Swans -- The Seer

soundtracks for the blind prolly the next logical step for my father/the seer fans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcEG0WvfSDM

then children of god

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTIN6RsgLNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijIPY-MTClI

if you like the new album you would like most of the 90's swans stuff. very similar sounds.

Cool, thanks! Its one of those kinda daunting back catalogs. Wishing I'd have paid more attention back in the 90s, but I don't think I would have been ready then.

yeah "soundtracks for the blind" & "children of god" are still respectively n°1 & 2 in my swans disco.

white light/love of life too. essential.

yup

swans periods:

1982 - 1983: labor EP, filth
alternates between flailing uppity no wave tempos and sickly dirges, killer polyrhythms

1984: young god EP, cop
descent into total lifeless nihilistic thud, glacial pace

1986: time is money 12", greed, holy money
introduction of keyboards/samplers and the gothy overtones of jarboe, the scuzz of the earlier material is scrubbed off, sound is clean, robotic, sterile

1987: children of god
massive expansion of sound, brutality now alternates with torch song tunefulness

1988: the burning world
inexplicable easy listening album

1991 - 1996: white light from the mouth of infinity, love of life, the great annihilator, soundtracks for the blind
forays into folk blues, tape loops, chamber music pop, this period is the most similar to current reconstituted swans

The Great Annihilator is awesome too.

i've only heard up to "Holy Money" I guess it's time to get Children of God or something

they never really made a bad record except for maybe the burning world (and I blame that on bill laswell, cuz live those songs were pretty killer).

not helpful advice for ppl looking to dive in tho I guess

yeah its all good. and burning world has some of their best songs so....get that too.

Bear in mind, though, that the live albums are not totally representative of the contemporaneous studio stuff and you should totally listen to the live albums too. Public Castration is a Good Idea and Feel Good Now are crucial.

yeah! public castration takes the austere greed/holy money material and completely reinvents it through LOUDNESS and it's likely to be my #1 pick for the 80s poll

yessss they're playing Seville in December!

god did I hate the burning world when it came out, this was absolutely not what I needed in 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR6niiAh0uY

I'd love to see pictures of peoples faces when they listen to Public Castration, like I'm sure I make the most contorted expression whenever I hear it

i loved the blind faith cover. but i just love that song. i really liked acid at the time though. so, that helps.

plus, its just so beautiful.

i used to be on jarboe's swans e-mail list in 1999/Y2K-ish and among the people there "God Damn The Sun" from Burning World was way at the top of any swans song poll.

fyi if you ever see them, the u.k. 12 inches of burning world songs sound waaaay better than the album versions. sonically. especially "Saved". american uni vinyl some of the cheapest shit at that time. sadly.

when i saw gira play solo a few times in the last ten years or so, he wld only perform a v small handful of swans songs, and 'god damm the sun' was always amongst them

I still waiting for vinyl of this.

Jarboe is going out on tour soon doing mainly Swans torch songs. Can't blame her for trying to get a piece of the action, I'm sure she feels sidelined by Gira despite doing vox on the new album.

I'd be into that depending on the backing band (although to be honest I don't much care for solo Jarboe.)

it's just her and a pianist

Sounds really dull.

I think i was at the Public Castration show. If so I was still coming down from taking a load of speed the night before. I sat in the balcony at the ULU beside somebody who I later thought had been Diamanda Galas.
Can't think what my face would have looked like while experiencing the show though. Pretty blistering experience anyway.

In '87 I stuck my head in a bassbin at the Birmingham show & I think that was supposed to be one of the loudest gigs on that tour.

'88 was better live than on record. Was Burning World actually out that year, I have it in my head as being the next year. I think several members left because they were unused whereas the '88 tour still had the line-up from the Children of God lp. Westberg, Kizys, Parsons. Playing very heavy folk rock. I thought the shows I saw were pretty literally awesome. Then spent the next 20 years wishing I could get some of the recordings to listen to. Finally did when I started getting stuff from Dime etc. I think I still have the Mean Fiddler show on my walkman.

yeah the Burning World was '89, '88 was the year of the Love Will Tear Us Apart 12" which was a pretty bad idea really. The Jarboe version was much better than the MG version. I saw them at the Kilburn National Ballroom, that was probably '88.

saw them at CBGBs on the burning world tour, c/r the year unless I look up my review

fun fact: sebadoh opened, nobody knew who they were and the crowd talked through their entire set

I'll let you know in a month after Supersonic about the Jarboe piano show. (for people who didn't know like, I'm guessing, Kerr her last Supersonic show was fronting Esoteric, which was great but also fairly clearly not Swans)

I think i was at the Public Castration show. If so I was still coming down from taking a load of speed the night before. I sat in the balcony at the ULU beside somebody who I later thought had been Diamanda Galas.

i was all like nah, public castration was recorded at the ICA i know cos etc etc, but then i looked it up and whaddya know:

Tracks 1-6 recorded live at I.C.A. London 27/3/86.
Track 7 recorded live at The Garage Nottingham 13/2/86
Track 8 recorded live at U.L.U. London 14/2/86.

so we are all correct hurrah. the 87 tour was meant to be the pinnacle of noise-as-noise swans - ilxor mark s went to the legendary show at the town and country club in kentish town (immortalised on the 'feel good now' live rec as 'beautiful reprise - the town and country backstab cowardice') where i think the police intervened to turn the show off/down. funnily enough the next time i saw swans was again at the town and country (tho' maybe it was called the forum by then?) in the early 90s, a fantastic gig on the white light/love of life tour (do remember that that was fairly sparsely attended, they didn't even open the balcony up.)

