Swans will soon reissue Soundtracks for the Blind, originally released in 1996 before the band's hiatus (which lasted until their reformation in 2010).
The reissue will be released in a limited 4xLP box complete with a poster, insert and download code, and it will also be available in CD format. Mastermind Michael Gira issued a statement about the release:
This album has everything in there - all the ideas from Swans' initial 15 years of work. There's some contemporary recordings of the band as it existed in '96/7, with Larry Mullins on drums/percussion, Jarboe singing and playing keyboards, Vudi playing electric guitar, and Joe Goldring playing bass and electric guitar, and me singing and playing electric and acoustic guitar, but there's also a huge amount of sounds and recordings that Jarboe and I collected over the years. These are reassembled, looped, mangled, and in many cases overdubbed upon to create new pieces of music... I really set my own trap, dug my own grave on this one. There was SO MUCH material to deal with, to sift through (whole trunks full of decomposing, moldy cassettes and discs with samples and sounds), and the task of making it into something coherent was at times debilitating. Really like climbing up a mountain of sand. I don't remember why I set this goal for myself, to somehow incorporate such a ridiculously disparate amount of material. I think maybe it was so I could justify throwing all that crap into the local dump, which is what I did when I finished the album. But in the end, after centuries of picking at this huge iceberg of material with a toothpick, my trusty engineer Chris Griffin and I managed to sculpt something out of it. It actually breathes, seems to live, in most places I think. ... When I decided to reform Swans in 2010 Soundtracks was what I referred to as a starting point.
In addition to the Soundtracks for the Blind news, Nick Soulsby will publish a biography of the band titled Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence, An Oral History on June 26 (Jawbone Press).
Gira has now retired the moniker, but is still performing, including a short US West Coast acoustic tour this fall. SPB interviewed Gira back in 2014.
9/27/2018 Los Angeles CA Regent Theatre
9/29/2018 Berkeley CA The UC Theatre
10/4/2018 Portland OR The Old Church Concert Hall
10/5/2018 Seattle WA Columbia City Theater
NYC show to be confirmed soon
