• SWANS’ Norman Westberg Set For Solo Irish Tour

    September 28, 2021 - By 

    Best known as the primary guitarist with SWANS, Norman Westberg is nothing short of a titan of heavy avant-rock. More generally, the Detroit-born musician’s output has traversed a remarkable amount of territory, most recently in solo LPs including the sublime ambience of Bedroom Off, After Vacation, and First Man In The Moon, his collaborative LP with Jacek Mazurkiewicz. As Lawrence English once put it: “What Norman has created with his solo works is an echoing universe of deep texture and harmonic intensity. His solo compositions generate an affecting quality that drives the listener towards reductive transcendence.” Next month, Westberg stops off in Ireland for a…

  • Primavera 2017

    June 8, 2017 - By 

    After 16 years, there’s no doubt that Primavera is Europe’s premier festival, for everyone from the capped-up indie kids to right-on middle-agers seeking some escapism, from the techno heads on through to High Fidelity type nerf herders and vinyl hoarders. So: how does Europe’s best music festival follow up on a last year’s best-ever edition – a mammoth lineup topped by Radiohead. Well, partially through sticking with what works – every sub-genre well catered for and then some, and not just on the three main days at Parc del Forum, but in venues across the city in the preceding weeks.…

  • Swans To Play Final Irish Show In Current Guise

    May 17, 2017 - By 

    As part of a lengthy tour, U.S. noise rock masters Swans will play their final Irish show with the current line-up at Dublin’s Button Factory on Tuesday, May 30. A last-minute show, support on the night comes from Little Annie (Crass Records/On-U Sound). Tickets will go on sale today here.

  • Up and At Them: An Interview With Thor Harris

    April 20, 2017 - By 

    Thor Harris is a percussionist extraordinaire best known for being the pulsing, rhythmic heart of avant rock legends Swans. Yet he is also a carpenter who crafts his own instruments, an artist and a staunch opponent of the political right. The latter of which got him in a bit of trouble when his tongue-in-cheek video dubbed ‘How to Punch a Nazi’ saw him suspended from Twitter. Though the incident may have been a shock to the Austin based musician it highlighted his particular brand of philosophical, social commentary and political outrage. On April 28 he’s bringing his group Thor &…

  • Le Guess Who? 2016 @ Utrecht, NL

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    It’s been a weird year for the ‘Boutique’ festival market, with ATP coming to an official end following a string of debacles, but in its tenth year, Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? somehow does it. Across four days, it ties together seldom-seen legends, a pocket of essential esoterica, and today’s most boundary-pushing acts, the lineup this year curated by Wilco, Suuns, Julia Holter & Savages. Utrecht is the sophisticated, civilised, more communal sister city of Amsterdam, located just half an hour south of the capital, and in a city with the Rietveld Schröderhuis built in 1924 it houses the kind of forward-thinking…

  • 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 w/ Okkyung Lee @ Mandela Hall, Belfast

    May 25, 2015 - By 

    Writing about Swans is a curious, almost impossible thing. With their three-decade long pursuit of summoning fleeting encounters with ecstasy, induced by masterfully orchestrated swathes of crushing noise, incantation and repetition, they are the living, breathing definition of a band whose seismic might and majesty can only truly be heeded live. A year to the month on from the release of their critically-devoured thirteenth studio opus, To Be Kind, Michael Gira and co. roll into Belfast tonight a towering and potent force to be reckoned with. Expectations simply couldn’t be higher. Immediately silencing the room with a flicker of the…

  • 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…

  • Choice Cuts: The Best Tracks of… March

    April 1, 2014 - By 

    This month has been remarkable in terms of the quantity of excellent music releases on all fronts, and summarizing it into a playlist of 10 tracks has proven a tad difficult. As such, there are many notable absentees from this list, but at the same time I can assure you the reader that these ten new releases are not just good, or even great, but downright essential listens if one is to keep ahead of the crowd. I wouldn’t lie about things of such importance. As per usual, the first list of songs is in no particular order, with the…

  • 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…