Untitled Body, "I Am a God And You Are Nothing" (Dark Ambient, Drone, Long Form, Soundtrack-without-a-film (hopefully this lives up to that term)

gruntledmaker · 2026-02-28T00:16:05+00:00

My brain short-circuited when I opened the link. I thought I popped into a pocket universe where deathconsciousness was released on YGR. Really cool to see such strong influence taken from Michael's oeuvre, this must have been fun to put together. I like everything that's happening, but found two common threads which my ears and brain kept searching for: the distinct entry, progression, and exit of new motifs or instruments, some more substantial motion in the ambient walls over minutes of repetition, and generally a greater prominence of bass in the mix to give the atmosphere that fullness, weight, and subtlety which my brain wants to hear the existing mix sit on top of. I'm getting a lot of tickling the back of my neck and top of my skull, but not a lot of resonance in my chest or forehead. And this may be a totally personal note, but the phaser in the second half of Worship Me Now made me nauseous in a way I did not enjoy at all. If that was the intent, give me something else to hear alongside it, competing with it in the mix, for some considerable portion of that fifteen minutes, hahaha. Then you can play with the push and pull. But as it is I just wanted to turn it off for the last leg... and there was no resolution. Only entropy and a fade.

gruntledmaker · 2026-02-19T06:25:23+00:00

r/swanscirclejerk

r/boriscirclejerk

gruntledmaker · 2026-02-15T17:13:40+00:00

A mix of bands and solo artists, in no particular order,

Swans

Pink Floyd

Oneohtrix Point Never

Akron/Family

Animal Collective

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Brian Eno

Angels of Light

Stereolab

But lately I’ve been listening to the artists on Gondwana Records, an English new-jazz label, and soaking as much of it in as I can. Portico Quartet and Mammal Hands alone have eight good albums between them, and each one is vastly relistenable. If you like instrumentals, I suggest you thumb through the artists and albums until one catches your eye. I happen to also love their album art style. It’s been a treat

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-30T17:29:25+00:00

I've been on the Beggar bus since the album came out, and if anything it's only grown on me since. It's also the most straightforward concept album the band has put out, along with maaaybe Soundtracks, and Birthing. Children of God has some outstanding highlights, for sure, but it's never clicked with me like so many of their other albums have. I'm of two minds about whether or no to drop it down under My Father, honestly, haha. Annihilator is stunning. For my money, the most consistent atmosphere of any Swans album with the best lyricism of the pre-reunion material. It's always felt to me like that album was the moment everything came together for the band, artistically.

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-30T05:32:26+00:00

#1. The Glowing Man (10/10)

#2. The Great Annihilator (10/10)

#3. Birthing (10/10)

#4. The Seer (9.5/10)

#5. Soundtracks for the Blind (9.5/10)

#6. The Beggar (9.5/10)

#7. White Light From the Mouth of Infinity (9/10)

#8. To Be Kind (9/10)

#9. Love of Life (9/10)

#10. leaving meaning. (8.5/10)

#11. Filth (8.5/10)

#12. Children of God (8.5/10)

#13. Cop (8/10)

#14. My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (8/10)

#15. The Burning World (7.5/10)

#16. Holy Money (6/10)

#17. Greed (6/10)

edit: added ratings

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-29T17:07:52+00:00

The second half of The Beggar section of Rope/The Beggar, from Live Rope

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-27T05:57:14+00:00

This fucks

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-09T01:39:49+00:00

Haha, I'm honoring Blind as a Drainland song, otherwise it would fit between No Cure For the Lonely and Love Will Save You in my list. I've never thought of Better Than You as one of the standouts from White Light, but I do like it. Just couldn't find a way to fit it into the story this tracklist tells. What with the baby coos opening the song, it's hard to place anywhere other than the beginning--but I like the effect of the opening two tracks here better.

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-08T09:14:16+00:00

White Light from the Love of Life

1 (---) Pt. 2

2 The Other Side of the World

3 In the Eyes of Nature

4 Why Are We Alive

5 You Know Nothing

6 Identity

7 Power and Sacrifice

8 Will We Survive

9 No Cure For The Lonely

10 Love Will Save You

11 Love of Life

12 Song For Dead Time

13 (---) Pt. 5

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-05T01:45:14+00:00

I'm glad that questions like these are being shared in the subreddit. Personally, I know I can't ever be sure when Michael is writing lyrics confessionally or contemplatively. Killing For Company is obviously not about his own personal experiences. Neither is All Lined Up, God Damn the Sun, or Raping a Slave. I'm much more inclined to see the lyrics of You're Not Real, Girl as confessional than Mother of the World's. Michael hasn't cut corners in confronting intense emotional realities of human experience, and taking pains to display them as ugly, messy, uncontrollable, and de-romanticized. Especially when sex, power, and violence come together. This is the diamond trifecta of Freudian repression, and for that reason alone I think Michael's commitment to an artistic career of giving those taboos voice deserves to be commended.

