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After a thirteen-year hiatus, the New York band Swans has released a new album, "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky," and begun an eighteen-month world tour. Michael Gira, the band's fifty-six-year-old leader, now lives in upstate New York with his wife and two young children, but in the early eighties he was the standard-bearer for a certain kind of confrontation in the downtown New York scene. Many people fancied themselves transgressors back then, but Gira outdid them--he would strip naked and menace the crowd, or, on one occasion, attack an audience member who was wearing a Devo outfit. This may be a small, theatrical footnote to a large and varied body of work, but it is a valuable indication of how Gira expected his audience to be as committed to the ritual as he was. Swans had an almost religious severity that seemed to proscribe anything that didn't add to a feeling of claustrophobia and pressure. However bleak his hymnal, Gira demanded the crowd's full attention, as if they were parishioners.
The new version of Swans is more musically adept than the original incarnation. The question is whether you want plain old music from an artist who has put so much faith in transcendence and physical experience. Do you want Swans to play great music or to erase you?
Swans came together in New York in a cultural context that evaporated almost twenty years ago, owing to the twin spectres of AIDS and financial solvency. In the early eighties, performance art, fine art, and live music were closely linked, and the chances of anyone in those genres making money were slim, except for a few visual artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Swans shows had resonances in the work of peers of Gira's...