In honor of Michael Gira’s 70th birthday today, we dug up this delightfully demented treasure from Swan’s pivotal Children of God era, circa 1987. This clip of “New Mind” (the type of video that you’d be lucky to see at 2:00 AM on MTV back in the day) captures the band in all their disturbingly harsh glory, although anyone familiar with Swans’ earlier material (i.e. Filth and Cop) might find this music borderline accessible by comparison. This is saying something, considering how menacing and intense this is, but whatever the case, this was the first of many musical progressions the band would undertake in the coming years, and strikes a captivating balance between the harrowingly bleak brutality that characterized their first few albums and the (relatively) more melodic/experimental direction they would explore on subsequent releases.
Swans would ultimately evolve into a musical force of nature, creating profoundly transcendent sonic compositions on albums like The Seer and To Be Kind for example, but there’s something so visceral and raw about their early material (primitive as it was) that still resonates. If you prefer Swans (more overtly) sinister early days, doesn’t get much better than this. Happy birthday Mike. Keep it dark:
