The Cloud of Unknowing

There was a time when the Swans were the toast of the L.A. music scene. Sometime in the late Spring of 1984, I believe. Band after band made their triumphant appearances in our town on their tours across the hinterlands, conquering heroes of the day, some hailing from the exotic or the urban, others from the backward and seemingly mundane. We felt the need to bear witness to them all, living evidence that the world outside the L.A. Basin was not as barren as we had been led to believe.

 

It was a time of eminence for the music reviewer, a rare point where writers were the gatekeepers and purveyors for all things wild and good being brewed in the world. Without them, I would have been deprived, for college radio was still a scattered whisper and the music industry at large seemed openly hostile to anything interesting or cool.   

So when the Swans arrived with a processional blast of rejoice from the gate keepers of our world, we eagerly crammed into the Roxy on that hot, sweaty night. The Swans were loud. Ridiculously loud. Possibly the loudest band I’d ever heard. And they were slow. Almost absurdly slow, especially considering how loud they were. Slower than Flipper slow. Maybe even slower than St. Vitus slow. The Swans were an electronic dirge at 130 decibels.  

The concert exploded my musical horizons. My punk rock records seemed melodic and almost innocent by comparison. The Swans took industrial music out of the world of the art installation and moved it into the rock club, where the unwashed masses could grove to it.

Other bands would follow in this vein, bands that would even further expand the concept of sonic assault. Crash Worship, Whitehouse and Merzbow come to mind. Meanwhile, Swans spent the next couple of decades with a rotating line-up, a continual reinvention that just made them easier to ignore.

In 2016, the Swans are not something you need to know about to be culturally in tune. In fact, there is something so resolutely personal and defiant about them that they have become a kind of anti-trend. No one in the cognoscenti writes about angry white guys with guitars anymore, at least not as anything but an anachronism, the remnant of those backward days before our world became diverse. The Swans have done nothing to accommodate themselves to this new cultural imperative. So they have pretty much been ignored.   

It was an accident that I even knew they were playing in Chicago, and I knew nothing about their latest release, a full-length album titled “The Glowing Man.” But the Swans were my original sonic gangsters, so when I stumbled on the show via my wife’s facebook feed, I had to go.  

Michael Gira continues to refine the concept of industrial ritual, bringing the trance-inducing spiritualism of a medieval Eastern Orthodox chant into the sonic landscape of primal drumming and distorted guitars. There are still loud, distorted guitars, of course, along with a throbbing bass and percussive polyrhythms. But there were also a few surprising touches, like the steel slide guitar being used as an industrial instrument, along with an electric organ full of reverb and at least a little soul. It was not just bombast that the Swans brought on stage, but extended periods of the celestial and the rhythmic calls to trance.

The Swans played for a full two hours. Their set was seven songs long, the core of which were four cuts from The Glowing Man: “The Cloud of Forgetting,” “The Cloud of Unknowing,” “The World Looks Black,” and the title track. Interspersed with these were three staples from earlier albums, albeit all from the band’s post-millennial reincarnation: “Screen Shot,” “Some Things We Do,” and an augmented version of “No Words, No Thoughts” that they now call “The Knot.”

Even in their early days, the Swans were about more than the jackhammer blasts. But, at their most delicate and spiritual, early Swans were still a blunt instrument. Gira has now expanded his palette, and the Swans have once again redefined for me what a rock show can be.

A couple of weeks later, I went to see Hillsong United at the United Center. It was my first foray into this particular cul-de-sac of Christian rock, which attempts to bring the Pentecostal calling of the Holy Spirit into an arena holding thousands. There were odd moments for me here, almost embarrassing in their earnestness, like the lengthy appeal to give money to an aid agency for refugees or the plaintive call to accept Jesus Christ, right here, right now, on the cement floor where the Blackhawks play. But there were also moments when the trick worked, when I felt the Holy Spirit in the room, and it brought me, at least briefly, to tears. Hillsong’s music, in its contrasting volumes and syncopations, its use of repetition as an inducement to sing and chant, is in many ways trying to do the same thing as Sigur Ros or Swans. Whether a secular, a sacred, or a tormented spirit, all three bands are striving for their audiences to reach similar places.

 

Culturally, Swans and Hillsong United are ghosts in the machine. Much like with the early days of punk rock, they operate behind the normal confines of mass media. They thrive within eddies of musical and cultural irrelevance that refuse to die.

After all these years, they are places that still feel like home.