‘The Man Machine’: Michael Gira’s favourite Kraftwerk album
It’s one of the most potently perfect band names ever, bristling with curt impact and confounding connotations. If anyone’s been unlucky enough to get close to one of the royal fowls, you’ll know how vicious they can be, emitting a ghastly hissing threat when backed into a corner. “Swans are majestic, beautiful-looking creatures,” Swans frontman and sole consistent member Michael Gira stated in a 2013 interview. “With really ugly temperaments.”
Standing as the most enduring act of the New York no wave scene in the early 1980s, Swans’ initial misanthropic post-punk racket soon evolved into gargantuan hefts of apocalyptic post-rock mysticism, building a reputation for bowel-churningly loud live sets with such dramatic stir, you’d think their unholy din was conjuring storm clouds outside the venue.
After announcing a hiatus in ’97, Swans returned with one of the most successful second acts in popular music. Triggered with 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, Swans’ following run of totemic 21st-century albums are some of the most acclaimed of Gira’s career.
Featuring on The Quietus‘ ‘Baker’s Dozen’ series in ’12, Gira selected 13 of his favourite albums, which included like-minded introspectives and firebrands such as Nick Drake, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, but curiously revealed an admiration for the Düsseldorf electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, highlighting 1978’s The Man Machine and revealing a preference for their analogue material: “Well, this is one of any I could have chosen. I’m not fond of when they started using computers, like on Computer World.”
He added, “I found it interesting to learn in a recent biopic that those drum sounds were actually played with chopsticks. In the punk days – when did this come out, like ’78? – I listened to it obsessively, not for any reason, I just thought the songs were beautiful and that it was a new way of making music. But that was just secondary to how beautiful the songs were.”
Kraftwerk, too, sits in the pantheon of perfect band names. German for ‘power plant’, founding members Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter succinctly illustrated their thematic fascination with West Germany’s industrial landscape, as well as how they saw themselves as artists, music workers engineering their groundbreaking synth works at their Kling Klang studio like scientists forging a new, sonic language.
To Gira’s point, The Man Machine did prove a pivotal record, marking a conceptual shift away from the European romanticism so definitively realised on their opus Trans-Europe Express toward the cyberman automatons that they drape themselves in to this day.
“I would say that it influenced the early way of making music with Swans,” Gira stated when asked if Kraftwerk’s sounds had filtered into Swans’ music. “It’s changed, obviously, considerably over the years, but in the early days it was very diverse and ranged from The Stooges to Throbbing Gristle to Brian Eno, and Kraftwerk. Just people using sound as a way of making music. Obviously, I was a bit more visceral, but that was inspirational to me. It was very liberating, the idea of abandoning structures and making something immediate.”
