bouncing around being idiots. I finally managed to get hold of one guy’s hair, and I pulled him up on stage and screamed in his face, and then they stopped. They were ruining the show. I don’t mind if people move, but they were living out their fake rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. They were ruining the show for other people, so I put a stop to it. I just hate that whole fake ritual. I remember the beginnings of it. I used to go to punk rock gigs in Los Angeles back in 1977. People weren’t slam dancing then; they were pogoing, which is just as silly. The first show I saw that happen was The Cramps at a gig in LA in ‘79, there were these surfer jocks stage diving and moshing. Thurston Moore and I used to go to the hardcore shows in NYC in the early days. I thought some of the music was OK, but I just didn’t like the jock aspect of it. The people that used to want to beat me up in school were now emboldened, having found their métier, and they were pounding into people, jumping off stage, and I just thought that was idiotic. That behavior gradually became the de rigeur thing you do at a rock show, which is really unfortunate. So there’s my sermon about that.
1996版本
SECONDS: To what extent was physical violence between you and the audience a part of early Swans shows?
GIRA: None, really. Except one time years ago when we were touring with Sonic Youth when we typically had an audience of about ten people, some guy was actually pogo-ing in his bright orange Devo jumpsuit at the front of the stage as we played, and it was just so pathetic I couldn't help myself. I climbed down from the stage and threw him to the ground, yelled at him to get the hell out of there. Similarly now, if anyone stage dives or moshes(what a joke!) at one of our shows I'll stop the music. I really hate group identity rituals like that. They're just a microcosm, a little factory workshop exercise in conformism.
rule #2 别戴耳塞（该戴还是得戴
2011版本：
Jonathan Dean: You have said that this incarnation of Swans should not be seen as a reunion, but rather a “revivification of the idea of Swans.” What is the idea of Swans?
Michael Gira: Maybe a love of sonic overload. The idea of the Swans is sonic intensity, which is something I eschewed for the most part with Angels Of Light, because I didn’t want to regress. With Angels, I was more interested in the song per se, and the lyrics.
There were always dynamics — the Swans had a lot of quiet songs — but one central salient feature is the cascading sounds that make your body feel like it’s levitating when you’re inside it. I’m speaking mostly about live performances, of course. That’s something I was going for with this incarnation. I wanted to experience that feeling again. Making something that is so much bigger than yourself that you feel like you are inside the mouth of God.
1996版本：
SECONDS: At one point SWANS were touted-presumably at your instigation- as the "loudest band in the world."
GIRA: That slogan certainly did not originate with me. I hated that perception of SWANS. But of course the music was loud- still is, sometimes- simply because the sounds weren't the same unless they were at a certain volume level. You can't get the same over tones in a room and your body doesn't really feel the bass frequencies unless they're at a certain volume, and these were aspects of the sound I was interested in experiencing at the time: they turned a key in my head, changed me in a way I found stimulating and enjoyed. But there was nothing macho about it, no desire to dominate. Instead I wanted to elevate, or disintegrate - I used to make tape loops of grinding metal, a baby crying, slowed down, low-frequency synth noise, distorted screams, etc., and I'd put, say, a half-hour of each of these loops on its own cassette. Then, in the rehearsal space I had on 6th Street in NYC, I'd give each cassette its own tape player and hook each tape player up to its own SVT bass set-up, with the amps arranged in a circle, pointing inward, and I'd play the tapes at full volume, with me standing in the middle of it as the loops bombarded me. It felt great! That's the sensation I wanted from SWANS, in the early days, except more...
rule #3 别摄录
Michael Gira: （这段是作为迷汉的自白/Caspar Brötzmann是Peter Brötzmann的儿纸）……Do you know Caspar Brötzmann’s music? I saw him playing at a festival recently and I was overwhelmed, it was so good, just so good. I was down in the front row, screaming like a fanboy. I think he was looking at me 'Michael! Go away!' I'm always like that when I like something. There are people that give that level of commitment still.
Luke Turner: Perhaps you can look at it another way and say that with music being so accessible now, it’s surprising that people haven't come round to the idea that Swans aren't antagonistic. Their minds would be opened up by technological progress.
MG: I don't know. The people that have an affinity for this sort of thing seem to be discovering it. The audience is growing, it's bigger than it ever has been. I guess that's due to the internet. One distressing aspect to that is if I look on YouTube for 'Swans' I see all these different shows and it sounds terrible, and people think they've seen it if they look at it like that. Maybe they come then to the show with expectations, or with a prefigured notion of what it's going to be, and I think that’s a little sad. But it's inevitable and I'm not complaining. In the old days every concert was a special, unique experience, and now they've gleaned it from YouTube. It's equally distressing to look out into the audience and see this sea of cell phones held up [laughs].
LT: When you see something immersive as Swans you want to be inside that music. From an audience point of view the bright screens blinking back at you are really frustrating, it pops the bubble.
MG: It's really surreal and very disjunctive. The person that's doing that, they're experiencing the ersatz version as well as partially what's there at the same time, and I don’t think they're able to get the experience because of that. I stop shows sometimes. I've started putting up notices saying it's not allowed, because people aren't paying attention. It's strange. I guess it's just a facet of the modern world. I wonder if people do that when they're having sex.
LT: Well they do, there's tonnes of it online.
MG: You mean people are having sex and each are looking at the cell phones of themselves having sex?
LT: From certain things I've seen. I wonder if people do it when they go to see the Pope give an address?
MG: I wonder what it would be like if you witnessed your own murder that way…
rule #4 别问蠢问题（或者珍爱生命还是别去看老年团了
John Doran: I wanted to talk to you about the live performance. I think it's the sign of a healthy and a good band when they attract a lot of urban myths and a lot of stories, and I wanted to ask you to confirm or deny the three or four stories about Swans which I've been unable to either stand up or discount over the years（现在又多了一个都市传说：在上海场震碎了灯泡）. One was, I was told that once a hapless sound engineer came up to you before a gig and asked what you wanted it to sound like and you punched him in the stomach and said, 'I want it to sound like that!'
Michael Gira: [laughs] Uh, yeah, that was the soundman, I pushed him in the chest, I said, 'Like this!' doosh! – and pushed him in the chest.
JD: Now, I'm pretty sure this is true actually, but did you turn off the air conditioning during a gig until the heat in the venue became quite unbearably hot?
MG: Yeah but it wasn't an evil intent, it was for my benefit as well. The air-conditioning, first of all, was above me on the stage, blowing on me, and if you're a singer, this immediately means your throat dries up and it ruins your voice, so I had to turn it off. But I also liked the heat in the room, the intensity of the heat and what it did to the whole experience, and actually things sound better in a humid room too, at least to me.
JD: Yeah, the sound waves travel differently don't they?
MG: Yeah. But it just feels good too, it's like being in this kind of psychic sweat lodge and I liked that. I'm not really between that any more, I'm a little more generous with my audience [laughs] Yeah I like that experience. And in a way it's a kind of unifier too. You're all in it, in the same thing. You think it's hot in the audience? Should be us, with fucking lights on us! I mean literally, my clothes would be soaked as if I've just jumped in a pool, just completely, and I have to just pour water on my head. It feels great in a way.
……
JD: Have you ever been in the practice of locking your audience in a venue?
MG: Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. I think we did that at Town and Country Club when they pulled the plug on us, but the doors were locked! [laughs] Yeah, in fact I remember now, when you mention it, that was kind of an obsession in those days, and getting people to turn the lights down all the way. There would always be these exit lights on like, we wanted to be in complete blackness and then lock the doors, and then we'd play.
rule #5 要讲礼貌（演出后别走，记得带上家里的碟子T-T
Cory Sklar: We've noticed a considerable difference in personality after your live performances in the last few years. You're definitely more approachable. Meeting and talking with fans. Even taking pictures.
Michael Gira: I started doing that during the so-called "final" Swans tour in the late '90s and throughout the tenure of Angels of Light, going out and talking to people at the merch table. It came from realizing, belatedly, how important the people that support the music are. They deserve respect and I should come out, say hi, and thank them. If you go to a bluegrass festival or a country show, it's pretty routine for the artist to come out and thank people personally. There's not this pretentious distance between the so-called "star" and the audience. I remember seeing (the great banjo player) Ralph Stanley. It was probably 101 degrees and he was in his black suit, he was probably 90-something. He was standing there at his merch booth thanking people and it was really awesome. To approach playing music as honorable work is important.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
其它杂录
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael, what is your spirit animal?
The worm.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
To hear something I haven’t heard before.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’m not fond of collaborating, but if forced, Werner Herzog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We don't really think of Swans as gear whores. Can I ask about your live setup?
I have a tuner. That's it. Sometimes I use a delay but even that is too affected for me. Lately I don't use anything. Just volume.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
QRD – Why did you decide to do the solo cd?
Michael – I just recorded a bunch of songs at home & I liked the way they sounded.
QRD – So is it all 4-track?
Michael – 4-track? It's just one microphone into a DAT machine. I just moved closer or further away to get my voice louder or quieter.
QRD – What's your favorite effect unit?
Michael – None. I don't use any anymore. I don't use anything. & when I'm recording I try to really avoid reverb. I make reverb by recording something & playing it back through an amp & moving a mic back away from it & it sounds like a hall or something. I don't think I've used delays or any of that shit in years.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
QRD – Which do you find yourself more successful with?
Michael – Art because I have my own craft. The way I play guitar is my own. Like Virgil (opening act) is a really great guitarist & I can't even approach to play the way he does. There are people like Nick Drake for instance who are so beautiful when they play, but I long ago gave up trying to be a "real musician" & just do what I can do. I am willfully ignorant.
QRD – What's the biggest compliment & criticism "real guitarists" have of your style?
Michael – They usually don't comment, due to their embarrassment.
QRD – How often do you break guitar strings & do you think breaking strings is always a bad thing?
Michael – I broke 3 or 4 strings a night towards the end of the recent tour. It meant the shows were stilted & awkward, because rather than using my back up guitar, I changed them, & it took forever onstage. I liked it. I played my guitar way too hard. It's like a physical nemesis I want to combat & test.
QRD – Do you feel more at home recording in a studio or on stage touring?
Michael – I hate both aspects, but also crave them. The most pleasurable moments in music-making, for me, are when I've first worked out a song, & I play it for myself. as soon as it transfers from that moment, it's polluted.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You don’t think that you’re provocative?