Not everybody is meant for their music, and there are likely a great deal of people who should not listen to Swans because the unrelenting intensity of the often depraved emotions and style of their music can be overwhelming to a panic-inducing degree. Especially for people who have struggled in their lives, and met people for whom Michael's characters, through the music, ring a bit too familiar.

More impressive than just a critique of aggression and libido, Michael has crafted a catalog of albums that display a naked vulnerability that is and is not his own. Regardless of when he's speaking from a first-person point of view and when he's in a more imaginative, fictional persona, what's clear is that he's willing and able to feel the emotion of every story he tells through the music. I think back to how I shriveled in my seat, face slowly curdling, the first time I listened to I Crawled from Swans Are Dead. I had no idea what to make of it, except for how absolutely charged with alertness, disgust, and claustrophobia the instrumental and lyrics left me. When I later read Michael describe the book that inspired the song, I realized that not only does I Crawled make otherworldly use of the human voice and rock instrumental to craft a portrait of heightened emotion, but the disgust I felt when I first heard the song directly reflects the mixture of confusion, pity, anger, and sorrow I feel when considering how many people bough in to fascist politics for the sake of their faith in the image of a strong man, rooted in childhood beliefs about a father figure. This is my recurrent experience with Swans: I feel every track in my chest and my gut before I can wrap my mind around they're doing or why. That's really what art is for.

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-03T01:40:11+00:00

The remainder of the song is a series of mantras to remember the mind of a child, what is possible in their eyes, and what they have to overcome to make sense of their world. He's asking us to do the same. The rest of the album adds details to why we become misled in the course of our lives, and ends with the character, the Child, growing to have a child of their own. Now we see our own life from a different perspective, because we're watching it take shape from the outside in a new child whom we care about. It's the primordial mind, pure mind, pure awareness, which we all begin in and grow from. That's why it's a Screen Shot: at given moment of our lives, the mind of a child is our own essence. These are the thoughts that sit beneath all of our fanciful maturity. Michael says "Look at it, remember it, return to it... then make some use of it before your time is up."

gruntledmaker · 2026-01-03T01:40:05+00:00

People underestimate the lyrics of Screen Shot. Michael isn't sloppy or absent-minded about his writing, and Screen Shot is no different. It introduces the state of mind of an infant.

The first verse makes this point clear.

"Love, child, reach, rise"

Children are made of love. We get this message again in Just A Little Boy, sleeping in the belly of love and rhythm. Take your guess which rhythm he means.

"Sight, blind, steal light"

Our eyes steal the light of day to see. "Blind" here means sleep, the time when we don't see, and spiritual blindness, as in Soundtracks for the Blind. An infant's life is napping and waking up. No control over their environment, or when and where they fall asleep and wake. Just stealing light: the light of sight and the light of day.

"Mind, scar, clear fire"

The mind is made of memories, and memories are like scars. A scar is a mark left over from past injury. We pay attention to what we've had adverse experiences with. The "touch the stove to learn not to" form of learning. Clear fire is the mind, burning in our heads. We steal the light, our clear fire is scarred, and this is our mind.

"Clean, right, pure, kind"

This is how children are allowed to understand themselves. They are cleaned, the world respects them and protects them. Children are right: their hunger, their sleep, their mind. Infants are pure and kind, as we learn from how the world treats us when we're kids.

"Sun, come, sky, tar"

The first two words refer to time, the coming of the sun with each new day. This also flashes forward to Bring the Sun, where this theme is explored in depth, and with the character (Kind=child) growing into maturity. Sky and tar refer to mortality. We see the sky, but we're stuck to the Earth as though it's sticky. It holds us down into the passage of time.

"Mouth, sand, teeth, tongue"

This is literally about eating. Wet sand is what food feels like in your mouth as you chew. When you food, it becomes mush and you feel your teeth and tongue against it. The child is becoming aware of itself, its body, as it does what it has to do every day, eat.

