According to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, change is the only constant in life. Everything that comes into being is a product of conflicting opposites and that process of becoming never ends. We never stop becoming. We are never at rest. The music of Swans (and by extension that of songwriter/bandleader Michael Gira) is the embodiment of an ever-changing being, existing through the continual tension of opposing forces; never at rest.
If everything is constantly changing with no fixed identity, where are the limits? Where are the boundaries? This existential questioning is a recurring theme in Gira’s writing. It’s in the title of the Swans documentary Where Does a Body End? and it runs through the forthcoming Swans…
…album The Beggar (released via Young God Records and Mute), on which Gira is joined by current Swans Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Dana Schechter, Christopher Pravdica, Phil Puleo and (guest Swan) Ben Frost (plus a number of other guest players).
Opening the CD and streaming version (the vinyl track listing is totally different) “The Parasite” immediately displays both dichotomies and opposing forces as well as Gira’s existential questioning. It’s in his words, “The more that you consume, the less you’ll ever know…”, and the music itself. Waves of sparse vocals and guitar ebb and flow, before a mid-track expansion of choral and instrumental layers has the track hypnotically transformed as the rest of the band fills out the sonic space.
Swans have been employing these kinds of sharp transitions as far back as their late 80s material in ever-evolving musical styles. Through all these becomings, one commonality in Swans’ music has an absence of resolution. The Beggar is aesthetically quite distinct from early Swans albums like Cop or Filth. Over the years Gira has brought in more subtle instrumental approaches and instrumentation, while still keeping Swans able to overpower the listener with sonic intensity. In any era though Gira is not one for building to a payoff. The music flows and evolves. There are swells, peaks, and climaxes, but at the end remains the grind, the tension, the unresolved questions.
2019’s leaving meaning was a significant recalibration, after the continuity of the band’s post-2010-reform material. It felt like Gira was once again searching for a new approach (though there was a nod to the past with its reworking of “Amnesia” from 1992’s Love of Life record). The Beggar goes further, in some ways evolving the delicate instrumental subtleties of the last record, while peppering the music with allusions to previous work. On the title track, as its brooding stalking rhythm evokes early 90s song “Was He Ever Alive”, Gira sings “Without your eyes upon my weakness, will I forget where I begin?”. It’s as though while casting his mind’s eye over the landscape of his and Swans’ remembered existence little fragments of the past attach to the Swans of the present.
Gira’s existential musings here repeatedly have him pondering his own mortality. “Am I ready to die? Is there really a mind?” he wonders on “Paradise is Mine”, while the rest of the band creep along like a nocturnal predator. On “Michael is Done” he softly intones ““When Michael is gone, some other will come. When the other has come, then Michael is done”, calmly staring into the mouth of the great annihilator, as the band coalesce into a triumphant explosion of bells and angels.