Noise Rock

"”Stay Here”"

"But as unhinged as Gira may have seemed at times, such compulsions felt fully justified during performances of “The Merge,” for example. With the help of Dana Schechter, who added another wickedly groovy and powerful bass guitar to the mix, the band conjured up a truly intoxicating, almost tribal-flavored sonic swirl that had most of the crowd hypnotically nodding and grinding away to the relentlessly rhythm-heavy intensity of the music."

"Gira would often lose himself in the music, closing his eyes intently while performing, or flailing his arms wildly and dancing on stage with the fervor of a cult leader who had just drank some potent snake venom."

"Granted, it’s not like Swans bludgeon you to death like it’s 1985 anymore, as the band’s sound has, of course, evolved significantly over the years to incorporate more dynamics, nuance, but perhaps most importantly: suspense. Case in point was their opening number, “The End of Forgetting,” which started out sounding like the aural equivalent of watching the sun rise from space, while steadily building in intensity/tempo before ultimately swelling into a massive, all-consuming crescendo that felt like you were being sucked into a pulsar by the end of it."

"Swans are majestic, beautiful-looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments."

"By 1986/7 Swans had run its course with the physical assault of sound that we had employed previously for the most part. I wanted to move on to other things and didn’t want to get stuck in some style, which in our case had the potential of becoming cartoonish if we’d continued in that direction. So, I pushed the music into unfamiliar territory."

"I wanted Swans to be 'heavier', though. I wanted the music to obliterate — why, I don’t remember! I think it just felt good."

"Closing track “Finally, Peace.” may end the album on a reflective high point, but by album’s end, I lay paralyzed, unable to decide if I desired a repeat or a reprieve. Unsettling as it may be, this conflict is a testament to Swans’ unparalleled ability to translate the absurd violence of the human condition into music that’s as intoxicating as it is intense."

"The whole idea of being a noise band at this point is the most conformist, conservative, consumerist, brain-dead route you could take. I think it would be more adventurous to sing at a Holiday Inn."

"Swans' path was not without potholes: an infamous cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" jumps out as one of the worst things they ever did, and Gira has more or less disowned an entire chunk of his back catalog. But even the missteps offer substance greater than most bands could imagine."

"With the addition of Jarboe on vocals and keys –- she was the only other constant from '84-'97 –- structures began to shift, songs coalesced into singable, hummable things, and Swans burst outward in a cruel bloom of contradictory sounds. The first transitional records saw the original stew of post-punk and sludge retrofitted to stuttering industrial beats while softer, piano tracks started to appear. Before long, each passing record took on a new persona, and each shift saw the band's vision grow exponentially in texture and scope. Gira's obsessions -- power, religion, sex, death -- remained constant, but his impressionistic, shouted rants found new strength when he adopted a baritone croon and learned to tell stories, softening his attack to serve a higher calling."

"In its earliest incarnation, Swans set out to inflict itself upon the listener –- violation and domination set to post-punk sludge, meant to break you down, bend you over, and tear right through. Mastermind and sole constant Michael Gira drew on the writings of Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade to sculpt his repetitious tirades, while an ever-shifting live band channeled the urban blight of no-wave and industrial into something much worse. The early records remain some of the most unapologetic, uncompromising sounds ever recorded."

"It started in the sewer. Ugliness embodied. Noise like you’d never heard. The bellowing drawl of an unhinged slave driver, spitting abuse and mantras of degradation. "Nobody beats you like a cop, with his club." "Someone weaker than you should rape you." Lyrics sailed past pitch-black into some deeper, darker void of nastiness. The music was supposed to hurt. This was NYC in the early '80s. This was Swans."

"Going forward … things will be simpler and more intimate for Swans. When that time comes, I look forward to discovering a fresh path towards a new sonic terrain in which to dwell."

"…a cacophonous rhythmic throb which drew on post-punk, industrial, doom metal, NYC avant minimalism and the blues; a sound which was matched by Gira's often nihilistic, anti-natalist and existential lyrical concerns ... delivered in a stentorian and messianic manner."

"The Slave EP was a sound that I always wanted to hear, just the bleakest and blackest. The minimalist approach of the music, that was what really influenced me. It was non-genre-specific, with a total lack of baggage... purely abstract, surreal, and violent. It communicated to me in a very special way, and taught me that heavy metal could be stripped of everything and reduced to its most primal form. ... Swans ... paved the way for me."

"Early Swans really is like little else on the planet before or since"

"”The Seer Returns”"

"”The Seer”"

"”Hypogirl”"

"”I was a Prisoner in your Skull”"

"She’s my sex bomb baby! Yeah!"

"San Francisco’s Flipper made music that sounded like the opposite of what most would consider sexy. And for that matter, it didn’t even sound like what most of us would associate with punk — where loud and fast once ruled, Flipper played slow and sludgy. Black Flag would do likewise in just a couple years, but in 1982 there was little that sounded like Flipper, and even less that sounded like “Sex Bomb,” a drunken mess of a punk song that took the template of early garage rock from the ’60s and stretched it out over seven minutes, simplified the lyrics and blasted lots of gnarly sax all over it. It feels nihilistic — the same thing over and over again, gradually becoming messier and messier, with no narrative or point to speak of."

"Big Black had noise-rock down to a science. The band essentially had no midrange. Bassist Dave Riley held down the low-end, while Steve Albini and Santiago Durango opted for extreme treble, which was made all the more piercing thanks to a penchant for playing with metal picks. With the industrial thump of drum machine “Roland” keeping rhythm, and a habit of setting off firecrackers on stage before playing, Big Black essentially created misanthropy you could sing along to."

"Like I said, I grew up with punk, and the lyrics of the songs I liked were about reality, and young people were expressing themselves by playing music. It's always been more about attitude, for me. Expressing yourself within society."