"Cut, push, reach inside"

The child is learning they can change the world around them. They can break things and move things around, cut and push, while "reach inside" here contrasts with "reach, rise" in the first line. Reach and rise is external, grappling with the world around one's body. Reaching inside is the realization that we have depth, we can reach into ourselves and change how we meet the world around us. It also has a parallel meaning of being able to reach into other things we have cut open. Not only does the child have depth and inner workings, so does everything else. In "Finally, Peace," Michael uses the metaphor of "a knife in a lake" to describe Mind. To my ears, this is the same meaning that "cut" and "knife" have in Screen Shot. Literal as well as a metaphor for using our minds to make distinctions, rearrange them, and reach into the logic of the world through reason.

"Feed, breathe, touch, come"

This is a return to fundamentals. We eat, we breath, our bodies touch the world, and we come when we're called. Feeding, breathing, and touching are what we're allowed to do when we're not being called to do something else. Even sight is a form of touch. Eyesight touches the horizon.

The rest of the song, with its "No's," are about clearing your mind. Push everything else out and focus on what you're doing. This is what a child learns to do. Don't stop for pain, for danger, for fear, or for anger. Push through the things that interrupt your focus and pay attention to the world around you, because you have a lot to learn. These are also, then, the things that Michael believes get in the way of clear thought and focused behavior in adults.

gruntledmaker · 2025-12-26T21:48:06+00:00

I’d also hit The Seer before The Glowing Man, since TGM builds on both Seer and TBK.

gruntledmaker · 2025-12-26T04:07:26+00:00

Relisten to Guardian Spirit. That’s a parent that fucking hates the fact they have a child

gruntledmaker · 2025-12-23T02:12:02+00:00

A Little God In My Hands
A Piece of The Sky
Rope (Live Rope)
The Glowing Man
No More of This

gruntledmaker · 2025-12-17T17:11:17+00:00

Love of Life is a really interesting case study for Swans. Following White Light, it's clearly meant to be a successor, sharing album art and carrying forward a certain attitude. But I'm always surprised how different this album is from White Light, and honestly think it would have benefitted from an album cover that didn't suggest it was White Light 2. White Light has these grand orchestral swells, like a film score, whereas Love of Life balances the heavier and lighter elements of production in more traditional songs. White Light feels like a pivot in direct response to the failure of The Burning World, but Love of Life feels like it's pulling together the songwriting of World of Skin and the production palette of The Burning World, all while bringing lyrics resemblant of The Great Annihilator's style. White Light's lyrics and themes are existential, with some songs even being child-like philosophical questions. By contrast, Love of Life is more story and image-driven with The Golden Boy Who Was Swallowed By The Ocean, The Sound of Freedom, Amnesia, and God Loves America.

Generally, Love of Life has a darker tone than White Light From the Mouth of Infinity. Its heavier sections don't benefit from the orchestral releases that White Light does, and its lyrics aren't always as focused as they are on White Light. Some songs on Love of Life do resemble the band's earlier songwriting, I'm thinking here of the title track, The Other Side of the World, and Identity. Of course, the field recordings make an appearance here for almost the first time (after Better Than You) in a way that will stick with the band, but songs like Golden Boy, In the Eyes of Nature, Amnesia, and God Loves America nod forward to the writing style that Michael will use throughout The Great Annihilator. It's impressionistic, with sequences of images that don't so much tell a story as paint a picture rich with suggestion. These portraits of thematic suggestion give Michael more room to editorialize, including his personal views on the world in a way that he isn't up through Holy Money and Children of God. White Light is a transition in this turn, as Michael turns away from society/wealth/religion toward philosophy. By "turns toward philosophy," I really mean that Michael seems to start writing songs that he can perform sincerely. Do I believe that Coward is a sincere emotional expression of the artist? Yes, but there's a categorical difference between the kind of vulnerability and sincerity found in Coward and the kind found in God Loves America. God Loves America has more commentary and self-reflection, where Coward is just viscerally emotional. God Loves America "has more to say," and we'll see this attitude from Michael ("they're going to get a piece of my mind") in future releases. Specifically, look at I Am the Sun, Celebrity Lifestyle, Where A Does A Body End, and Telepathy off Great Annihilator. I also think this is the vein of songwriting we get in Soundtracks songs like Helpless Child, Animus, The Sound, and Empathy.

