Saturday, November 29, 2014

schrodinger's swan

this seems like the best thing on youtube to crosslink this to...

i put a five-year listening period on my serious reviews in order to ensure that the music can sink in and be put into context. sometimes, it's a matter of convention. with something like swans, it's really necessary to make sense of it. i've been a swans fan since the late 90s, and share a certain artistic approach with them, so i'm coming into this very, very familiar with what they are and what they're aiming for. i'm extremely critical but i need to point out that gira is one of a handful of living artists that i have legitimate respect for, as an artist. i'm not ready to write a full review yet, but i think i'm ready to provide a general impression.

oddly, not many people seem to be spilling much ink on the absence of jarboe. sure, it's not like there's any real chance that she's coming back to the band. but it's sort of remarkable how totally she's been written out of the band, as though she never existed in the first place. this strikes me as indicative of most reviewers coming to the band after their breakup period looking for a seminal doom act, and sort of skipping their psychedelic 90s phase. but, see, i think there's a dominant argument that what made swans' 90s work so remarkable was the interplay between gira's dour bluntness and jarboe's lighter, more airy presentation. you could think of it as tension and release. but it's just the juxtaposition of it...

gira's tried to compensate with the use of various female vocalists, but it's clear that it's on a guest vocalist level rather than a collaborative level, meaning it just doesn't capture the juxtaposition on as organic of a level.

in a sense, maybe it's unfair to draw the comparison. everybody knows jarboe isn't in the band any more. but, if you have an understanding of what swans is, the more recent material just seems like it's missing an important ingredient.

putting that aside, one needs to review a record for what it is.

the core of this disc is as strong as anything else swans has put out, but i get the impression gira is being driven a little too strongly by expectations. i'm all for long records, but a long record is something that needs to develop out of an overriding concept or simply a lot of material. neither of these things seem to apply to this. it seems like this record is long simply for the sake of being long, and is loaded with tons of filler to get to the point of being long. i don't think we really needed nearly as much aimless jamming (and a lot of it is aimless jamming) or damo suzuki impersonations.

i'm not walking away from it with the sense of it being the kind of masterpiece that gira has previously been involved with creating. rather, i'm walking away from it thinking it's a little tedious and that large amounts of it are simply rather grating.

i don't think this record is going to hold up as well as his other major works. it might be partially as a result of trying to fit perceived expectations of an epic double record. but i think it might be a bit of pretension getting into his head.

this could have been a strong 9 if pared down a little. as it is, i have to give it a 6 or a 7.



Zack Fishley
I envy people who lived through Swans' original run and are able to see those albums as Gira's masterpieces. While I like them, I feel like albums like Soundtracks For the Blind lose focus quickly when they hit disc 2. Just not as memorable.

deathtokoalas
they're more abstract records; they explore a wider scope. memorable is a subjective thing. but, you can objectively state that they require a deeper attention span and greater focus on the actual music. i find his newest work has more aspects of his oldest work in that sense; they're great if you want to listen to one or two things for three hours. soundtracks is more variable, and so is more immersive. but, you have to be looking for that, otherwise you're going to trail off, like you said.

what i was trying to get across here is that it isn't that gira has lost a step. what's amazing is that he really hasn't. it's more that he's lost a layer of self-criticism.
i'm still fighting with the bass, but it's the last thing to do. it's actually mostly cut up, it's just about levels. and i'm nodding off so it will have to wait until i wake up...

it WILL be done tomorrow.
i'm almost done remixing my fourth symphony, which is a long time coming. i finished recording the parts in 2002 and have been messing around with it every few years since 2006, but i could never get it quite right because i didn't really have the right tools to do it. what i needed to do was separate it into parts, but what i had was a wave file that i pasted parts into rather than anything i could recreate in a traditional multitracking environment. trying to figure out where each of the parts began was very hard without being able to line the parts up...

trepanation nation (raw guitar mix) (initial upload)

around the middle of 2007, i sat down and tried to just paste some guitars over top of a half done mix i had. in the process, i created a guitar collage that i found interesting in it's own right and put aside for possible release as a remix one day. this is an entirely new mix, but it's based on that idea.

the idea was created around july 30, 2007. final mix was rendered on november 29, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/09-trepanation-nation-raw-guitar-mix
i was hoping to catch animals as leaders last night, but i ended up passing out. i'm not sure how exciting a live show it would have been. great guitarist, but it's headphone music.

i've got a new map up that organized things a little differently. as you can see, this is just loaded with guitar overdubs, a lot of them doubled or quintupled through separate effects paths. it seems like i'm hurtling towards 70 tracks. three more things to do there, down at the bottom.

...although i'm starting to wonder about maybe doubling a few more parts later in the song. we'll see how this goes....