They’re so creative-they come up with really great ideas. “That was an exuberant experience, working with such young, enthusiastic musicians. “I did an album ( Angels of Light Sing Other People), with the Akron/Family as almost the sole musicians,” he explained. Gira is currently working on a new album (possibly his last as Angels of Light), part of which he recorded with Akron/Family, an experimental jazz/folk quartet Gira discovered a few years ago. The orchestration sort of grows that way.” It’s mainly by choosing people to work with, having them contribute to a song and then gleaning something from what they did, getting them to push that and then taking that element and getting someone else to respond to it. Much to the consternation of the very skilled musicians I work with, I still talk in colors, or pictures, or gestures. I’m still not a skilled musician by any means. I don’t think I was very successful at that for a very long time-but I’m better at it now. Back in the mid-’80s, I started introducing other sounds, and Jarboe’s vocals, and songs on piano, and gradually I started doing songs written on acoustic guitar, which was sort of anathema to anyone who was following SWANS in the early days. “That whole process started way back in SWANS. He says it’s been an exercise in organic evolution. It’s developed into a very rich, complex, human music that stands alone, beyond category. While the darkness is still palpable, he’s balanced it with glimmers of light and humor. The one constant has been Gira’s uncanny, unmistakable songwriting-but even that’s matured. From walls of noise to sparse, poignant solo guitar. With Angels of Light, you can hear everything from sweet, ukulele-based love songs, to pounding whoop-’em-ups, to indefinable experimental numbers. More than just the names, however, the music itself has changed, and dramatically. Since SWANS ended in 1997, he’s released albums as the Body Lovers, the Body Haters and Angels of Light, together with several solo recordings. “If it didn’t,” he says, “I’d be pretty stupid.” Then he added, “Maybe I’m fortunate in that I don’t have a financial incentive to stay the same.” Their music was a cement fist to the back of the skull, the noise overwhelming as Gira intoned songs about despair, disgust, pain, psychosexual violence, physical decay, and a particularly frightening kind of love.Ī quarter-century later, with Gira now in his early fifties, his artistic output has changed considerably. In many ways, Gira is himself a kind of quixotic figure, though in his case nature has been replaced by the music industry.Īfter moving to NYC in the late seventies, he quickly gained notoriety as the founder of SWANS-the most brutal of New York’s no wave bands. He’s the last of the great hero artists, like Joseph Beuys, or John Huston.” “And that’s how he does it personally, too. “There’s such a theme in his films of the quixotic character going out against nature,” Gira said.