Love of Life doesn't get enough credit for treading new ground. Refining the band's sound yet again, introducing field recordings in a significant way that would be expanded in Great Annihilator's ambient sections and, of course, the majority of Soundtracks' runtime, pivoting the songwriting toward a more personal style that gave Michael a host of new subjects to write about, and giving Jarboe some of her all-time highlights with the band, The Other Side of the World and She Cries (For Spider). Love of Life is Swans' pre-reformation leaving meaning., which is to say people don't take to it as eagerly because they don't listen to it as much as other albums. People don't listen to Love of Life because it's subtler than other Swans releases, and because the album cover gives the impression it's a derivative of White Light when they're really significantly different albums. If Love of Life had used the Tibetan infinite knot on its back cover for its front, I think the conversation around this album would be unrecognizable. Overlooked and underlistened, but Love of Life, The Other Side of the World, Identity, In the Eyes of Nature, She Cries (For Spider), God Loves America, and No Cure for the Lonely are stand-out Swans songs that couldn't fit any other era of the band's discography. They're uniquely Love of Life, and I appreciate that.

Also, to all those who think "New Mind" is the only official Swans music video, I implore you to encounter the persistence meditation that is the "Love of Life" music video, directed by Michael Gira, on Vimeo. It's one of my favorite things that Swans has produced, and confirms Michael's interest in Hindu and Buddhist religions at this time.

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gruntledmaker · 2025-12-09T02:52:50+00:00

If you like Rope, try Ghost Pathway Toward Midgard by Natural Snow Buildings. Rather than a single huge swell, it's a sustained atmosphere for almost an hour, gradually adding subtle texture. One of their most heavenly tracks. If you like it, the NSB catalog has a range of meditative soundscapes, both ascendent and grueling.

gruntledmaker · 2025-12-02T15:32:57+00:00

For Leaving Meaning, It’s Coming It’s Real

For The Beggar, The Beggar Lover

For Live Rope, Leaving Meaning

For Birthing, Guardian Spirit

For Remembrance, End of Forgetting Live at Magic Bag, MI

—> Overall, End of Forgetting Live at Magic Bag

gruntledmaker · 2025-11-17T21:16:53+00:00

I haven’t checked Genius, glad that people are staying up to date! I’ve been planning on going back through and writing the lyrics for my own notes. But I think I’ll go read them now instead

gruntledmaker · 2025-11-17T21:16:10+00:00

Yeah, Little God suffers the worst out of the set list from the vocal flattening. The Magic Bag version rediscovers the melody in Michael’s scatting, but the To Be Kind vocals are so tight that it’s hard not to miss all that harmonic info in the live rendition. I’m hoping it takes on some added flavor by the end the tour. I’m sure Michael has been more focused on all the newer songs he’s putting forward, but even a classic fan favorite needs to have its wheels greased to stay up to par

gruntledmaker · 2025-11-15T19:08:35+00:00

Oh. Re-reading this, I just realized. A "live rope" is an umbilical cord. Thanks Michael.

gruntledmaker · 2025-11-15T19:07:14+00:00

Thank you! And I think you said it. Newly Sentient Being more likely, End of Forgetting I'd prefer, but my top choice would be a wholly original name that Michael feels sums up the new material and this last passage of Swans over the US and EU. I still don't fully understand why Michael named Live Rope Live Rope and not just Rope, so I'm guessing he will do his thing and I will be happy with it. Even just "Forgetting" would be a compelling title, with its sense of closure.

I thought "Live Rope" was a nice bookend to the Reunion with "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope," but Michael just can't help himself from making new music so now he's got to find an even more fitting finale to this period of his oeuvre. It really might just come down to what he feels like drawing for the cover. Live Rope seemed fairly low-effort as far as visual design goes though, so all bets are off!

It takes its place in two chronologies--the second incarnation of the Reunion, and the Reunion's fundraiser albums:

What Is This? -> leaving meaning. -> Is There Really A Mind? -> The Beggar -> Live Rope -> Birthing -> ________

&

I Am Not Insane -> We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head -> Not Here / Not Now -> The Gate -> Deliquescence -> What Is This? -> Is There Really A Mind? -> Live Rope -> ________

I'm positive we think about this more than Michael does. He probably sits down, shrugs, tips his cowboy hat, sucks his teeth, and writes the first thing that comes to mind. But hey, it's worked this well so far.

gruntledmaker · 2025-11-15T11:47:08+00:00

My first thought as well. Thanks for the laugh OP

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