A discussion on endings, transformation and Swans’ seventeenth album

Transmission 218: Interview with Michael Gira

Swans formed in early 1980s New York under the direction of Michael Gira, emerging from the no wave scene with a sound rooted in repetition, volume and discomfort. Emerging as the no wave scene collapsed, the group’s early releases—Filth (1983), Cop (1984), and Young God (1984)—offered a bleak, slow-motion grind that owed more to physical endurance than to conventional song structure. Over time, their sound began to shift. The introduction of Jarboe in the mid-1980s opened a new chapter, bringing in harmony, choral textures, and atmosphere. Albums like Children of God (1987) and White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991) replaced sheer force with tension, using fragility and devotional overtones without abandoning the intensity that defined their earlier work.

Title: Birthing
Artist: Swans
Genres: Avant-garde, Drone, Experimental Music, Industrial Music, Noise Rock, Post-punk, Post-rock
Label: Mute Records, Young God Records
Description: Michael Gira discusses Swans' 17th album Birthing, released May 30, 2025 on Young God/Mute, marking the end of current lineup and tour era.

By the time of Soundtracks for the Blind (1996), Swans had turned inward, producing sprawling, collage-based material that blurred the line between rock album and sonic archive. Gira dissolved the group in 1997. When Swans returned in 2010, it wasn’t as a reunion but a reconstitution. With new collaborators, Gira released a string of records—The Seer (2012), To Be Kind (2014), The Glowing Man (2016)—that doubled down on the extremes: long tracks built on slow transformations, eruptions of sound that felt sculpted more than composed. The project’s structure remained fluid. Leaving Meaning (2019) and The Beggar (2023) extended the band’s studio collective model, pulling in a shifting cast while preserving the obsessive force at the core. Birthing (2025) is the seventeenth Swans studio album and marks the end of the current live configuration. Released on May 30 via Young God and Mute Records, the record was produced by Gira in Berlin and features regular collaborators Dana Schechter, Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo, Norman Westberg, and Christopher Pravdica.

What kind of sounds or experiences first pulled you toward making music rather than just listening to it?

In 1971/2 I took off and hitchhiked across North America twice. I carried a harmonica someone gave me and learned to play it in the hours standing by the side of the road waiting for a ride, in a trance and happily alone. A few times, someone I’d come across might have a guitar and I’d play along. It seemed easy and natural. Soon thereafter, back home in Los Angeles, I’d visit the house of my aunt and uncle, who had a baby grand piano. It was in a back room off to the side of the house and was private and they left me alone in there.

I had no idea how to play and I knew absolutely nothing about music, but I’d play the thing for hours, just finding the notes or chords I liked and repeating them endlessly, with the sustain peddle pressed down, my mind disappearing in the resonances and overtones. Decades later I discovered Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, wherein he plays subtly shifting figures on 2 grand pianos simultaneously and insistently, in one long piece for the duration of the record, slowly summoning and revealing choirs of angels in the overtones created by the sustained notes. This, to me, is the essence of music, the unfolding of God’s voice in sound.

You spent part of your youth in Germany and traveling across the U.S.—did anything during that time leave a permanent mark on how you think about sound?

In 1969 I was working as a sort of apprentice in a tool factory in Solingen, Germany. I was 15. On the weekends I’d visit a local hippie/leftist bar, during the daytime, run by a sympathetic bohemian fellow who took a sort of filial interest in me, a lost American kid. He played me the more adventurous music of the time as we sat there alone in the bar. I remember specifically being enthralled with the first Stooges album. I had no idea what I was listening to, what it meant or what the context was, but I was drawn to the drone notes hiding within the sound. I suppose it’s an attraction that has sustained itself over the years.

Do you remember a specific moment when it became clear that music wouldn’t just be part of your life, but the core of it?

That would have been the first time I was ever onstage as a singer. I had never felt so alive and focused in my life. It was with my (somewhat) punk band of the time, Little Cripples, opening for The Bags and Middle Class at The Deaf Club in San Francisco. This must have been 1978/9. It was like throwing yourself off a cliff and never hitting the ground. I still haven’t landed, though at this point I must say I’m looking forward to it.

