[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Severian

And the Seer was not a "put in and rock out" album. Not for me. It was like performing a lengthy, intricate, high-stakes metaphorical surgery on my own brain.

Fucking totally agree. I can only listen to The Seer when I am on my metro commute or reading a novel for extended periods of time, I need to open space for my brain to explore the sounds without being to preoccupied with other aspects of life or even the music.

I'm just one of those assholes who thinks, "Hey, if you're going to put THAT much time and effort into a piece of music, then there has to be something behind it; some reason for every decision .

This is why I never understood people's beef with radiohead, even if they didn't like it, they must admit the technical mechanics and process that goes into it. Swans even more so, ironic how "minimalist" music is often the most complex and constructed.

"Think you can figure me out, huh. Well, come on then!"

Agreed, The Seer is not like some friendly DMT kind of sagacity, no, its fucking some reality shattering Datura shit. It looks like some pleasant flowers, but its in actuality a force of the supernatural.

Wait, I'm getting Bleach confused with real life again. Sorry.

Hold on, while lyrically Bleach is definitely immature and less-than-well-formed, sonically that record is as much a brunt force of minimalism as Swans, just in a microcosmic approach. Where Swans draws out the effect of contrast and dynamics, Nirvana condenses it into bursts of conventional rock music, yet, its the same kind of simplistic, almost minimalist approach seasoned with the energy of brunt force.

Anyway, it is true that I'm a pretty scientific thinker, and I tend to use logic and empiricism whenever possible (except when it comes to graduate student codes of conduct in cognitive neuroscience programs... Hah!) but ART mysteries me, because there are no rules, operational definitions, charts, graphs, or equations to use to better understand it. It's all about fleeting moments in time, and snap decisions made by people much more talented and imaginative than I will ever be.

There are charts, graphs, rules, operational definitions, and theory underlying music, but the beauty of it unlike math and engineering, music creates the effect of feeling, which is altogether transcendental in ways that math simply can't even attempt at. Logic is about reasoning, music is about shattering that using the underlying math of the craft of playing an instrument. As a player myself, nothing is more esoteric and magical than the effect playing an instrument has over people around you, it is surreal and when you master it the art becomes less and less a matter of conscious effort or expression and becomes something more, a kind of harmonic Communion. Its why in the Old Church, the Mass is always sung, the Fathers always said, "When you sing a prayer, you pray twice."

But standing at a Swans show, being bludgeoned to death by guitars that feel like axes in your ear drums, surrounded by maniacs, drenched in someone else's sweat, feeling my body age and weaken more rapidly due to the sheer intensity of the sensory onslaught in front of me and loving every minute of it?

This is how I felt about the Sonic Nurse tour. Bludgeoned to death by guitars.. Nothing like it. I would LOVE to see Swans tour The Seer or this new record, it would be like taking mushrooms, too many in fact.