Alright kids, time to make an update to the Swans flowchart. Any requests...

Alright kids, time to make an update to the Swans flowchart. Any requests? Gonna have to give the Glowing Man some more listens and get a refresher of all the side-project stuff, but it's coming.

No other flowchart is posted as frequently as this one, I think. Congrats, man.

I'm thinking of structuring it something like this to make it possible for every overlap to flow together neatly.

Where do you think The Glowing Man should be in there?

next to to be kind since its to be kind 2.0

Nah, it's already as fine as it gets. Just think about the proper description and place for TGM and you're done.

From my listen it's kind of like TBK and the seer in one, so perhaps that's how it could go on the chart?

Seconded.
Also, add The Gate.

Nah it's a mix of TBK and The Seer

Not sure, just gave it my first listen this evening. Initial impression is that it's basically a milder To Be Kind that takes more cues from mid-period Swans instead of no-wave as the former did.

The original chart is missing some vital stuff like Body to Body, Job to Job, several live albums and a couple EPs. I really want to work the Angels of Life and the World of Skin in there too.

BTBJTJ
Real Love
Feel Good Now
Kill the Child
World of Skin (3 releases or overall comp)
Anonymous Bodies
Omniscience
Drainland / Sacrificial Cake / 13 Masks / Anhedoniac
Body Lovers/Haters
Somnambulist / Hard Rock
the 6 AoL records
maybe some 2000s era Gira solo releases?

There's a shitton of stuff to go through, I haven't even listened to all the side projects and solo stuff.

With the other live albums, it can go like "If you want something in the similar vein of PUBLIC CASTRATION, then you can check out their other live LPs like REAL LOVE, FEEL GOOD NOW, and KILL THE CHILD"

As for the Young God EP and the Body to Body comp, you can easily tag those as extras you can check out after you've finished all the No Wave LPs, "anything left by them that's brutal?"

When it comes to World Of Skin, you can make that an off shoot of Love Of Life, "I like the moodiness, but how about something more dry?" I would also place AoL's discography somewhere in between White Light and The Great Annihilator

body lovers/haters should be darker sftb

And Anhedoniac should be darker SFTB if you like Jarboe parts (more histrionic/unsettling and out-there than Sacrificial. Fun fact: New Mother and Anhedoniac are IRL relationship breakup albums)

>"If you want something in the similar vein of PUBLIC CASTRATION, then you can check out their other live LPs like REAL LOVE, FEEL GOOD NOW, and KILL THE CHILD"
Aren't some of those live recordings of Children of God material, though?

In fact, one could go so far to suggest Body Lovers/Haters (or New Mother, depends on what side of Gira's psyche you're on) + Anhedoniac are the cleansing/purge/catharsis of each other.

Feel Good Now and Kill the Child, yeah, but you could probably make it something like "What's a good mix between Children Of God and Public Castration?"
Real Love is also purely made up of Greed/Holy Money material so that can be the "pure" offshoot of Public Castration

Kill should be in between PC and CoG. Varied combo of the two eras but 'wilder'.
RL is a mechanical/restrained/seething PC. Reckon is an Greed era show while PC is a Holy Money era show, once they worked out all the kinks to do justice to material. RL is interesting if you see it as a PC in progress.

I'm thinking of splitting the early era up into a noisier segment and a more industrial segment. Greed and Holy Money are quite different from the others during that period, so I don't really feel it makes sense to put them in the same string of progressively more abrasive stuff, especially not since you more or less have to start at Filth.

>between Children Of God and Public Castration?
*between Feel Good Now and Public Castration?

Where does this fit in?

I would put The Glowing Man between To Be Kind and My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope. My reasoning for this is because The Glowing Man seems like a much more subdued To Be Kind, something I think My Father Will Guide Me intended to be but fell short of. The Glowing Man, putting aside the really long track lengths is a pretty user friendly Swans album in terms of listenability - more so than TBK and The Seer.

Did they fug?

I came up with something like this

The Gate should be a "MORE!" coming down from Not Here / Not Now

Good idea! That works better!
Never understood why Greed/Holy Money is always recommended as 'more brutal!' when it's considerably softer aurally, but no less harsher lyrically probably even more masochistic. More dirge like selfloathing, rather than the energy of Filth. "A kind of reference state or absolute zero of human dignity". Something's rotting.

>recorded at Michael's bedroom

Says enough

I feel like the chart is fine as it is for the most part, but the reunion trilogy needs to be a triangle with the respective live albums leading off from each.

More from no wave under "instances on how fucked up you are."
Somnambulist/Consumer could go here too.

do you guys think we'll get one final live album?

I'd also add to this that The Body Lovers NEEDS to be on there.

This is great!
Forgot YG though.

"This EP serves as sort of a transition between the bludgeoning no-wave of Cop and the more experimental gothic sounds of Greed and Holy Money. The mix is psychedelic and overpowering: when you listen to I Crawled it's like Michael Gira's standing right there whispering his twisted lyrics into your ears, and the others are huge and atmospheric thanks to shitloads of reverb. While Cop was like being tied to a chair and tortured in an abandoned warehouse, Young God is like practicing ritual self-mutilation in your basement while overdosing on LSD and roofies. It's so slow, dark and delirious it sort of makes you feel like you're slowly bleeding to death."

"There's a flicker of tension and pensiveness about the slow doomy dirges on Swans' Young God. Whereas Cop came across as outraged, furious, but ultimately dead and rotting, somewhere deep within Young God something _sinister_is gradually coming to life."

YG is lumped with Body2Body in the "Anything else?" section, although now that I think of it it might work better being under Cop like "Like Cop but shorter?", or maybe in between Filth and Cop

bumpp

anybody workin on this?

I feel like Public Castration should still be a dead end on the chart. Swans never went heavier/blacker than that, and it's so radically different from the rest of their material that it almost needs its own classification.

Mildly lighter works like 'Body to Body' or 'Real Love' should refer to Public Castration as the end-point of Swansian brutality, rather than using Public Castration as a reference point for them; they aren't works that can be quite likened to it as The Great Annihilator can be likened to White Light.