Maybe working a knife slowly into my own belly perhaps, but not someone else’s.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEREOGUM: When did you start wearing the cowboy hat?
GIRA: [Laughs]. In 1985. Jarboe’s father was a former FBI agent. I saw this wonderful hat and it was his FBI hat and I started wearing it. But I’ve always worn hats.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What's the most unusual place you've ever played a show or made a recording? How did the qualities of that place affect the show/recording?
I once went to a bank, in order to try to get a loan for a house. For some reason I had my guitar with me. Everyone was embarrassed, because it was obvious my quest was futile. I was sweating, and I felt greasy and dirty in the sterile office. I took out my guitar and played a song for these horrible, puffy-haired, fake-tanned bank type people, in hopes of convincing them I was worthy of a loan. I sang completely and painfully out of tune, because I was so nervous. The words to the song were really creepy in context, anyway. Complete silence. No loan. I shuffled out of there like a wet dog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s one track that comes to mind when you refer to being enveloped by the music and the intensity of it – “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. Whoever is playing the piano during the latter part of the track is simply battering it.
That’s Bill Rieflin. He’s also playing the drums there. The song was starting to take shape and it needed something at the end. And I said “why don’t you try: count eight, then smashing the piano as hard as you can, count 12, space, then smashing the piano as hard as you can, count 20, space, smashing the piano as hard as you can”… just these random increments. And being an incredibly skilled drummer he was able to count all that out in his head. It came out really good.
I think you can hear him faintly in the background – is that him counting between each hit?
Yes. Well on this remix thing I took that stuff, and inevitably I took out the spaces, so it’s just got five minutes of it going “rurrblarurbla!”, with horns on top and things – it’s pretty intense. But the way that song developed…you know that’s Devendra Banhart singing, right? Well it was supposed to be a little transitional piece on the record, with some loops and scraping sounds someone had made, and that Jew’s harp that introduces the song was in there somewhere. And then I just had more people expand on it, and I’d add in more loops and sounds, and then eventually I just realised that it needed a song. So I wrote a song on acoustic guitar and sang it, and then I realised that I sounded like Devendra so I got him to sing it. Then I had my daughter sing on it too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s a section on that track ( I Am Not Insane) after your vocal first comes in, where it rises up and there’s a flurry of something over the top…
Piano. Again, that’s Bill Rieflin. It’s a piano played with two point fingers, played really fast like a drum and then vari-speeded on the tape machine. I probably shouldn’t be giving away these secrets, but that’s what it is!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With the last record, I regretted not letting certain things develop. So I had this idea of no restrictions on this one because, really, who do I have to answer to? No one. I have my own record company. I have to answer to God, basically. I'm not young, so I want to make the best possible work I can before I exit. [laughs]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pitchfork: I've always wanted to ask what your tour with Sonic Youth in 1982 was like.
MG: We called it the Savage Blunder tour, which sorta describes it. It was completely inept; we booked ourselves. No one knew who the fuck either of us were. We went out and people were just appalled, particularly with Swans. Sonic Youth had a few more recognizable rock elements in their music. They were much more accessible. I admit that. Good for them. In fact, they never wanted to go on after us, because everybody would be gone already. [laughs]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pitchfork: As you get older, how does your on-stage physicality shift?
MG: I have a healthy fear of breaking my bones now. I used to not think about that-- I would routinely break my ribs doing stupid things, just feeling the music so much that I would throw myself down on the monitors. It fucking hurts. [laughs] I used to have to wear these bandages around my belly and every time I shouted it was just immense pain. I broke my tooth on a microphone. Stupid things. I don't throw my body down on the stage at all anymore because I'm sure I'd snap like a twig. But it is still a physical commitment. All we're really doing is holding this piece of wood, but it's the way you slam your body into it, the intensity. The heat on stage is a big factor, too. It's very physically draining.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You gave a wonderful interview to Pitchfork for The Seer, and in it you describe having “a healthy fear of breaking your bones.” I wonder if there was a sense of masochism when you wrote the music for To Be Kind, because it is intensely physical stuff. When I imagine going to a Swans show, I imagine getting pummeled by noise.
Well, first of all, let me gently object to the use of the word “noise.” It’s one that I’ve never approved of when applied to the music of Swans. It’s sound, certainly, and much of it is quite sonorous. I picture noise as something like Whitehouse, but nothing that really applies to us. But it is intense sound, certainly.
Whether I could continue to physically do it, I hope so. I developed this routine, a shtick, during the last series of performances where I would jump up and down while pacing across the stage. Because the beats are so slow, you could jump up in the air and land on the next beat. This is one of those kinds of ritual behaviors that develops over the course of a tour. At the end, my knees were just fucked. [laughs] I don’t know if I’ll be doing that anymore. But the music requires a kind of physical response, a physical involvement. So I guess I’ll continue to do that until I’m so feeble that I can’t do it anymore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I recently re-listened to Soundtracks For The Blind, and it strikes me that this is one of the best albums of the 1990s, and certainly one of the best Swans albums, even if it was not recognized as such at the time.
That record was the sum total of everything Swans had done for 15 years, in a literal, physical sense. I had trunks full of cassette tapes from as far back as 1981 where I was messing around with synthesizers makings sounds and drones. I also had trunks full of floppy disks used by early samplers with different samples and weird patches. I also had half-mixed versions of songs that never got used on any albums. I had multi-tracks for studio recordings with all kinds of sounds on them that had never been used. I also recorded a contemporary band for that record on 24-track. I put all those things into a computer using a rudimentary program which was called Sonic Solutions, a mastering program that was super-high fidelity for the time. I took those sounds, I just chose them, the ones that I thought would work, put them into the computer, and then started trying to piece it together somehow. At a random point there would be something from 1981, a piece from 1987, and a bit from 1996 playing all at the same time and somehow they would be in tune and work together perfectly. It was a way of taking sonic material and not having a prejudice whether it was a recording of a song, or it was a found tape loop, and figuring out how it all worked as one composition, as an album. It took a huge amount of time and effort and hair-pulling. Finally it came together, and when it was done, I threw away all of that material. I went to the garbage dump and threw it away.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, I was wondering whether to ask this question or not, but seeing as you brought up the word gospel, I was going to ask - 'She Loves Us' and several other songs that you've done since the reconfiguration of Swans, they do kind of scream out spiritual music to me. I was wondering if you saw them in this way? I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of formal religious beliefs, but do you understand that people are starting to get more of a spiritual feeling from Swans music?
MG: I hope so. But it's not a denominational kind of thing, it's an aspiration towards some kind of realisation, or breathing the air that the spirits breathe, or going somewhere that is bigger than myself when I conceive these songs. It's a great feeling. I think The Stooges had a kind of abandon and release, if you listen to Fun House. But electric guitar music has the ability to do that to people, and it's also like the Master Musicians Of Jajouka, where they just keep going and you lose your mind but find it simultaneously. That's sort of the idea. My personal spiritual beliefs are irrelevant. Music is the practice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, I'd like to go back a little bit now and ask you a few questions about when you were younger. You're from an avant-garde art background; you were at art school at the same time as Kim Gordon was. You were quite a proactive performance art participant. You even got involved in a performance by Hermann Nitsch. Now I've seen a Hermann Nitsch performance and, my God, that's something to behold!
MG: I had quit art school and I was in a punk band called The Little Cripples. I was just about to leave L.A. - I was at the end of my time there in 78. My girlfriend was an arts organiser; she brought Philip Glass to L.A. for the first time. She got some kind of grant money and brought Hermann Nitsch of all people to come over. He did a performance in Venice. It was in a storefront space. It lasted for six hours or something. Short for him. He had the whole ritual thing, with people being brought out, people on stretchers. I was in the room with two carcasses strung up. It really was a kind of a nice image, if you picture a piece of meat in the centre, and then cables stringing it up to all the corners. Then there was another carcass at the other end of the room strung up to the corners.
There were performers coming out and pouring the blood, and the street musicians blowing their horns. The people on the stretchers were naked but they had gauze on their eyes, and the blood was poured through the carcass onto the performers. There were two fifty gallon drums of blood in the room. Once people had been subjected to this ritual, they would be shaking and pretty traumatised. My job was to wipe them off and cool them down, and then send them back out for another session! There were probably about thirty or forty street musicians just blowing noise on horns at the direction of Herr Nitsch, who was wearing an elbow length black rubber butcher's glove. He looked pretty fiendish, and he was conducting all of them with his arm going up and down. Eventually everybody was naked and covered in blood. It was a Dionysian ritual.
And this great performance art duo, these guys The Kipper Kids, did you ever hear of them? They were fantastic, I was friends with Brian, we used to paint houses together actually, he's from England. But they were swinging the meat while wearing diapers. They were drinking wine. Everyone was drinking wine. It was a very drunken affair. Any eventually one of the cables broke and the Kipper Kids who were very mischievous, started swinging the carcass around spraying blood everywhere.
It sounds like a Francis Bacon painting come to life.
MG: Exactly. There's a real connection there. And I'm pretty sure Nitsch came out of not just abstract expressionism, but was also interested in the paintings of Bacon. You can see it in the colours he uses in his paintings he makes. The whole audience, everybody was drunk. But the police came because the blood was pouring out the door onto the street, it was a street level storefront, and they investigated it because there was blood all over the sidewalk. The whole thing again was like regressing towards the id, or involved in the buried aspects of what's inside of us coming out. That was our whole thing, bringing the psyche out into the open. Sometimes with some pretty hideous results! But that was a very interesting thing. I've lost interest in that aspect of art, really. I'm done with it anyway. It was formative, for sure, but perhaps the main thing i think about it now is that it was humourous.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, at the genesis of Swans - I'm sorry that this is a very general question - but what motivated you initially to make music? I'm guessing, given the sort of music you made, it wasn't necessarily money or chasing girls or any of the normal kind of rock band stuff…
MG: Well, I wanted to get laid, of course!
Oh yeah, but anyone knows they can get laid anyway. If you're intelligent you know that you don't need to be in the Swans to get laid, surely…
MG: Yeah. In fact, it's probably a detriment. [laughs]
So, what motivated you and what inspired you at day one?
MG: I don't know, and I still don't know, but I know I need to make things happen, and that's, you know, what I wanted to make happen. It's sort of an existential demand. I'm not happy unless I'm making art or music or something, and I don't have any current sense of being a whole human being unless I'm actively involved in making something. As far as the style of music, I knew what I didn't want it to be like. As soon as we started playing and I finally got sort of a semi-permanent net of people together, inevitably it started going into some kind of rock groove, and I was just like, 'No!'
