• Swans w/ Okkyung Lee @ Button Factory, Dublin

    May 27, 2015 - By 

    Despite being a Monday after the weekend before there’s a sense of excitement for those milling around waiting for the show to start. They’re all ages, a physical embodiment of the decades long span of Swans career and the age defying loyalty they inspire. But before that there’s something of a gatekeeper in the image of Okkyung Lee (below). Her face spookily serene, she weighs taste on her rapidly moving bow as she makes her cello gurgle, spit, shout and scream. In fact everything except sing. So is this deranged arthouse fun? There is something of the performance about it,…

  • Swans – To Be Kind

    May 21, 2014 - By 

    In 2012 something quite extraordinary happened. After reforming his band Swans following a hiatus of over thirteen years, Michael Gira and his select group of musicians released their masterpiece: The Seer. Hailed as their finest work by many, it was a colossal piece of music spanning over two hours, an extended exploration of the unknowable obscurities and mind-numbing repetitions that had become synonymous with the Swans name. But it was much more than that – it was an evolutionary step into uncharted territory for the band, and for contemporary rock music as a whole. In an age where the synthesiser…

  • Interview: Swans

    August 14, 2013 - By 

    “I used to hate people, generally,” says Michael Gira, fifty-nine year old commander-in-chief of seminal New York post-punk band Swans. In the final stages of touring their critically-acclaimed, monumentally accomplished twelfth studio album The Seer, the outfit are currently undergoing perhaps their best period in thirty years both as a creative unit and in achieving widespread acclaim for their stunningly severe craft. Not altogether unexpected, something evidently running parallel with this is Gira’s own disposition nowadays: a thoroughly agreeable and self-effacing personality that unravels in conversation with Brian Coney ahead of the band’s hugely-anticipated Belfast show. Having just concluded a…