The early 1980s New York underground wasn’t exactly a welcoming space—how did that atmosphere affect how Swans took shape?

It was not an easy time, for sure – the squalor, the pervasive crime, the crumbling buildings, blah, blah, all of that’s true to a certain extent – but the harder things got the harder we pushed. And I realize now that I thrived on the generally negative reactions to the music and the unending adversity of NYC in those days. Ridicule and hatred were welcome, even actively solicited. They fed me and gave me strength. But the thing is, as harsh as the music of Swans was to most ears at the time, I personally felt a white light of continuously exploding positive energy in my chest while inside that music and while performing it. Sure, it was raging, even savage in a way, but I now see it as the first stages of an ongoing prayer that continues to this day. It’s a long process of stripping things away until all that’s left is an unending exhalation.

Was there a single idea or event that set Birthing in motion, or did it gradually take form during the tour?

Like most of the music in recent years it’s an unending process. The songs start with me alone in my office playing my acoustic guitar. I’ll find a chord and a rhythm pattern that seems promising and I’ll play it over and over until another chord or two appears. I listen for the sounds that fume around the chords in a cloud. In that mist that appears, swirling around my head, I imagine how the nascent song will develop when I play it with the band. Eventually, words appear, and I sing those until it makes sense. If it’s good, I can lose myself in it, alone in my room. Then I take it, and other songs I’ve written to the band and we play them endlessly until they’re transformed into something new and unexpected.

The music grows of its own will and eventually it’s playing us rather than the opposite. This is when the true promise appears. Then we take this material on tour and night after night it continues to grow and transform, transforming us too with each performance. It seems to have a positive effect on the audience. After perhaps a year of this process the material is hardly recognizable from where it began. It’s a matter of listening for the voices inside the music and following those, going where they tell us to go. When the music reaches the apex of its possibility we record it, then usually we never perform it again. If we do perform a song again we rip it apart until it’s barely the same song anymore. The songs are never finished. They’re just a drug one ingests in order to hallucinate new possibilities.

Was there a particular piece that acted as a structural anchor for the rest of the album?

I suppose that would have been the song, Birthing.

The album’s title evokes physical transformation. Was this idea present from the beginning of the recording process, or did it emerge in parallel with the music?

I long ago came to the intuitive conclusion that nothing is solid, that everything eventually dissolves and mixes with everything else, that there is no single point in time, that time is in fact an abstraction, a grid we place over endlessly churning phenomena and that the entire mess is God thinking things into being.

Did any specific writings, images, or outside materials enter the orbit of Birthing?

I suppose most specifically on the song Guardian Spirit. When I wrote it, I was possessed by the demon spirit that lives inside our digital, collective, shadow lives. We’re inviting the Devil in and he’s eating our minds. I see this as inevitable and we’ll eventually disappear.

Was there any material that didn’t make it onto the album—if so, why?

No. Everything’s in there. It’s enough. I wish there were more.

You’ve said Birthing and the final 2025 tour will mark the end of a chapter—what does that boundary mean to you?

Too much fun is poison. I love this group of people in Swans currently – Dana Schechter, Kristof Hahn, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Christopher Pravdica, Norman Westberg and myself – but this way of working is nearing its end. The most thrilling thing has been to watch the music grow and take us to places we could have never imagined when we began. Our shows are typically 3 hours long and they’re grueling and utterly exhausting to perform. Don’t get me wrong: It’s what I live for and it’s enthralling. But at my age, stamina is a limited quantity and I want to preserve enough of my life force to be able to continue working in some way. It’s just time to throw myself off a cliff again and see what happens.

After the 2025 tour, do you plan to focus more on solo recordings, collaborations, or something less defined?

I will continue Swans, but in a stripped down form. I’m intentionally not thinking about what things will sound like. I’m open to everything. I’m happy to be alive. It’s a privilege to be able to serve as a medium through which sound, music, my voice and words can discover themselves.

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others