So I just simply and completely reconfigured the thing. Even chord progressions were like, out. We were building chunks of sound too; we were using what's known as a staircase chord, because it's a flattened fifth with two octaves. So it has the octaves, which give it a kind of soar, but it has this note in it that makes it ache, not a sour note, but it aches at the same time. I'd use those on bass chords percussively rather than running lines. Everything was chunks of sound with some generous sheets of extra sound over the top of that. We used two bass players, two drummers and Norman's guitar. Playing in that way, the bass players were like… "Ch-ch-ch-gh-gh!" It was like hammer music.
Then we also used this cassette deck. I would record drums, loops, sounds - one was the sound of a cat shrieking, but slowed down two octaves - and that would be the whole cassette, that sound. The other bass player would have a volume pedal and that hooked up to the cassette player, which in turn was hooked up to an SVT cabinet with an SVT head, and another 2-15 cabinet with a Gallien Krueger head. It was really loud, so if he hit a bass with a similar set up – bwhhm – and then he'd push his volume pedal down and it would go – BWHHHM, BWHHHM – and the drums would go – bo-chee, bo-chee – in between, so you made these kind of grooves of sound, rather than making punk rock.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I really hate the term synergy, but it is very specific to the thing I'm about to ask you about. Do you believe that what you're currently trying to do via Swans can only be done via Swans? Is your prose writing, for example, something entirely different?
MG: Oh yeah. It might come from the same place ultimately though. I'm not doing prose writing; I wish I was, but I don't have time. And yeah, whenever I'm making this music, it's sometimes this overwhelming sonic experience at times. The next thing I want to do - after this next series of endless gauntlet sessions is over in eighteen months - is to take a break, of course. But then I want to take the last three albums and some of the extra material that didn't get recorded, and look at it carefully for passages that can be used and combined with each other. And then to get the band together - hopefully all these guys will still want to be in a room with me then - and perform these pieces. But we will also add, say, ten hammered dulcimers playing through Fender twins, and say a fifteen piece choir, ten horns, and add more timpani and percussion. I want to make it into a total wipeout sonic event, and perform this material around in classical places. There's interest in us doing that, but the problem is the volume. They're not able to allow the level of dBs that we excrete in their venue, so I think some classical music promoters are going to try and help me gather the arrangers to do that, and we're going to try and do these events.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: Why is the album called We Are Him?
Lately I've been thinking it's a good idea to just give up, let go, disappear, not to have an identity. I wrote the song thinking about something like the Nuremburg rallies, except not with Hitler at the podium, but instead maybe an old fat naked clown covered in chocolate and flies, gesticulating madly, pink foam bubbling out of his ears. The crowd was comprised of people of all ages, all in a mad fervor, naked except for the soiled diapers they wore, reaching into their poop sacks and smearing each other's faces and bodies with the contents, stomping their feet in a communal tantrum, aping the words and gestures of their leader. They're chanting "We Are Him."
PSF: Do you see it as a return in some ways to the sound you had with Swans around Love of Life, as there seem to be reasonable parallels?
Oh God, no! I can't even remember those days. I've worked really hard on forgetting all about Swans. I have nothing to do with it. It was someone else. I killed that worthless piece of shit of a human being a long time ago. The records still exist, I guess, but they're artifacts, leavings, like unsightly growths that were surgically removed from my body, left to dry and shrivel in the sun, then scattered in the wind. In a way, Angels of Light is a religious undertaking—I'm doing penance for all my years of selfishness and sin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: "The Visitor" hints at a belief in reincarnation. Do you think you've lived before?
Good Gawd, no, I'm not even sure I'm alive now.
PSF: Is "The Visitor" about the death of a friend?
No, it's about the death of "me" (thank God! I think!) or the "me" I might imagine myself to be, if I were to find myself in a song written by "me." ... It's also a fairly jejune but earnest wish to die in my lover's arms....
PSF: "Star Chaser" is a very moving song. Is it a remembrance of all those you've known who have died?
Thanks! It's an homage to a person that once lived inside me. He's left a hole in my chest, and I miss him.... But for heaven's sakes—no offense—where does all the Death stuff come from? Anyway, no matter, this song is a longing for the past, which at the time was not there, and now is even less so, and only a few artifacts remain to hint at what never was.
PSF: Is there a theme of mutation in the song "Sunflower's Here to Stay"?
First I saw my beloved Genesis P-Orridge leading a troupe of He/She child-creatures through a maze of Mylar, metallic glitter snowflakes clouding the air, then I saw my beloved Devendra Banhart leading a horde of hairy feral children towards a phallic rock formation in the woods, then I saw a half-goat / half-pig beast leading human rats to a chasm filled with flames. He chugged wine and belched lightning, and his erection was truly frightening. The human rats turned on him and were about to swarm him and eat him when I woke up. Thank God! I wanted the music to sound like The Beatles or The Turtles or the early hippy era of Pink Floyd, but of course it didn't turn out that way.
PSF: We seem to be living in times of rapid change. Where do you think the human race is heading?
Oh my God. I can't believe I was just asked that question. Please consult someone with wisdom for an answer. I'm as naïve as the day I was born, thank you.
PSF: Have you heard of the black hole generator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that is going to be activated in November? Could it finally mean Armageddon?
I sure hope so!!!!! Armageddon is good. It means we're all going to heaven—at least I think I am.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's talk about the book. Tell me about the rotting pig story.
Gira: That story stems from when I went to art school and I was obsessed with television and media at the time. I wanted to invent these these goggles where you could see images of your thoughts, so you could live an entirely ersatz existence. It seemed to me the only distraction would be your body, so the way to lose your body would be to immerse yourself in body-temperature fluid and be fed intravenously. I thought that would be the ultimate end of media and television. And now they've almost done that with virtual reality.
And what would you become if you did that?
Gira: Ultimately, you would become nothing, I think.
Would you have any sense of your existence?
Gira: Hopefully not - that would be the idea.
But you'd still be alive? [Jeez Paul, haven't you got yet.- ed.]
Gira: I'd guess so, I wouldn't know. To me, if you take the kernel of the frame of mind that occurs when you watch television, that's seems to be the incipient seed of what I'm talking about there. The way your body melts into the couch and your mind completely empathizes with the image.
But I can't help relating that to some SWANS songs that are more spiritual in their content, like "Where does a Body End?"
Gira: To me, television seems like a very spiritual thing, at times. It's also very mundane and a mind control device, as well, It's born from growing up and watching massive amounts of television, I guess it's embedded in their consciousness.
But you seem to be tapping into something a lot of people desire.
Gira: The whole American nation, yeah...I've always felt that, at least in the louder moments with SWANS, that the ideal thing to have happen, particularity live, would be to have it just dissolve you - the intensity and swirl of the sound. I think that's what people want from loud rock music.
Most of the book is set in L.A. Why is that?
Gira: That's a place I'm pretty familiar with, having grown up there. So I'd take a memory and extrapolate from there. I actually did live in a tiny room above a porn theater in downtown LA. [ like the character in the Young Man That Hid His Boy Inside A Horse, or, My Vulvik in Los Angeles] It didn't have a toilet. We had to shit in a gallon bucket and we'd wrap it with a trash bag and carry down through the lobby and dump out there on there on the street. [laughs]
So there are some autobiographical elements.
Gira: Obviously, that story isn't entirely autobiographical, but I did take a lot of speed, too. And I did once take so much speed that I sat in front of the mirror picking at my gums because I was convinced there was something living in them. When I finished, I realized three days had past, my gums had swollen like there was a boxing glove inside my mouth, and it took me about a week to recover from that. That was the last time I took speed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What exactly happened with The Burning World [1989]? It doesn't possess certain qualities the other records do.
To me, Love Will Tear Us Apart [1988 EP] and that are our low points.
I agree.
That's all right. The Burning World - well, I was forced to have an outside producer [by MCA] and although I think that Bill Laswell makes great music on his own. I just don't think that the conjunction worked very well. I'm more the kind of person that wants to use the studio as a tool and change things. I don't look at a recording and say, "That's it." I look at the mix as a whole other part of the process. I was sort of locked out of the mixes.
I noticed that on White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity [the subsequent 1991 effort], the first cut is really strong again. You sounded like you were recovering.
That's exactly what happened. I lost confidence as a singer, as a producer. I lost huge amounts of money and was incredibly in debt and just debilitated after that experience.
And what became of the Uni deal?
We signed to Uni and then MCA went through this whole financial reorganization and they fired everyone at Uni right after we signed. So we were without any staff behind us and the record was just thrown out there with no intentions to sell it. I, in naive enthusiasm for my career, hired a publicist and a management company out of my own money instead of giving them a percentage, and I just got raped. I ended up owing huge amounts of money to lawyers, to everybody. All in all, it was certainly edifying. [laughs] Shortly thereafter we started our own record company [Young God] and it's been fine to eke out a living ever since. I would never sign to a major label again. I would let them distribute my records, but I would never let them do anything else.
Are you still selling your right pinkie [as you once publicly offered]?
Yeah, I'm really looking for buyers, too. $250,000
Why?
Why? Because, well, I figure I'm poor, I'm broke, I've worked my guts out for 15 years, if it means selling my right pinkie...my left one I need for playing guitar. I thought, you know, like in the old days you could get a patron. He or she could have it and put it in aspic and put it on their mantel piece and then I would live.
How would you cut if off?
Shit, l'd just put it on a piece of wood and hack it off with a machete. $250.000! Christ! You could almost have my penis for that!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fan Letter - by Michael Gira（我没勇气给他写信了。。。
And the violence in my insides is
Glowing and malignant, and
The only way
To stop it, is to cut a hole and
Let the fresh air come in.
And your public face is dripping, now you're famous and
You're beautiful,
But I can still remember when your
Mouth was always open,
Like a stairway
Leading down to hell.
Now your perfect body's shining, and the camera's always
Circling, and the
Boys and girls are dreaming, and
Your naked body's bleeding
Where the dogs
Have ripped away your skin.
And the world is always shrinking, and my mind is
Disappearing, in the holy
Adulation of your all-inclusive open arms, and feeling
Penitential, l'm cuning
Off my finger, and l'm faxing you
The image, via omnipresent
Electricity.
