How FBI surveillance tapes made their way onto a Swans album
No band has enjoyed an arc quite like Swans. Starting in the dark underbelly of New York’s underground in 1982, the band were at the forefront of groups creating a punishing experimental sound alongside the likes of German counterparts Einstürzende Neubauten. However, gradually over time, the Michael Gira-led group undertook a metamorphosis, moving into a space best described as transcendental, starting with 1987’s Children of God. After this moment, Swans took their experimental gothic leanings and packaged them into a sound that has never lost its freshness, with them still going strong today.
One of their most lauded efforts is 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind. A refined album, it features a host of their finest cuts, including ‘Helpless Child’, ‘Animus’, and ‘The Sound’. A significant point in their career due to it being their last album until 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky; it was a perfect way to bow out before such an extended time away. It remains an excellent example of the heights a band can reach if they remove all the barriers.
As the title suggests, the album was intended to function as a “soundtrack for a non-existent film”. From start to finish, the band pulled this off, with it an incredibly cinematic and cathartic sonic experience. One of the most fascinating – and remarkable – aspects of the record is that much of it is woven together by audio-collage works and sample-based textures recorded in various environments over the years. The fact that FBI recordings taken from band member Jarboe’s father’s time in the service feature remain this area’s highlight on Soundtracks for the Blind.
Speaking ahead of what was then to be Swans’ last-ever gig at LA2 in London in 1997, Michael Gira explained how the recordings and FBI tapes made their way onto Soundtracks for the Blind. He said: “I’ve always been interested in different sounds like that and listened to Brian Eno and different kinds of music that use non-musical sources often, and as I made this record, I had a lot of that material: those loops and things I’d made from ’81”.
“I had vocal loops that Jarboe had made in 1985 on a little sixteen-second digital delay unit which was actually the first sampler… we had these tape narrations we’d been collecting, that she got from her father’s desk when he was an FBI agent – surveillance tapes; I interviewed my father because I’m interested in his life, and took a little snippet of his experiences… then we had new things we’d recorded with our ‘band’ from the last tour; and some stuff we did for a soundtrack for a film.”
Gira continued: “I threw all those into the computer and assembled it that way. So, in some things, there’s something from 1981 playing simultaneously with something from ’85 playing simultaneously with something from 1996. It’s cross-faded and blended and mixed, so to speak, in the computer, cut-up and sometimes looped and reversed.”
Listen to Soundtracks for the Blind below.
