Michael Gira on the album that made him think of music as “cinema”
Most people would struggle to think of an artist who has enjoyed a more fascinating journey than Swans leader Michael Gira. At points, his life reads like a work of fiction, with Gira continuing to embody his art in a way that closely resembles the ideas of Yukio Mishima, with complete sincerity always on offer.
Despite developing in California when the counterculture was at its peak, Gira would break out as part of New York’s widely influential no-wave scene years after the death of the hippie dream. This was the promise of the 1960s had given way to something much darker that even the mention of the Manson Family murders does not fully embody.
Gone were the days of Easy Rider; the nightmarish hellscape of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is the most fitting representation of the city that Gira and the first iteration of Swans emerged from in the early 1980s. This context goes a fair way in explaining why their provocative and challenging earliest music was so brutal in its scope and motivations.
However, as time went on, Swans would start to metamorphose. While the pitch-black soul of Gira’s music would remain for most of their first chapter, they became increasingly expansive, creating some of the most profound sonic palettes ever heard. A genuinely compelling voyage, Gira has produced so much quality across it, with the question of what his finest body of work is, one that has long divided fans.
One word often used to describe Gira’s music with Swans from 1987’s Children of God onwards is cinematic. As he refined his work and made the band’s work more expansive and cerebral, this word started to crop up more, particularly in light of one of his finest efforts, 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind, which was intended to function as a “soundtrack for a non-existent film”.
Cinematic is also an adjective Gira has always wanted his music to be defined as. When speaking to Records In My Life in 2016, he revealed the album that made him think of music as “cinema” when he was young. Given the punishing nature of much of his work, this notion originated in an unlikely place.
He said: “Well, I don’t recall the name of it, but it would have been a Walt Disney record, something about Br’er Rabbit, you know, and it was a very cinematic kind of record in that it had sound effects and music and a narrative and it was sort of an audio film, and I don’t have the record now but that and records like South Pacific that my parents had kind of inspired me to think about music as cinema or as a sort of quasi-visual experience and I’ve attempted to approach that on several records as a sort of producer.”
Watch the interview below.