And the communists were torturing a sacred man and
Women, whose screams flew
Out the window and through the
Himalayas, then changed into
A buttelfly and
Drifted through the wind, and
Landed on a street in Paris,
Where you crushed
It underneath your high-heeled fin.
Now l'm killing and l'm stealing and
L'm raping and l'm burning
And l'm
Feeling kinda magic due to mental
Enervation, so I'll send my
Mind into the
Hard body of a rockstar, and maybe then you'll fuck me,
'Cause 5 million
People love me, and you wanna suck my energy.
Yeah this world is made of losers,
But I wanna be a winner,
I'll do anything it takes to
Hypnotize the upturned faces, into
Trusting me completely so they'll
Need me to supply, the object that
Will fill the emptiness that
Was created
By repetition of an image and a
Sound they recognize, and
Their malleable
Identities will be sexually excited
By the product which I will
Then provide.
And this planet keeps on drifting
Through a thick and viscous
Blackness, every
Pleasure every weakness will come true before we're
Finished, and l'm Iying
In my bed and my hands are gening
Bloody and l'm thinking I
Can save you
From the phony world you live in,
And maybe you will hide me
Deep inside your perfect body and
I'll melt into the glistening
Flawless contours of
Your immortal flesh.
Now you're mine. Yeah you're mine...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: Would you ever consider reforming Swans?
MG: Absolutely not, never. Dead and gone. I have more interesting things to do.
PSF: Would you and Jarboe consider working together again?
MG: I would never consider it, no.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Big Takeover #68 2011-6-24 节选
I heard an interesting story, that when you were involved in performance art in Los Angeles, you did a piece involving having blindfolded, anonymous sex…?
Yeah, well, I went to art school, and I was involved in performance art – it’s sort of a stupid genre, but I was interested in it at the time. And I guess I was preoccupied with what you would call ersatz experience, like, experiencing things secondhand, through television and media. This was pre-internet and computers and everything – just how about American society had kind of become about experiencing reality in ersatz, even at that time. And I designed this sort of early version of a virtual world – I drew out this design of this mask you would wear, and you’d be lowered into a vat of body-temperature liquid, and maybe having a tube coming out your ass which would get rid of your waste, and a tube going in your mouth which would feed you; and you would just experience things completely in ersatz, like your imagination would trigger this video experience, with this mask around your face. And you would lose a sense of your body and you’d experience everything as imagination. And that led to thinking about trying to actualize having a sexual experience with someone whom I would never see, or know. And so… I lived in a dilapidated factory at the time; I had a loft space that was hundreds of feet long – so I rolled out this white paper, about 50 yards of it or something, and I built these chairs, these sort of abstract wooden chairs, built out of plywood and 2X4s, at the sides of this processional, kind of thing. And then leading along the processional, the pathway, every foot, there was a four or five foot high hollow post, but at the bottom of the post was a square, and inside that was lightbulb. So really they were like penises, sort of four foot high, geometrical-looking penises, out of raw wood. And there would be a stream of light coming out of each penis. And then I decided, I wanted to have this experience where I would have this impersonal-as-possible sex, so I had a friend contact a female who was interested in trying this, and what we had to do was that each of us had to narrate into a cassette our sexual fantasies, what we liked about sex, what we wanted to do, and just try to get as deep as possible into our sexuality. So we each made a cassette, and I had a cassette player strapped to each one of us, playing our sexual fantasies. And we each had blindfolds on, and we were naked, and we sat opposite each other in these chairs; and then we’d grope our way along these penises until we found each other in the middle; then we’d have sex in the middle and then we’d go back and sit down again and wait until it was appropriate to have it again, and these tapes were going the whole time. And it’s very embarrassing; I invited like, X, and all these different bands who were playing downstairs.
X the punk band?
Yeah, this was in LA. This was in Pasadena. And Fear I think played – so there was all this punk rock/ art connection. They could go downstairs and watch the gig and come upstairs and watch this going on.
How long did the piece go on for?
I don’t know, two or three hours probably.
How old were you when you were doing this?
Let’s see – that was 1977, probably, 78 maybe? So I was 23, 24. Around that time, I was publishing a magazine, with another friend of mine from art school; it was called No magazine. And it was like a broadsheet kind of thing – the same size as NME or Village Voice, on newsprint; it wasn’t like a little fanzine. We saved money – I painted houses, and forget what he did, but we saved enough money for each issue and figured out how to lay it out. This was like, before computers and everything, so we did it with Letraset and laid the thing out, had it typset, and had interviews with bands, and stuff about performance art and pornography and some of my writing. It was really vile, actually, but it was also poppy, in the same way, because we’d interview X or Suicide, and then we’d have this pornography or pictures or decomposing corpses on the cover, we had on one issue. So we did that – I was sort of in the punk scene in LA, doing that, and eventually I got tired of not actually making music, and started a band.
Little Cripples, right? I can’t find much information about them.
It had a couple of names. It was called Little Cripples, and it was called Strict Ids, and then it was called IDS. I guess we sounded a little bit like Wire, a little like the Buzzcocks, something like that. That’s about all there is to say about it. It changed when I left – it became the B-People.
And they recorded?
They did record, yeah. It became a little more quirky, or something like that (note – the Mutant Sounds blog has the B-People album up for download).
Did any of your stuff from that time survive? Recordings?
Not that I know of. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing then, anyway, so I don’t know what to say about it.
Were you writing songs?
I was writing words. I didn’t have anything to do with the music, really – except to be guiding the direction, sort of, or helping to guide the direction. I didn’t know anything about being in a band.
Wow. And somewhere back there, you also worked with Hermann Nitsch?
I didn’t really “work with” Hermann Nitsch. I was one of the assistants that just washed the blood off the performers – or participants, I guess should say, as they would come back to the back room and go back out for more. That was a great experience for me – it was in a little, I guess what you’d call a storefront, a 600 square foot storefront in Venice, California. Really small. And he had the carcasses strung up there, and went through the rituals that he does. And the musicians were gathered from LA punks and street musicians and things, people blowing horns and whistles and whatever, and he would guide them with this hand in a big, black butcher’s glove. It was really comical, in a way. He looked like a little Hitler. And a couple of the main participants were the Kipper Kids. They were a really great performance act – it was two guys. It was brutal, but comedic at the same time. One of them married Karen Finley, and she basically got her shtick from him. Look’em up online.
Would you count that as a formative experience?
Oh yeah, sure.
Were you aware of the Viennese Aktionists, before assisting with that piece?
Oh yeah, of course – I went to art school, and I read about that stuff. It was really interesting to me. Schwarzkogler, and Günter Brus, and Otto Muehl and all those people. To me, that was inspirational stuff – that, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman – that was the art I gravitated towards when I was still in art school.
I gather “Raping a Slave” and “I Crawled” are on the setlist – but maybe they always were; were you performing these songs prior to disbanding the band?
Well – actually, “I Crawled” is an early song I did, and I had Jarboe sing it. There’s a version of that on Swans Are Dead, which is a double live CD we did, and that’s a really, really good live CD. But her version is pretty wrenching. But it doesn’t sound like the original, and the version now doesn’t sound like the original, either. It’s really transformed, it’s made into something else. I just look at records, they’re like a postcard version of a song. A song starts out as something really elemental, maybe with an acoustic guitar, a bass riff or something, and it gradually evolves; and then you get people involved in it and orchestrate it and mix it, and it’s codified when it’s recorded. And live it should keep changing; if it doesn’t, it’s kind of boring.
Where did “I Crawled” come from?
That song was written when I was reading this book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich. And simultaneously, Hitler – uh, I was gonna say “Hitler was being elected!” – Ronald Reagan was being elected president (laughs) and the corollaries were really clear to me – the avuncular, or like, father figure that lords over the nation and harks back to a better time, to a more pure past, and emphasizes the family structure… because that’s the kernel of state control, is teaching people how to obey the paternal figure in a family structure. And all that kind of thinking was really integral to the Reagan campaign. So I was drawing a corollary.
I can imagine your children being troubled by some of your songs, at some point –like a song like “Beautiful Child,” which I gather is in the current setlist, with its chorus of “I will kill the child…”
(Gira laughs)
Do you have a plan to explain such songs to them at some point?
Well, I figure they’ll be mature enough to understand that art touches places that are uncomfortable, and if they’re not – tough luck! …That song, “Beautiful Child,” now that you mention it, is really sort of a twisted version of the story of Isaac and Abraham, and since I was pursuing a Biblical theme on the record [Children of God], it seemed appropriate – but that story itself is pretty perverse, so…
Yeah, it is…! Okay… so I was hoping I could ask you about a few of the writers you read…
I go through periods, just like everyone. I’ve had times when I read Jack London obsessively – I understand that’s not very hip, but I think he’s fantastic. Or Cormac McCarthy, I think is wonderful. Paul Bowles, I’ve read a lot of, and Borges. I kind of randomly – I don’t really have any focused education, so I might read a little bit of Charles Bukowski, and then I’ll read the biography of Hitler (laughs). I just jump around, y’know?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On inspirations and influences: "Initially, advertising slogans influenced me the most. I really liked the way that language was aggressive and immediate, but with lots of subtext. It's reaching for the back of your mind to influence you.
"There's a book by [Jerzy] Kosinski called Steps, which is cold and clinical, but describes scenes of incredible violence and cruelty. I found that combination of elements attractive early on. I often write after reading books. I wrote an Angels of Light song, Kosinski, after reading him. And I wrote a song called New Mother after reading [Joseph] Conrad's The Secret Agent. Right now, I'm reading Lord Jim by Conrad and I think something's going to come of that."
On shaping, refining and editing songs: "It's a really long, gruelling process, but every now and again a song just rushes out fully formed, and it's just wonderful. That happened with the song Eden Prison. It refers back to childhood memories of me being in jail when I was a kid. I was hitchhiking across Europe, and I ended up in Israel, where I was arrested for selling hashish. I spent four and a half months in jail. It was a pretty formative experience, and this line I wrote ties into that: 'Within the walls of Eden Prison, there is a mark upon a stone/ And in that place a life was written, and there a stain was laid where I was born.' There's this idea that someone was murdered or attacked in prison, but that was some kind of birth experience in itself."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
老年团的正确打开方式：
rule #1 别跑狗
2011版本：
Jonathan Dean: I heard from a few friends who were at the show in Chicago, and they said there was some kind of physical confrontation with the audience that created a very tense atmosphere.
