Soundtracks for the Blind

Michael Gira had already decided to disband Swans before this album was finished. He had been running the band for fifteen years, through noise rock, industrial, post-punk, slow burning gothic rock, and into something stranger, and by 1995 he was exhausted. Soundtracks for the Blind was conceived as a final statement, a two and a half hour double album that functioned as both a summation of everything Swans had been and a departure into territory they had never entered. Gira described the concept as a soundtrack for a nonexistent film, an album that would exist as its own imaginary cinema.

The source material spans fifteen years. Loops and sounds that Gira had created in 1981. Vocal loops that Jarboe, his longtime creative partner, had recorded in 1985 on a sixteen-second digital delay unit. Surveillance tapes she recovered from her father's desk when he had worked as an FBI agent. A recorded conversation with Gira's own father about his life. New recordings from the band's most recent tour. Everything was loaded into a computer and assembled into something that moves between post-rock grandeur, drone, spoken word, field recordings, and fifteen-minute guitar epics without logic or warning. The album was released in October 1996, Swans played their farewell tour, and Gira closed the chapter.

Swans reformed in 2010, but Soundtracks for the Blind remains a singular object, something that does not sound like anything else in their catalog or anyone else's. Set aside an afternoon. The album demands and rewards total surrender.