Four more bars

I saw the band Swans this past Tuesday. Swans are a New York band who spent most of the last 15 years broken up, and while this show wasn't a reunion gig, the band brought an extra-spiteful edge to this hometown performance.

Swans are one of the stranger bands that I listen to, which makes them really easy to write about. I could go on at great length about their performance. They've got a weird instrumental set-up, a quirky cast of characters behind the instruments, a deliberately confrontational set structure, and a range of unusual performance tics. They even had a heated argument onstage. These things all make for rock-writer wet dreams.

But one aspect of Swans' performance caught my attention more than any other: the communication between frontman/guitarist Michael Gira and the rest of the musicians.


Swans spend a lot of time on agonizing instrumental climaxes. The songs build and build before finally breaking like a fever. During these crescendos, Gira typically strums away at a single chord. His guitar becomes lost in the cacophony of kit drums, extra percussion, bass gravel and pedal-steel shrieking that comprise the rest of the band's sound.

His function during these segments is effectively that of band leader rather than instrumentalist. He visibly communicates with the other musicians, telling them how hard to push and when to stop, like Mingus during a sax solo. At one point during Tuesday's set, the kit drummer was in charge of calling out the four-count that signaled the transition to a new part. When the drummer first counted out the transition, Gira shook him off, like a pitcher rejecting a catcher's call.

I've seen a lot of live music at this point. Most of it has been rock music, and most of that rock music has involved strict, rigid structuring. You would never see Terrence Hobbs telling the rest of Suffocation to add four more bars to the end of his solo while onstage. But Swans come from a wholly different place from the metal and hardcore that I spend most of my time on, and their stage communication reveals their roots. It's compositional tactics like this one—so minor as to be invisible to those who aren't looking for them—that distinguish entire styles of music from each other.