Michael Gira: A couple of bozos were slam dancing… I think that’s what you call it. They saw it on MTV so they figured that’s what they were supposed to do. They were slamming into people who were actually paying attention and listening. I kept spitting on them trying to get their attention, but they wouldn’t look up because they weren’t really listening, they were just bouncing around being idiots. I finally managed to get hold of one guy’s hair, and I pulled him up on stage and screamed in his face, and then they stopped. They were ruining the show. I don’t mind if people move, but they were living out their fake rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. They were ruining the show for other people, so I put a stop to it. I just hate that whole fake ritual. I remember the beginnings of it. I used to go to punk rock gigs in Los Angeles back in 1977. People weren’t slam dancing then; they were pogoing, which is just as silly. The first show I saw that happen was The Cramps at a gig in LA in ‘79, there were these surfer jocks stage diving and moshing. Thurston Moore and I used to go to the hardcore shows in NYC in the early days. I thought some of the music was OK, but I just didn’t like the jock aspect of it. The people that used to want to beat me up in school were now emboldened, having found their métier, and they were pounding into people, jumping off stage, and I just thought that was idiotic. That behavior gradually became the de rigeur thing you do at a rock show, which is really unfortunate. So there’s my sermon about that.
1996版本
SECONDS: To what extent was physical violence between you and the audience a part of early Swans shows?
GIRA: None, really. Except one time years ago when we were touring with Sonic Youth when we typically had an audience of about ten people, some guy was actually pogo-ing in his bright orange Devo jumpsuit at the front of the stage as we played, and it was just so pathetic I couldn't help myself. I climbed down from the stage and threw him to the ground, yelled at him to get the hell out of there. Similarly now, if anyone stage dives or moshes(what a joke!) at one of our shows I'll stop the music. I really hate group identity rituals like that. They're just a microcosm, a little factory workshop exercise in conformism.
rule #2 别戴耳塞（该戴还是得戴
2011版本：
Jonathan Dean: You have said that this incarnation of Swans should not be seen as a reunion, but rather a “revivification of the idea of Swans.” What is the idea of Swans?
Michael Gira: Maybe a love of sonic overload. The idea of the Swans is sonic intensity, which is something I eschewed for the most part with Angels Of Light, because I didn’t want to regress. With Angels, I was more interested in the song per se, and the lyrics.
There were always dynamics — the Swans had a lot of quiet songs — but one central salient feature is the cascading sounds that make your body feel like it’s levitating when you’re inside it. I’m speaking mostly about live performances, of course. That’s something I was going for with this incarnation. I wanted to experience that feeling again. Making something that is so much bigger than yourself that you feel like you are inside the mouth of God.
1996版本：
SECONDS: At one point SWANS were touted-presumably at your instigation- as the "loudest band in the world."
GIRA: That slogan certainly did not originate with me. I hated that perception of SWANS. But of course the music was loud- still is, sometimes- simply because the sounds weren't the same unless they were at a certain volume level. You can't get the same over tones in a room and your body doesn't really feel the bass frequencies unless they're at a certain volume, and these were aspects of the sound I was interested in experiencing at the time: they turned a key in my head, changed me in a way I found stimulating and enjoyed. But there was nothing macho about it, no desire to dominate. Instead I wanted to elevate, or disintegrate - I used to make tape loops of grinding metal, a baby crying, slowed down, low-frequency synth noise, distorted screams, etc., and I'd put, say, a half-hour of each of these loops on its own cassette. Then, in the rehearsal space I had on 6th Street in NYC, I'd give each cassette its own tape player and hook each tape player up to its own SVT bass set-up, with the amps arranged in a circle, pointing inward, and I'd play the tapes at full volume, with me standing in the middle of it as the loops bombarded me. It felt great! That's the sensation I wanted from SWANS, in the early days, except more...
rule #3 别摄录
Michael Gira: （这段是作为迷汉的自白/Caspar Brötzmann是Peter Brötzmann的儿纸）……Do you know Caspar Brötzmann’s music? I saw him playing at a festival recently and I was overwhelmed, it was so good, just so good. I was down in the front row, screaming like a fanboy. I think he was looking at me 'Michael! Go away!' I'm always like that when I like something. There are people that give that level of commitment still.
Luke Turner: Perhaps you can look at it another way and say that with music being so accessible now, it’s surprising that people haven't come round to the idea that Swans aren't antagonistic. Their minds would be opened up by technological progress.
MG: I don't know. The people that have an affinity for this sort of thing seem to be discovering it. The audience is growing, it's bigger than it ever has been. I guess that's due to the internet. One distressing aspect to that is if I look on YouTube for 'Swans' I see all these different shows and it sounds terrible, and people think they've seen it if they look at it like that. Maybe they come then to the show with expectations, or with a prefigured notion of what it's going to be, and I think that’s a little sad. But it's inevitable and I'm not complaining. In the old days every concert was a special, unique experience, and now they've gleaned it from YouTube. It's equally distressing to look out into the audience and see this sea of cell phones held up [laughs].
LT: When you see something immersive as Swans you want to be inside that music. From an audience point of view the bright screens blinking back at you are really frustrating, it pops the bubble.
MG: It's really surreal and very disjunctive. The person that's doing that, they're experiencing the ersatz version as well as partially what's there at the same time, and I don’t think they're able to get the experience because of that. I stop shows sometimes. I've started putting up notices saying it's not allowed, because people aren't paying attention. It's strange. I guess it's just a facet of the modern world. I wonder if people do that when they're having sex.
LT: Well they do, there's tonnes of it online.
MG: You mean people are having sex and each are looking at the cell phones of themselves having sex?
LT: From certain things I've seen. I wonder if people do it when they go to see the Pope give an address?
MG: I wonder what it would be like if you witnessed your own murder that way…
rule #4 别问蠢问题（或者珍爱生命还是别去看老年团了
John Doran: I wanted to talk to you about the live performance. I think it's the sign of a healthy and a good band when they attract a lot of urban myths and a lot of stories, and I wanted to ask you to confirm or deny the three or four stories about Swans which I've been unable to either stand up or discount over the years（现在又多了一个都市传说：在上海场震碎了灯泡）. One was, I was told that once a hapless sound engineer came up to you before a gig and asked what you wanted it to sound like and you punched him in the stomach and said, 'I want it to sound like that!'
Michael Gira: [laughs] Uh, yeah, that was the soundman, I pushed him in the chest, I said, 'Like this!' doosh! – and pushed him in the chest.
JD: Now, I'm pretty sure this is true actually, but did you turn off the air conditioning during a gig until the heat in the venue became quite unbearably hot?
MG: Yeah but it wasn't an evil intent, it was for my benefit as well. The air-conditioning, first of all, was above me on the stage, blowing on me, and if you're a singer, this immediately means your throat dries up and it ruins your voice, so I had to turn it off. But I also liked the heat in the room, the intensity of the heat and what it did to the whole experience, and actually things sound better in a humid room too, at least to me.
JD: Yeah, the sound waves travel differently don't they?
MG: Yeah. But it just feels good too, it's like being in this kind of psychic sweat lodge and I liked that. I'm not really between that any more, I'm a little more generous with my audience [laughs] Yeah I like that experience. And in a way it's a kind of unifier too. You're all in it, in the same thing. You think it's hot in the audience? Should be us, with fucking lights on us! I mean literally, my clothes would be soaked as if I've just jumped in a pool, just completely, and I have to just pour water on my head. It feels great in a way.
……
JD: Have you ever been in the practice of locking your audience in a venue?
MG: Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. I think we did that at Town and Country Club when they pulled the plug on us, but the doors were locked! [laughs] Yeah, in fact I remember now, when you mention it, that was kind of an obsession in those days, and getting people to turn the lights down all the way. There would always be these exit lights on like, we wanted to be in complete blackness and then lock the doors, and then we'd play.
rule #5 要讲礼貌（演出后别走，记得带上家里的碟子T-T
Cory Sklar: We've noticed a considerable difference in personality after your live performances in the last few years. You're definitely more approachable. Meeting and talking with fans. Even taking pictures.
Michael Gira: I started doing that during the so-called "final" Swans tour in the late '90s and throughout the tenure of Angels of Light, going out and talking to people at the merch table. It came from realizing, belatedly, how important the people that support the music are. They deserve respect and I should come out, say hi, and thank them. If you go to a bluegrass festival or a country show, it's pretty routine for the artist to come out and thank people personally. There's not this pretentious distance between the so-called "star" and the audience. I remember seeing (the great banjo player) Ralph Stanley. It was probably 101 degrees and he was in his black suit, he was probably 90-something. He was standing there at his merch booth thanking people and it was really awesome. To approach playing music as honorable work is important.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
其它杂录
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael, what is your spirit animal?
The worm.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
To hear something I haven’t heard before.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’m not fond of collaborating, but if forced, Werner Herzog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We don't really think of Swans as gear whores. Can I ask about your live setup?
I have a tuner. That's it. Sometimes I use a delay but even that is too affected for me. Lately I don't use anything. Just volume.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
QRD – Why did you decide to do the solo cd?
Michael – I just recorded a bunch of songs at home & I liked the way they sounded.
QRD – So is it all 4-track?
Michael – 4-track? It's just one microphone into a DAT machine. I just moved closer or further away to get my voice louder or quieter.
QRD – What's your favorite effect unit?
Michael – None. I don't use any anymore. I don't use anything. & when I'm recording I try to really avoid reverb. I make reverb by recording something & playing it back through an amp & moving a mic back away from it & it sounds like a hall or something. I don't think I've used delays or any of that shit in years.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
QRD – Which do you find yourself more successful with?
Michael – Art because I have my own craft. The way I play guitar is my own. Like Virgil (opening act) is a really great guitarist & I can't even approach to play the way he does. There are people like Nick Drake for instance who are so beautiful when they play, but I long ago gave up trying to be a "real musician" & just do what I can do. I am willfully ignorant.
QRD – What's the biggest compliment & criticism "real guitarists" have of your style?
Michael – They usually don't comment, due to their embarrassment.
QRD – How often do you break guitar strings & do you think breaking strings is always a bad thing?
Michael – I broke 3 or 4 strings a night towards the end of the recent tour. It meant the shows were stilted & awkward, because rather than using my back up guitar, I changed them, & it took forever onstage. I liked it. I played my guitar way too hard. It's like a physical nemesis I want to combat & test.
QRD – Do you feel more at home recording in a studio or on stage touring?
