Continuing Michael Gira's effort to consolidate anything Swans-related into 2xCD period piece comes the The Body Lovers / Body Haters. It seems to be the "post Swans drone" period. That's nice because it walks a thin line with being the "I'm gonna release whatever experimental bullshit I feel like because I own a record label" period. Luckily, two decades of quality drone and repetition under the Swans moniker, has made Gira a master of the two.
The Body Lovers was originally released in 1998 with the subtitle Disc 1 of 3. It was eventually followed by The Body Haters. Since then Gira has focused on the song-oriented Angels of Light project and the chaperoning of freak-folkers Devandra Barnhart and the Akron/Family.
Gira has now packaged his hour-long-song period with a 10 minute bonus track and expanded artwork full of swine and human sex organs. The Body Lovers is 73 minutes (segued into 10 tracks) of semi-calculated instrumentation-- the kind that doesn't find the artist jacking off with the EQ or sampler to their hearts content. It starts with what sounds like the distant chimes of gamelan music reverberating around a cavern and then morphs into a different winding style every eight minutes or so. There are funeral dirges, shimmering and floating guitars, crescendos reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor, impenetrable walls of stretched notes, austere jangle, samples of crying babies and weeping women, and only one minute of Gira singing. It's all attention holding and it's very reminiscent of what the Swans were trying on Soundtracks for the Blind, which is fitting since parts of Body Lovers were culled from sound samples dating back to 1982. The rest is from the standard Swans crew like Jarboe, Bill Rieflin, and Larry Mullins, while members of Pan Sonic, Origami, and Deathprod also make contributions.
While The Body Lovers pulls disparate sounds together into one enthralling hour, The Body Haters just wanders around in some gloom and doom for 36 minutes. It simply sounds like Gira indulged in some looping software and did some half-assed processing. The bonus track is 10 minutes of instantly recognizable bits of Swans songs chopped up and layered on top of each other. The Body Haters isn't crap, it just pales in comparison to everything else Gira has done and therefore sounds very amateurish. But I'll allow a few mistakes in two decades of high quality mind warping music.
If it's just repetitive droning, what makes The Body Lovers so good? It's because Gira has consistently made atmospheric music that doesn't take you into the atmosphere. It doesn't invite you to escape reality. It suffocates you with the not so comforting truths of humanity, without causing introspection, retrospection, or even speculation. The emotions are so strong yet so indistinct that half the Swans fans you'll meet can't make a cohesive argument as to why they listen to them. If Gira can cause all this enigmatic wonder in an hour-long piece without his trademark lyrics then he must truly be making special music...The catch is that it only works at night.