"Opening new fields of permissibility means to go fragile until we destroy the fears that hold us back."

"While nobody might recognise the importance of what you have done, you need to keep your confidence. It is difficult to be alone in working toward something and yet not know where it will take you…"

"Only very few manage to keep searching for fragility; it requires musicians to make multiple breaks from their own traditions."

"To be open, receptive and exposed to the dangers of making improvised music, means exposing yourself to unwanted situations that could break the foundations of your own security. … You must engage in questioning your security, see it as a constriction. You are aware and scared, as if you were in a dark corridor. Now you are starting to realise that what you thought of as walls existed only in your imagination."

"Improvised music forces situations into play where musicians push each other into bringing different perspectives to their playing. Improvised music is not progressive in itself, but it invites constant experimentation. When players feel too secure about their approaches, the experimentation risks turning into Mannerism. What I would like to explore here are the moments in which players leave behind a safe zone and expose themselves in the face of the internalised structures of judgment that govern our appreciation of music. These I would call fragile moments."

"If you turn up the volume to your computer, and set the the little microphone inside to maximum level it will feed back, just like any other type of microphone. I just put it through some filters and add some white noise or pink noise. For me, the thing was to use elements that were marginal in other types of music, take something of no real value and use it."

"Maybe I still am, but I also understand more the problems involved with rock, how close-minded it sometimes is, how male."

"It seems that Locke had in mind rival goods when he developed his theory (if one consumes it, others can’t). What happens to non-rival goods like ideas? George Bernard Shaw famously said that if you and I have an apple and we exchange apples, you would only have one apple but if you and I have an idea and we exchanged them, we will have two ideas. So, how is it possible to treat ideas as if they were apples i.e. to make them into commodities? It is only through copyright that it is possible to produce scarcity out of ideas and this of course can produce serious benefits for some but not all"

"While in improvisation there is a sense of craft within one's own instrument and in being able to interact with other musicians, in noise this disappears to the extent of anti-virtuosity becoming a virtue. A nihilist approach to improvisation in which the interaction is not based upon developing common denominators for some communication to happen among the players, but rather a matter of developing the freedom of individual expression."

"It is a fallacy that one can capture the moment through audio recording – that the recording can really represent that 'creative process'. We all know that the moment is gone forever, that the recording can never reproduce all the specifics of the situation, the room, the feeling of the players, their history and backgrounds, the conditions, reasons and interests for producing such a recording."

"If successful, improvisation runs against its own dogmatism."

"Some people tell me it is very utopian or naïve to think that one can get rid of copyright and intellectual property, but to a certain extent it is already happening in practice. … Because of its rigid and bureaucratic structure, the law is always left behind by the questions posed by new technologies."

"No other type of music-making contradicts itself through its recording like improvisation does."

"When does the improvisation begin? As we started to play or when we started talking about it?"

"I am very dubious of the idea of spontaneity, as if what we do to be free could ever be without restrictions by ideologies, circumstances, spaces, people in the room, aesthetics and judgments."

"Oh when I improvise I am so free!"

"Capitalism puts higher and higher demands on people to be able to improvise, to adapt to the constant changes of the market, to interact with each other and communicate in an effective way, to be ready at any time for the worse. There is a strong correlation between the importance of constant innovation in capitalism and in improvisation, and we cannot avoid that there is a strong relationship between the two. … The more open you are to experimentation, the more you would be likely to open up new avenues for capitalism to produce value."

"Sonic Youth albums aren’t as popular now as they were in the days of cassettes. That’s because now it’s a lot easier to say, 'Hey this song is going fucking nowhere, skip it.' Every single Sonic Youth song is a 'skip it' song. Every single one. Unless, of course, you enjoy hearing Thurston Moore sound like he’s dicking around with effects pedals at Guitar Center."

"It’s hard to imagine where we would be without Sonic Youth. It’s unlikely another smart post-punk band founded around the same time — Big Black, the Meat Puppets — could have delivered us from hardcore’s fury quite the same way. What would indie rock sound like if Sonic Youth’s sublime din hadn’t enchanted and derailed all the college rock bands of the mid-’80s? We would have only been left with a bunch of sanguine Feelies rip offs, never having the chance to divulge a crush via careful mixtape placement of “Shadow of A Doubt.”"

"Perhaps even more than Joni [Mitchell], trying to summarize the music of Sonic Youth with just one tuning is an exercise in noisy futility. The pioneering art rock outfit took advantage of countless unconventional and angular tunings through their run, frequently blending multiple dissonant tunings from different guitarists within one track. [...] The sheer multiplicity of tunings that Sonic Youth used caused all sorts of logistical hurdles for the band. They used cheap guitars that could only function in certain detuned ways and famously used drumsticks and screwdrivers on their guitars to achieve even more adventurous sounds and effects."

"Hailing from Long Island, New York, with noise rock stalwarts Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore sought to tear down the idea of guitar-driven music completely. One of many struggling bands in a busy NYC scene, Sonic Youth emerged as Greenwich Village darlings, riding to the top of the heap through a string of genre-defying albums. The pair's viewpoint on their instruments was fresh, vivid and untethered to all established norms."

"No artist did more for noise rock’s reputation — or for that matter noise’s reputation — than Sonic Youth. They brought it to a wider audience, made a handful of hit alt-rock singles out of it, crashed grunge as it was happening, and became a beloved institution, despite the fact that the bulk of their catalog features some pretty weird stuff. Throughout the ’80s, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo amassed an arsenal of cheap guitars that they modified and through which they employed bizarre tunings as well as techniques like playing the strings with drum sticks. Their noise wasn’t just unique — no other band could replicate it."

"To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips I've gone native"