Michael – I hate both aspects, but also crave them. The most pleasurable moments in music-making, for me, are when I've first worked out a song, & I play it for myself. as soon as it transfers from that moment, it's polluted.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You don’t think that you’re provocative?
Maybe working a knife slowly into my own belly perhaps, but not someone else’s.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEREOGUM: When did you start wearing the cowboy hat?
GIRA: [Laughs]. In 1985. Jarboe’s father was a former FBI agent. I saw this wonderful hat and it was his FBI hat and I started wearing it. But I’ve always worn hats.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What's the most unusual place you've ever played a show or made a recording? How did the qualities of that place affect the show/recording?
I once went to a bank, in order to try to get a loan for a house. For some reason I had my guitar with me. Everyone was embarrassed, because it was obvious my quest was futile. I was sweating, and I felt greasy and dirty in the sterile office. I took out my guitar and played a song for these horrible, puffy-haired, fake-tanned bank type people, in hopes of convincing them I was worthy of a loan. I sang completely and painfully out of tune, because I was so nervous. The words to the song were really creepy in context, anyway. Complete silence. No loan. I shuffled out of there like a wet dog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s one track that comes to mind when you refer to being enveloped by the music and the intensity of it – “You Fucking People Make Me Sick”. Whoever is playing the piano during the latter part of the track is simply battering it.
That’s Bill Rieflin. He’s also playing the drums there. The song was starting to take shape and it needed something at the end. And I said “why don’t you try: count eight, then smashing the piano as hard as you can, count 12, space, then smashing the piano as hard as you can, count 20, space, smashing the piano as hard as you can”… just these random increments. And being an incredibly skilled drummer he was able to count all that out in his head. It came out really good.
I think you can hear him faintly in the background – is that him counting between each hit?
Yes. Well on this remix thing I took that stuff, and inevitably I took out the spaces, so it’s just got five minutes of it going “rurrblarurbla!”, with horns on top and things – it’s pretty intense. But the way that song developed…you know that’s Devendra Banhart singing, right? Well it was supposed to be a little transitional piece on the record, with some loops and scraping sounds someone had made, and that Jew’s harp that introduces the song was in there somewhere. And then I just had more people expand on it, and I’d add in more loops and sounds, and then eventually I just realised that it needed a song. So I wrote a song on acoustic guitar and sang it, and then I realised that I sounded like Devendra so I got him to sing it. Then I had my daughter sing on it too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There’s a section on that track ( I Am Not Insane) after your vocal first comes in, where it rises up and there’s a flurry of something over the top…
Piano. Again, that’s Bill Rieflin. It’s a piano played with two point fingers, played really fast like a drum and then vari-speeded on the tape machine. I probably shouldn’t be giving away these secrets, but that’s what it is!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With the last record, I regretted not letting certain things develop. So I had this idea of no restrictions on this one because, really, who do I have to answer to? No one. I have my own record company. I have to answer to God, basically. I'm not young, so I want to make the best possible work I can before I exit. [laughs]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pitchfork: I've always wanted to ask what your tour with Sonic Youth in 1982 was like.
MG: We called it the Savage Blunder tour, which sorta describes it. It was completely inept; we booked ourselves. No one knew who the fuck either of us were. We went out and people were just appalled, particularly with Swans. Sonic Youth had a few more recognizable rock elements in their music. They were much more accessible. I admit that. Good for them. In fact, they never wanted to go on after us, because everybody would be gone already. [laughs]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pitchfork: As you get older, how does your on-stage physicality shift?
MG: I have a healthy fear of breaking my bones now. I used to not think about that-- I would routinely break my ribs doing stupid things, just feeling the music so much that I would throw myself down on the monitors. It fucking hurts. [laughs] I used to have to wear these bandages around my belly and every time I shouted it was just immense pain. I broke my tooth on a microphone. Stupid things. I don't throw my body down on the stage at all anymore because I'm sure I'd snap like a twig. But it is still a physical commitment. All we're really doing is holding this piece of wood, but it's the way you slam your body into it, the intensity. The heat on stage is a big factor, too. It's very physically draining.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You gave a wonderful interview to Pitchfork for The Seer, and in it you describe having “a healthy fear of breaking your bones.” I wonder if there was a sense of masochism when you wrote the music for To Be Kind, because it is intensely physical stuff. When I imagine going to a Swans show, I imagine getting pummeled by noise.
Well, first of all, let me gently object to the use of the word “noise.” It’s one that I’ve never approved of when applied to the music of Swans. It’s sound, certainly, and much of it is quite sonorous. I picture noise as something like Whitehouse, but nothing that really applies to us. But it is intense sound, certainly.
Whether I could continue to physically do it, I hope so. I developed this routine, a shtick, during the last series of performances where I would jump up and down while pacing across the stage. Because the beats are so slow, you could jump up in the air and land on the next beat. This is one of those kinds of ritual behaviors that develops over the course of a tour. At the end, my knees were just fucked. [laughs] I don’t know if I’ll be doing that anymore. But the music requires a kind of physical response, a physical involvement. So I guess I’ll continue to do that until I’m so feeble that I can’t do it anymore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I recently re-listened to Soundtracks For The Blind, and it strikes me that this is one of the best albums of the 1990s, and certainly one of the best Swans albums, even if it was not recognized as such at the time.
That record was the sum total of everything Swans had done for 15 years, in a literal, physical sense. I had trunks full of cassette tapes from as far back as 1981 where I was messing around with synthesizers makings sounds and drones. I also had trunks full of floppy disks used by early samplers with different samples and weird patches. I also had half-mixed versions of songs that never got used on any albums. I had multi-tracks for studio recordings with all kinds of sounds on them that had never been used. I also recorded a contemporary band for that record on 24-track. I put all those things into a computer using a rudimentary program which was called Sonic Solutions, a mastering program that was super-high fidelity for the time. I took those sounds, I just chose them, the ones that I thought would work, put them into the computer, and then started trying to piece it together somehow. At a random point there would be something from 1981, a piece from 1987, and a bit from 1996 playing all at the same time and somehow they would be in tune and work together perfectly. It was a way of taking sonic material and not having a prejudice whether it was a recording of a song, or it was a found tape loop, and figuring out how it all worked as one composition, as an album. It took a huge amount of time and effort and hair-pulling. Finally it came together, and when it was done, I threw away all of that material. I went to the garbage dump and threw it away.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, I was wondering whether to ask this question or not, but seeing as you brought up the word gospel, I was going to ask - 'She Loves Us' and several other songs that you've done since the reconfiguration of Swans, they do kind of scream out spiritual music to me. I was wondering if you saw them in this way? I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of formal religious beliefs, but do you understand that people are starting to get more of a spiritual feeling from Swans music?
MG: I hope so. But it's not a denominational kind of thing, it's an aspiration towards some kind of realisation, or breathing the air that the spirits breathe, or going somewhere that is bigger than myself when I conceive these songs. It's a great feeling. I think The Stooges had a kind of abandon and release, if you listen to Fun House. But electric guitar music has the ability to do that to people, and it's also like the Master Musicians Of Jajouka, where they just keep going and you lose your mind but find it simultaneously. That's sort of the idea. My personal spiritual beliefs are irrelevant. Music is the practice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, I'd like to go back a little bit now and ask you a few questions about when you were younger. You're from an avant-garde art background; you were at art school at the same time as Kim Gordon was. You were quite a proactive performance art participant. You even got involved in a performance by Hermann Nitsch. Now I've seen a Hermann Nitsch performance and, my God, that's something to behold!
MG: I had quit art school and I was in a punk band called The Little Cripples. I was just about to leave L.A. - I was at the end of my time there in 78. My girlfriend was an arts organiser; she brought Philip Glass to L.A. for the first time. She got some kind of grant money and brought Hermann Nitsch of all people to come over. He did a performance in Venice. It was in a storefront space. It lasted for six hours or something. Short for him. He had the whole ritual thing, with people being brought out, people on stretchers. I was in the room with two carcasses strung up. It really was a kind of a nice image, if you picture a piece of meat in the centre, and then cables stringing it up to all the corners. Then there was another carcass at the other end of the room strung up to the corners.
There were performers coming out and pouring the blood, and the street musicians blowing their horns. The people on the stretchers were naked but they had gauze on their eyes, and the blood was poured through the carcass onto the performers. There were two fifty gallon drums of blood in the room. Once people had been subjected to this ritual, they would be shaking and pretty traumatised. My job was to wipe them off and cool them down, and then send them back out for another session! There were probably about thirty or forty street musicians just blowing noise on horns at the direction of Herr Nitsch, who was wearing an elbow length black rubber butcher's glove. He looked pretty fiendish, and he was conducting all of them with his arm going up and down. Eventually everybody was naked and covered in blood. It was a Dionysian ritual.
And this great performance art duo, these guys The Kipper Kids, did you ever hear of them? They were fantastic, I was friends with Brian, we used to paint houses together actually, he's from England. But they were swinging the meat while wearing diapers. They were drinking wine. Everyone was drinking wine. It was a very drunken affair. Any eventually one of the cables broke and the Kipper Kids who were very mischievous, started swinging the carcass around spraying blood everywhere.
It sounds like a Francis Bacon painting come to life.
MG: Exactly. There's a real connection there. And I'm pretty sure Nitsch came out of not just abstract expressionism, but was also interested in the paintings of Bacon. You can see it in the colours he uses in his paintings he makes. The whole audience, everybody was drunk. But the police came because the blood was pouring out the door onto the street, it was a street level storefront, and they investigated it because there was blood all over the sidewalk. The whole thing again was like regressing towards the id, or involved in the buried aspects of what's inside of us coming out. That was our whole thing, bringing the psyche out into the open. Sometimes with some pretty hideous results! But that was a very interesting thing. I've lost interest in that aspect of art, really. I'm done with it anyway. It was formative, for sure, but perhaps the main thing i think about it now is that it was humourous.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, at the genesis of Swans - I'm sorry that this is a very general question - but what motivated you initially to make music? I'm guessing, given the sort of music you made, it wasn't necessarily money or chasing girls or any of the normal kind of rock band stuff…
MG: Well, I wanted to get laid, of course!
Oh yeah, but anyone knows they can get laid anyway. If you're intelligent you know that you don't need to be in the Swans to get laid, surely…
MG: Yeah. In fact, it's probably a detriment. [laughs]
So, what motivated you and what inspired you at day one?
