Swans Is Pain
“This is music that hurts to play”
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Swans is pain.
You might think I’m talking about pain for the audience at a Swans show. It’s been well-documented that Swans is loud live. Loud the way God is loud when he tells you to sacrifice your only son atop the mountain.
It’s true, every word of it. I caught Swans’ live show last night at the Roseland Theater in Portland, and their show is a 120-minute obliterating wall of noise created by six musicians playing as loud and as hard as they possibly can. My ears are still ringing as I write this the next day. I’m a long-time noise music fan, but even I have my limits.
The transitions between songs, where the rhythm is gone and only pure noise is left, often louder than the songs themselves, and played at frequencies I didn’t even know I could hear, were especially brutal. Twice during those song transitions, my body couldn’t handle the overload, and a brief wave of nausea put a fist into my stomach. Both times, it was gone nearly as quickly as it came, because Swans have been doing this for thirty years, and Michael Gira seems to know exactly how far he can push his audience before sending them over the edge.
But I’m not talking about the audience.
Swans is pain for the musicians. This is music that hurts to play.
By the end of set opener Frankie M, a new unrecorded song nearly 20 minutes long, percussionist Thor Harris has been playing a giant gong at the back of the stage for so long and so hard his arms are about to fall off. True to his name, Thor looks like some kind of viking god up there on the stage. Long, flowing red hair and red beard, shirtless, thick muscled arms. But by the end of the song, he’s shaking his arms out, and in that brief pause before the simple bass riff that starts A Little God in my Hands kicks in, he looks relieved to have a break for just a moment.
That bass riff from A Little God in my Hands, it’s only three notes, and it repeats verbatim through the entire song, which stretches out to about 11 minutes in the live version. Three notes, over and over. Easy, right? I’ve never seen anyone play their bass as hard as Christopher Pravdica. The guy must have a callus on his thumb the size of my entire thumb. Each note, he’s hitting the strings so hard with his thumb that he hunches over and grits his teeth. He looks like he’s crying, and for all I know, he might be.
After the long instrumental opening of Apostate, the closing track from 2012’s The Seer, when Michael Gira finally steps back up to the microphone, he can’t sing, because every time he opens his mouth, there’s piercing feedback coming through the monitors. After the second attempt, he tears the earpiece out of his ear and puts the heels of his hands to temples, his face pinched up in pain. He has to run offstage to scream at the guys operating the soundboard twice while the rest of the band keeps playing before the problem’s finally fixed.
By the end of set closer Bring the Sun / Black Hole Man, the entire band is in pain, and it shows. Thor is covered in sweat, his long hair stuck to his face. Christoph Hahn on lap steel is constantly squirming around on his stool, picking his foot up and hooking it in guitar’s stand, then dropping his foot back to the floor. He starts picking at his thumb and shaking his hand out. It looks like he’s torn his thumbnail back from the nail bed. Michael Gira, who suffers from asthma, has been singing his lungs out for 120 minutes, and it looks like he can barely breathe by now.
And Christopher Pravdica, still hammering away on his bass, has got a pick in his hands this time, but it doesn’t look any easier on him. He’s red-faced, his eyes squeezed tight shut, literally screaming while he plays those last few minutes of the set.
Or at least it looked like he was screaming.
Behind that obliterating wall of noise, it’s not like anyone could hear him.
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