Swans, The Early Years: Filth

    Back in the late 1970s, from pitiful depths and sludges of New Yorkian basements rose ingenious representatives of antagonistic music. Infused with noise, punk and a tendency for ear piercing industrial drum patterns, the band Swans ascended above the filth, greed and confusion of what was essentially, according to some, the pinnacle of corporate America. Scoffing in the general direction of tradition and expectation, the band brilliantly enslaved the essence of non-conformity, chewing up the fascination with trendy rebellion and spitting it right back on the floor in the form of revolting black mire. Unbolting the glamorous glass doors of its city’s display case, Michael Gira and company banished interpretation and through masterful lyricism revealed the true nature lurking in the shadows, unveiling itself.

    Although to understand Swans, one must coherently trace their roots back to the brief glimpse of experimental music that was - No Wave. In many ways, unlike many other genres of music, No Wave is notoriously difficult to pin down which, in many ways, played into its desire to swim against the current and denounce meaning. It was an antagonistic reply to the, at that time, current state of the city the genre was bred in and fully embraced the culmination of a hostile New York. “With the city falling apart at the seams, low rents together exacerbated soaring crime rates and an overstretched police force combined to create the perfect conditions for the artist, and in particular the transgressive artist. “All the ‘straight’ people were trying to get out of New York,” recalled artist Maripol in Celine Danhier’s definitive No Wave documentary Blank City, “but all the freaks… we were trying to get in.”

Source: Janet Delaney

    Had the origin lacked additional irony, the title came to aid with the revelation that the absurd ‘no’ stood as a rejection of new wave music whose enormous commercial attraction was getting more and more massive by the minute. Concluding that the atonal guitar work of DEVO’s ‘Jocko Homo” was too appealing to the ear, No Wave musicians unapologetically leaned even deeper into industrial atonality, excessive use of noise and, surprisingly, free jazz. In turn, No Wave was met with both disgust and fascination, listeners, as well as artists themselves were unafraid to delve into the belly of the beast and interpret their anguish in a creative and non-violent way.

    The response to Ryan Paris’ 1983 disco hit “Dolce Vita”, then, was the debut Swans record “Filth” that congregated crowds to probe and explore the darker aspects of themselves and rearranged the milk of human kindness. Writer John Calvert, retrospectively writes:

“It was exactly how you’d imagine hard rock and No Wave would sound were the two forms ever fused: downright monstrous. A milestone in extreme music – a sound heavier, more vicious and more all-out evil-sounding than any metal band had produced by 1983 – with Filth, Swans took the rock form a few gargantuan steps forward.” (Source: Fact Magazine, John Calvert, 10 March 2014)

    With its relatively short runtime, ‘Filth’, as the name suggests, wasted no time unraveling its putrid innards, ejecting a concoction of bleak atmosphere, little to no optimistic resolution and rarely offered protection against its looming ghastliness. Listeners were made to fend off the album’s corruption with whatever means necessary, though as the initial track “Stay Here”, in its militaristic tone suggested, Swans had little to no interest in letting the observer go, offering, instead, to “come back for more”, indulge in the unimaginable and submerge one’s body into the river Styx.

    The song “Weakling” lays a gruesome and continuous blanket of wailing distortion that pounds away at the eardrums while Gira pleads for human touch. The kind gesture, however, causes his body even more pain.

"You know everything

I forget how to breathe

You're touching my chest

When I'm touched I bleed”

    With each horrifying howl of the industrial atmosphere, Gira struggles to grasp the reality of his suffering and naively reassures himself of the false reality he’s experiencing.

    Sound, or rather its intensity, was also a massive part of early Swans. Paired with a seeming willingness to pick apart and rearrange music’s genetic make-up, though not abandoning the tradition in their later years, the band made an even more abrasive approach to live performances in their early career, at times causing the crowds to make a run for the exit. The ferocity of sounds with which Swans unleashed themselves left PA systems scrambling for dear life, musicians took preemptive measures.

    In an interview with journalist Dave Simpson, Michael Gira was inquired about these specific moments in Swans’ live performances:

DS: “Are the stories about your early gigs – people vomiting because of the volume, audiences fleeing, the police being called – all true?”

MG: “The vomiting … I don’t know. Christ no! But when we started, it was unexpected. There was no context for it. So if you were listening to the Cure and then we came out…. [laughs]. It was not in the usual menu, so a lot of audiences did flee, and we’d be left playing to 10 people. For a while, we took to locking the doors. Then turning off the lights…”  (Source: The Guardian, Dave Simpson, Wed, 6 May, 2015)

    Be as it may, at its most isolating and experimental, Filth is able to filter its animosity and, though rare, offer the occasional glimpse of catchiness. From the entrancing “Power For Power”, to the punk oriented “Big Strong Boss”, Swans’ debut record blends in between the ambience of an isolated construction site and legitimately invigorating artistry. Disregarding the absence of grace or beauty mentioned previously, a certain wonder surrounds the absolute ludicrous abnormality of Filth.

“The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.” (Source: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)