MG: I don't know, and I still don't know, but I know I need to make things happen, and that's, you know, what I wanted to make happen. It's sort of an existential demand. I'm not happy unless I'm making art or music or something, and I don't have any current sense of being a whole human being unless I'm actively involved in making something. As far as the style of music, I knew what I didn't want it to be like. As soon as we started playing and I finally got sort of a semi-permanent net of people together, inevitably it started going into some kind of rock groove, and I was just like, 'No!'
So I just simply and completely reconfigured the thing. Even chord progressions were like, out. We were building chunks of sound too; we were using what's known as a staircase chord, because it's a flattened fifth with two octaves. So it has the octaves, which give it a kind of soar, but it has this note in it that makes it ache, not a sour note, but it aches at the same time. I'd use those on bass chords percussively rather than running lines. Everything was chunks of sound with some generous sheets of extra sound over the top of that. We used two bass players, two drummers and Norman's guitar. Playing in that way, the bass players were like… "Ch-ch-ch-gh-gh!" It was like hammer music.
Then we also used this cassette deck. I would record drums, loops, sounds - one was the sound of a cat shrieking, but slowed down two octaves - and that would be the whole cassette, that sound. The other bass player would have a volume pedal and that hooked up to the cassette player, which in turn was hooked up to an SVT cabinet with an SVT head, and another 2-15 cabinet with a Gallien Krueger head. It was really loud, so if he hit a bass with a similar set up – bwhhm – and then he'd push his volume pedal down and it would go – BWHHHM, BWHHHM – and the drums would go – bo-chee, bo-chee – in between, so you made these kind of grooves of sound, rather than making punk rock.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I really hate the term synergy, but it is very specific to the thing I'm about to ask you about. Do you believe that what you're currently trying to do via Swans can only be done via Swans? Is your prose writing, for example, something entirely different?
MG: Oh yeah. It might come from the same place ultimately though. I'm not doing prose writing; I wish I was, but I don't have time. And yeah, whenever I'm making this music, it's sometimes this overwhelming sonic experience at times. The next thing I want to do - after this next series of endless gauntlet sessions is over in eighteen months - is to take a break, of course. But then I want to take the last three albums and some of the extra material that didn't get recorded, and look at it carefully for passages that can be used and combined with each other. And then to get the band together - hopefully all these guys will still want to be in a room with me then - and perform these pieces. But we will also add, say, ten hammered dulcimers playing through Fender twins, and say a fifteen piece choir, ten horns, and add more timpani and percussion. I want to make it into a total wipeout sonic event, and perform this material around in classical places. There's interest in us doing that, but the problem is the volume. They're not able to allow the level of dBs that we excrete in their venue, so I think some classical music promoters are going to try and help me gather the arrangers to do that, and we're going to try and do these events.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: Why is the album called We Are Him?
Lately I've been thinking it's a good idea to just give up, let go, disappear, not to have an identity. I wrote the song thinking about something like the Nuremburg rallies, except not with Hitler at the podium, but instead maybe an old fat naked clown covered in chocolate and flies, gesticulating madly, pink foam bubbling out of his ears. The crowd was comprised of people of all ages, all in a mad fervor, naked except for the soiled diapers they wore, reaching into their poop sacks and smearing each other's faces and bodies with the contents, stomping their feet in a communal tantrum, aping the words and gestures of their leader. They're chanting "We Are Him."
PSF: Do you see it as a return in some ways to the sound you had with Swans around Love of Life, as there seem to be reasonable parallels?
Oh God, no! I can't even remember those days. I've worked really hard on forgetting all about Swans. I have nothing to do with it. It was someone else. I killed that worthless piece of shit of a human being a long time ago. The records still exist, I guess, but they're artifacts, leavings, like unsightly growths that were surgically removed from my body, left to dry and shrivel in the sun, then scattered in the wind. In a way, Angels of Light is a religious undertaking—I'm doing penance for all my years of selfishness and sin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: "The Visitor" hints at a belief in reincarnation. Do you think you've lived before?
Good Gawd, no, I'm not even sure I'm alive now.
PSF: Is "The Visitor" about the death of a friend?
No, it's about the death of "me" (thank God! I think!) or the "me" I might imagine myself to be, if I were to find myself in a song written by "me." ... It's also a fairly jejune but earnest wish to die in my lover's arms....
PSF: "Star Chaser" is a very moving song. Is it a remembrance of all those you've known who have died?
Thanks! It's an homage to a person that once lived inside me. He's left a hole in my chest, and I miss him.... But for heaven's sakes—no offense—where does all the Death stuff come from? Anyway, no matter, this song is a longing for the past, which at the time was not there, and now is even less so, and only a few artifacts remain to hint at what never was.
PSF: Is there a theme of mutation in the song "Sunflower's Here to Stay"?
First I saw my beloved Genesis P-Orridge leading a troupe of He/She child-creatures through a maze of Mylar, metallic glitter snowflakes clouding the air, then I saw my beloved Devendra Banhart leading a horde of hairy feral children towards a phallic rock formation in the woods, then I saw a half-goat / half-pig beast leading human rats to a chasm filled with flames. He chugged wine and belched lightning, and his erection was truly frightening. The human rats turned on him and were about to swarm him and eat him when I woke up. Thank God! I wanted the music to sound like The Beatles or The Turtles or the early hippy era of Pink Floyd, but of course it didn't turn out that way.
PSF: We seem to be living in times of rapid change. Where do you think the human race is heading?
Oh my God. I can't believe I was just asked that question. Please consult someone with wisdom for an answer. I'm as naïve as the day I was born, thank you.
PSF: Have you heard of the black hole generator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that is going to be activated in November? Could it finally mean Armageddon?
I sure hope so!!!!! Armageddon is good. It means we're all going to heaven—at least I think I am.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's talk about the book. Tell me about the rotting pig story.
Gira: That story stems from when I went to art school and I was obsessed with television and media at the time. I wanted to invent these these goggles where you could see images of your thoughts, so you could live an entirely ersatz existence. It seemed to me the only distraction would be your body, so the way to lose your body would be to immerse yourself in body-temperature fluid and be fed intravenously. I thought that would be the ultimate end of media and television. And now they've almost done that with virtual reality.
And what would you become if you did that?
Gira: Ultimately, you would become nothing, I think.
Would you have any sense of your existence?
Gira: Hopefully not - that would be the idea.
But you'd still be alive? [Jeez Paul, haven't you got yet.- ed.]
Gira: I'd guess so, I wouldn't know. To me, if you take the kernel of the frame of mind that occurs when you watch television, that's seems to be the incipient seed of what I'm talking about there. The way your body melts into the couch and your mind completely empathizes with the image.
But I can't help relating that to some SWANS songs that are more spiritual in their content, like "Where does a Body End?"
Gira: To me, television seems like a very spiritual thing, at times. It's also very mundane and a mind control device, as well, It's born from growing up and watching massive amounts of television, I guess it's embedded in their consciousness.
But you seem to be tapping into something a lot of people desire.
Gira: The whole American nation, yeah...I've always felt that, at least in the louder moments with SWANS, that the ideal thing to have happen, particularity live, would be to have it just dissolve you - the intensity and swirl of the sound. I think that's what people want from loud rock music.
Most of the book is set in L.A. Why is that?
Gira: That's a place I'm pretty familiar with, having grown up there. So I'd take a memory and extrapolate from there. I actually did live in a tiny room above a porn theater in downtown LA. [ like the character in the Young Man That Hid His Boy Inside A Horse, or, My Vulvik in Los Angeles] It didn't have a toilet. We had to shit in a gallon bucket and we'd wrap it with a trash bag and carry down through the lobby and dump out there on there on the street. [laughs]
So there are some autobiographical elements.
Gira: Obviously, that story isn't entirely autobiographical, but I did take a lot of speed, too. And I did once take so much speed that I sat in front of the mirror picking at my gums because I was convinced there was something living in them. When I finished, I realized three days had past, my gums had swollen like there was a boxing glove inside my mouth, and it took me about a week to recover from that. That was the last time I took speed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What exactly happened with The Burning World [1989]? It doesn't possess certain qualities the other records do.
To me, Love Will Tear Us Apart [1988 EP] and that are our low points.
I agree.
That's all right. The Burning World - well, I was forced to have an outside producer [by MCA] and although I think that Bill Laswell makes great music on his own. I just don't think that the conjunction worked very well. I'm more the kind of person that wants to use the studio as a tool and change things. I don't look at a recording and say, "That's it." I look at the mix as a whole other part of the process. I was sort of locked out of the mixes.
I noticed that on White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity [the subsequent 1991 effort], the first cut is really strong again. You sounded like you were recovering.
That's exactly what happened. I lost confidence as a singer, as a producer. I lost huge amounts of money and was incredibly in debt and just debilitated after that experience.
And what became of the Uni deal?
We signed to Uni and then MCA went through this whole financial reorganization and they fired everyone at Uni right after we signed. So we were without any staff behind us and the record was just thrown out there with no intentions to sell it. I, in naive enthusiasm for my career, hired a publicist and a management company out of my own money instead of giving them a percentage, and I just got raped. I ended up owing huge amounts of money to lawyers, to everybody. All in all, it was certainly edifying. [laughs] Shortly thereafter we started our own record company [Young God] and it's been fine to eke out a living ever since. I would never sign to a major label again. I would let them distribute my records, but I would never let them do anything else.
Are you still selling your right pinkie [as you once publicly offered]?
Yeah, I'm really looking for buyers, too. $250,000
Why?
Why? Because, well, I figure I'm poor, I'm broke, I've worked my guts out for 15 years, if it means selling my right pinkie...my left one I need for playing guitar. I thought, you know, like in the old days you could get a patron. He or she could have it and put it in aspic and put it on their mantel piece and then I would live.
How would you cut if off?
Shit, l'd just put it on a piece of wood and hack it off with a machete. $250.000! Christ! You could almost have my penis for that!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fan Letter - by Michael Gira（我没勇气给他写信了。。。
And the violence in my insides is
Glowing and malignant, and
The only way
To stop it, is to cut a hole and
Let the fresh air come in.
And your public face is dripping, now you're famous and
You're beautiful,
But I can still remember when your
Mouth was always open,
Like a stairway
Leading down to hell.
Now your perfect body's shining, and the camera's always
Circling, and the
Boys and girls are dreaming, and
Your naked body's bleeding
Where the dogs
Have ripped away your skin.
