Michael Gira

Michael Gira’s Swans have announced a new album, Leaving Meaning, due out on October 25. It’s Swans’ 15th studio album and their first since 2016’s The Glowing Man.

Deliquescence is a 2XCD live album recorded in 2016/17, documenting the final Swans tour of this configuration of the band. It shows the Swans live set generally as it stands now (though, as always, the set continues its transformation along the way as the tour progresses). It contains two (long) pieces that have never been, and never will be, recorded elsewhere. In addition it contains a lengthy, unfinished and discarded work in progress. As usual, the pre-existing material used in the live set is subject to constant revision/expansion.

Devendra Benhart - Niño Rojo (2004) [Young God Records]
EACRip | FLAC+CUE+LOG -> 243 MB | MP3 @320 -> 104 MB | Full HQ Artwork Scans -> 48.3 MB
© Young God Records | 25 | Freak Folk / Folk-Rock

Banhart covers Ella Jenkins' "Wake Up, Little Sparrow" as the opener to this album. The 80-year-old Jenkins has a made a career of creating children's folk music with an educational and inclusively moral bent, and perhaps lends Niño Rojo its best context: Over time, beyond cultural movement and sociological or musicological phenomenon, Banhart's record makes the most sense at the mercy of simple pleasures and the young at heart. You want truth? Beauty? They're here, in basic forms. Progress and relevance are very different concerns, and ones I'm willing to leave to historians with a better advantage. And as all Gira had to do was release the stuff, at the moment, I'm content to listen in turn.

Swans present their sixteenth studio album The Beggar. The Beggar was written and produced by founding member Michael Gira and features contributions from recent and former Swans members, members of Angels Of Light, as well as guest Swan Ben Frost.