I was at The T&C on that '87 tour too, where a lot of Feel Good Now was recorded, among other places.

I know I saw Swans at ICA but I thought that was earlier, though maybe I'm confusing '85 and '86.
I know they were over once in '84, to the u.K. at least cos I saw them support The Fall at Heaven. Can't remember if they were over in '85 or not, then they were documented in '86.
Is there a From THe Archives or anything on the Swans?

yeah my grasp of dates/chronology from that time is now p hazy, but there was an NME issue with a cover article about american hardcore bands, prob written by chris bohn/biba kopf, that was my first introduction to ppl like sonic youth, black flag, swans, foetus? think that was 84, but can't seem to find an image of the cover (black and white snap of rollins iirc) to confirm the date

There's one that has Rollins' tattooed arm on the cover I think, that has a very wideranging idea of hardcore as the theme for the bulk of the issue. Includes things like Leonard Cohen's Death Of a ladies' Man, Yukio Mishima etc etc

There was also a thing on the downtown NYC scene that covered Swans, Sonic YOuth, Foetus, Lydia Lunch and a couple of others in the cover story.

I'm pretty sure I still have the hardcore edition somewhere here but not sure about the other one. & I have mice so I hope it's intact when I find it.

thanks, again i cld be confusing/conflating the two issues in my mouse-bitten mind

http://www.vinylonthe.net/images/stockpix/2012-05-31_nme-hardcore_opt.jpg

15 September 1984, according to wikipedia.

Children of God tour was my first time, at the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton. Jarboe was ill that night and couldn't perform.

that's the one!

This has got very little relevance to the Swans, but while we're reminiscing... Stevolende, just going by various things you've said, I'm sure I've met you once long ago. Did you go to the R*peman/Band of Susans/Dinosaur Jr gig @ Leeds Uni in about 1988, the one with the anti-Albini protest outside? If you're the guy I'm thinking of, you'd ridden up on your bike and you were striding round campus in yr biker gear looking for the venue. Pardon me if I'm wrong though.

I recently found this really interesting boot from '86, Mabuhay Gardens SF, it's a live radio recording and they lose the signal at one point and a panicked DJ has to vamp for a minute or so.

The sound of the recording is really weird and great, something about having to contain and parse all that ferocity for radio and struggling to balance the elements made them come out sounding even more industrial, queasy and fucked up.

Mind blown by "a piece of the sky"

Somehow this record gets better the more you listen

Would love to hear some live 80s shows

When I get home I'll organise a link to the SF gig.

This has got very little relevance to the Swans, but while we're reminiscing... Stevolende, just going by various things you've said, I'm sure I've met you once long ago. Did you go to the R*peman/Band of Susans/Dinosaur Jr gig @ Leeds Uni in about 1988, the one with the anti-Albini protest outside? If you're the guy I'm thinking of, you'd ridden up on your bike and you were striding round campus in yr biker gear looking for the venue. Pardon me if I'm wrong though.

― mod night at the oasis (NickB), Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:13 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Funny that, if I'm thinking of the same gig. I only started hitching around the U.K. following the Dinosaur Jr tour at the other end of the EUropean jaunt of that tour. I think it was originally a Blast First tour that featured Rapeman, BAnd Of Susans and Dinosaur Jr. & after the Europe bit Rapeman had dropped out. Though I did see them in Bedford & I can't think how that fits in with the rest. Just remembering Albini wearing a teddy Bear head backstage
so no it wasn't me at the Leeds gig as fare as I recall, though I did go there quite frequently over the next couple of years. Could be remembering it wrong. I was hitching anyway but at some point around then I was wearing a sleeveless bike jacket frequently. Though probably under a long mac. I'm brown with dreads btw.

I've got this on headphones for the first time and finding it a little harsh. A very sibilant "Song For A Warrior" to start disc 2. Let's see how the rest is. Wondering about my set-up.

Stevolende: I think you said on some other thread that your dad's Nigerian iirc? and you mentioned following those sorts of bands round before, so I was just putting two and two together and wondering if that was you... Only reason that encounter with whoever it was is still stuck in my mind is cos that was the first time I'd ever been to a gig by myself and that was the very first person I spoke to there! I'd travelled over from Salford for it and was quite intimidated by the whole thing - the student protest outside, all these lairy northerners inside shouting at Albini to play Kerosene and him getting increasingly frustrated by it... I missed the last train home and spent the night squatting under a tarpaulin next to a cement mixer on some building site near the station, praying that I wouldn't get stabbed. Middle of October and it was fucking freezing - happy days.

good lord, used copies of Public Castration are pricey. anybody wanna make me a dub of the Thirsty Ear CD reissue, or a burn of the 2LP? hit me up thru ilx webmail. I have it on MP3 but it's just not the same.

Odd, coming back to me that when I started hitching I still had my green german army coat which was actually a bike messenger one. Got nicked at Harry Crews in 88 that did.
I didn't think I was at that gig. Maybe I was. Just thought Rapeman didn't do the post Europe part of that tour and that was the main part I did do.
Remember being in Brighton, Edinburgh, probably Newcastle. But can't remember Leeds being part of that.
The Leeds I do remember, I thought was a non college venue and people were coming up to me thinking I was Murph. I guess I looked somewhat similar to him in a B+w photo in one of the UK weeklies at the time. But I'm obviously a different colour. I had been sitting with him a little before people started asking me if I was him though.

I think Rollins Band was the first Leeds College gig I was at. Maybe I have date order wrong though. Did go to Duchess Of York quite a bit after that though.

Swans at Mubahay Gardens SF (radio recording)

http://wtrns.fr/5QOPsiYnCdqqie