And the world is always shrinking, and my mind is
Disappearing, in the holy
Adulation of your all-inclusive open arms, and feeling
Penitential, l'm cuning
Off my finger, and l'm faxing you
The image, via omnipresent
Electricity.
And the communists were torturing a sacred man and
Women, whose screams flew
Out the window and through the
Himalayas, then changed into
A buttelfly and
Drifted through the wind, and
Landed on a street in Paris,
Where you crushed
It underneath your high-heeled fin.
Now l'm killing and l'm stealing and
L'm raping and l'm burning
And l'm
Feeling kinda magic due to mental
Enervation, so I'll send my
Mind into the
Hard body of a rockstar, and maybe then you'll fuck me,
'Cause 5 million
People love me, and you wanna suck my energy.
Yeah this world is made of losers,
But I wanna be a winner,
I'll do anything it takes to
Hypnotize the upturned faces, into
Trusting me completely so they'll
Need me to supply, the object that
Will fill the emptiness that
Was created
By repetition of an image and a
Sound they recognize, and
Their malleable
Identities will be sexually excited
By the product which I will
Then provide.
And this planet keeps on drifting
Through a thick and viscous
Blackness, every
Pleasure every weakness will come true before we're
Finished, and l'm Iying
In my bed and my hands are gening
Bloody and l'm thinking I
Can save you
From the phony world you live in,
And maybe you will hide me
Deep inside your perfect body and
I'll melt into the glistening
Flawless contours of
Your immortal flesh.
Now you're mine. Yeah you're mine...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PSF: Would you ever consider reforming Swans?
MG: Absolutely not, never. Dead and gone. I have more interesting things to do.
PSF: Would you and Jarboe consider working together again?
MG: I would never consider it, no.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Big Takeover #68 2011-6-24 节选
I heard an interesting story, that when you were involved in performance art in Los Angeles, you did a piece involving having blindfolded, anonymous sex…?
Yeah, well, I went to art school, and I was involved in performance art – it’s sort of a stupid genre, but I was interested in it at the time. And I guess I was preoccupied with what you would call ersatz experience, like, experiencing things secondhand, through television and media. This was pre-internet and computers and everything – just how about American society had kind of become about experiencing reality in ersatz, even at that time. And I designed this sort of early version of a virtual world – I drew out this design of this mask you would wear, and you’d be lowered into a vat of body-temperature liquid, and maybe having a tube coming out your ass which would get rid of your waste, and a tube going in your mouth which would feed you; and you would just experience things completely in ersatz, like your imagination would trigger this video experience, with this mask around your face. And you would lose a sense of your body and you’d experience everything as imagination. And that led to thinking about trying to actualize having a sexual experience with someone whom I would never see, or know. And so… I lived in a dilapidated factory at the time; I had a loft space that was hundreds of feet long – so I rolled out this white paper, about 50 yards of it or something, and I built these chairs, these sort of abstract wooden chairs, built out of plywood and 2X4s, at the sides of this processional, kind of thing. And then leading along the processional, the pathway, every foot, there was a four or five foot high hollow post, but at the bottom of the post was a square, and inside that was lightbulb. So really they were like penises, sort of four foot high, geometrical-looking penises, out of raw wood. And there would be a stream of light coming out of each penis. And then I decided, I wanted to have this experience where I would have this impersonal-as-possible sex, so I had a friend contact a female who was interested in trying this, and what we had to do was that each of us had to narrate into a cassette our sexual fantasies, what we liked about sex, what we wanted to do, and just try to get as deep as possible into our sexuality. So we each made a cassette, and I had a cassette player strapped to each one of us, playing our sexual fantasies. And we each had blindfolds on, and we were naked, and we sat opposite each other in these chairs; and then we’d grope our way along these penises until we found each other in the middle; then we’d have sex in the middle and then we’d go back and sit down again and wait until it was appropriate to have it again, and these tapes were going the whole time. And it’s very embarrassing; I invited like, X, and all these different bands who were playing downstairs.
X the punk band?
Yeah, this was in LA. This was in Pasadena. And Fear I think played – so there was all this punk rock/ art connection. They could go downstairs and watch the gig and come upstairs and watch this going on.
How long did the piece go on for?
I don’t know, two or three hours probably.
How old were you when you were doing this?
Let’s see – that was 1977, probably, 78 maybe? So I was 23, 24. Around that time, I was publishing a magazine, with another friend of mine from art school; it was called No magazine. And it was like a broadsheet kind of thing – the same size as NME or Village Voice, on newsprint; it wasn’t like a little fanzine. We saved money – I painted houses, and forget what he did, but we saved enough money for each issue and figured out how to lay it out. This was like, before computers and everything, so we did it with Letraset and laid the thing out, had it typset, and had interviews with bands, and stuff about performance art and pornography and some of my writing. It was really vile, actually, but it was also poppy, in the same way, because we’d interview X or Suicide, and then we’d have this pornography or pictures or decomposing corpses on the cover, we had on one issue. So we did that – I was sort of in the punk scene in LA, doing that, and eventually I got tired of not actually making music, and started a band.
Little Cripples, right? I can’t find much information about them.
It had a couple of names. It was called Little Cripples, and it was called Strict Ids, and then it was called IDS. I guess we sounded a little bit like Wire, a little like the Buzzcocks, something like that. That’s about all there is to say about it. It changed when I left – it became the B-People.
And they recorded?
They did record, yeah. It became a little more quirky, or something like that (note – the Mutant Sounds blog has the B-People album up for download).
Did any of your stuff from that time survive? Recordings?
Not that I know of. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing then, anyway, so I don’t know what to say about it.
Were you writing songs?
I was writing words. I didn’t have anything to do with the music, really – except to be guiding the direction, sort of, or helping to guide the direction. I didn’t know anything about being in a band.
Wow. And somewhere back there, you also worked with Hermann Nitsch?
I didn’t really “work with” Hermann Nitsch. I was one of the assistants that just washed the blood off the performers – or participants, I guess should say, as they would come back to the back room and go back out for more. That was a great experience for me – it was in a little, I guess what you’d call a storefront, a 600 square foot storefront in Venice, California. Really small. And he had the carcasses strung up there, and went through the rituals that he does. And the musicians were gathered from LA punks and street musicians and things, people blowing horns and whistles and whatever, and he would guide them with this hand in a big, black butcher’s glove. It was really comical, in a way. He looked like a little Hitler. And a couple of the main participants were the Kipper Kids. They were a really great performance act – it was two guys. It was brutal, but comedic at the same time. One of them married Karen Finley, and she basically got her shtick from him. Look’em up online.
Would you count that as a formative experience?
Oh yeah, sure.
Were you aware of the Viennese Aktionists, before assisting with that piece?
Oh yeah, of course – I went to art school, and I read about that stuff. It was really interesting to me. Schwarzkogler, and Günter Brus, and Otto Muehl and all those people. To me, that was inspirational stuff – that, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman – that was the art I gravitated towards when I was still in art school.
I gather “Raping a Slave” and “I Crawled” are on the setlist – but maybe they always were; were you performing these songs prior to disbanding the band?
Well – actually, “I Crawled” is an early song I did, and I had Jarboe sing it. There’s a version of that on Swans Are Dead, which is a double live CD we did, and that’s a really, really good live CD. But her version is pretty wrenching. But it doesn’t sound like the original, and the version now doesn’t sound like the original, either. It’s really transformed, it’s made into something else. I just look at records, they’re like a postcard version of a song. A song starts out as something really elemental, maybe with an acoustic guitar, a bass riff or something, and it gradually evolves; and then you get people involved in it and orchestrate it and mix it, and it’s codified when it’s recorded. And live it should keep changing; if it doesn’t, it’s kind of boring.
Where did “I Crawled” come from?
That song was written when I was reading this book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich. And simultaneously, Hitler – uh, I was gonna say “Hitler was being elected!” – Ronald Reagan was being elected president (laughs) and the corollaries were really clear to me – the avuncular, or like, father figure that lords over the nation and harks back to a better time, to a more pure past, and emphasizes the family structure… because that’s the kernel of state control, is teaching people how to obey the paternal figure in a family structure. And all that kind of thinking was really integral to the Reagan campaign. So I was drawing a corollary.
I can imagine your children being troubled by some of your songs, at some point –like a song like “Beautiful Child,” which I gather is in the current setlist, with its chorus of “I will kill the child…”
(Gira laughs)
Do you have a plan to explain such songs to them at some point?
Well, I figure they’ll be mature enough to understand that art touches places that are uncomfortable, and if they’re not – tough luck! …That song, “Beautiful Child,” now that you mention it, is really sort of a twisted version of the story of Isaac and Abraham, and since I was pursuing a Biblical theme on the record [Children of God], it seemed appropriate – but that story itself is pretty perverse, so…
Yeah, it is…! Okay… so I was hoping I could ask you about a few of the writers you read…
I go through periods, just like everyone. I’ve had times when I read Jack London obsessively – I understand that’s not very hip, but I think he’s fantastic. Or Cormac McCarthy, I think is wonderful. Paul Bowles, I’ve read a lot of, and Borges. I kind of randomly – I don’t really have any focused education, so I might read a little bit of Charles Bukowski, and then I’ll read the biography of Hitler (laughs). I just jump around, y’know?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On inspirations and influences: "Initially, advertising slogans influenced me the most. I really liked the way that language was aggressive and immediate, but with lots of subtext. It's reaching for the back of your mind to influence you.
"There's a book by [Jerzy] Kosinski called Steps, which is cold and clinical, but describes scenes of incredible violence and cruelty. I found that combination of elements attractive early on. I often write after reading books. I wrote an Angels of Light song, Kosinski, after reading him. And I wrote a song called New Mother after reading [Joseph] Conrad's The Secret Agent. Right now, I'm reading Lord Jim by Conrad and I think something's going to come of that."
On shaping, refining and editing songs: "It's a really long, gruelling process, but every now and again a song just rushes out fully formed, and it's just wonderful. That happened with the song Eden Prison. It refers back to childhood memories of me being in jail when I was a kid. I was hitchhiking across Europe, and I ended up in Israel, where I was arrested for selling hashish. I spent four and a half months in jail. It was a pretty formative experience, and this line I wrote ties into that: 'Within the walls of Eden Prison, there is a mark upon a stone/ And in that place a life was written, and there a stain was laid where I was born.' There's this idea that someone was murdered or attacked in prison, but that was some kind of birth experience in itself."
