The path towards Yellow Swans had opened up. Gabriel Mindel Saloman was living in Oakland and playing in “destroyed punk” band Boxleitner when Swanson first met him. Saloman moved to Portland, and the duo saw an opportunity to work together on a project that could combine their interests in punk and extreme electronics. “We were both aware of noise as a genre, but I think we both were coming at our music from a more out-rock sort of angle,” remembers Swanson. “I’m still far more interested in Dead C or Man Is The Bastard than I am with Merzbow.”
“We were both aware of noise as a genre, but I think we both were coming at our music from a more out-rock sort of angle.”
Swanson’s pragmatic, process-driven approach to making music found its perfect compliment in the more conceptual strategising of Saloman, and Yellow Swans produced an enormous amount of music in their nine year lifespan, including splits with the likes of Skaters, John Wiese and Ashtray Navigations, and collaborations with Axolotl, Mouthus and Burning Star Core. Their most coherent, “complete” full-length statement was also their final: 2010′s Going Places.
“It took us about 18 months to get the music to the point that we were happy with it,” says Swanson of the album. “I had plans to record vocals over the record, but by the time we had completed the instrumental portion of the music, I was pretty out of the Yellow Swans zone, deep in school, not really writing at all and I began to realise the music was dense enough already.
“A lot of people have hypothesized that we quit the band because of ongoing interpersonal conflict,” he continues, “But that’s far from the case. In 2007 we both had hit a wall from touring hard for years, and not really achieving any amount of financial stability. Gabe had recently fallen in love and wanted to pursue that in Canada; he married and seemed really happy. I didn’t really see how or why we would continue as a band if he was moving to Canada, since our working process was based on constant rehearsing.”
There was a sense also that they’d got as much out of the partnership as they could. “We both had expressed the feeling of having painted ourselves into a corner creatively and didn’t know where to go from where we had arrived at.” Following the release of Going Places on Type and one last live show at Barcelona’s Sonar festival, Yellow Swans was amicably declared dead.
Swanson by this point was ready to move to New York to pursue a masters degree in psychiatric nursing at Columbia. He’s been working in mental healthcare for a decade. “I first got into it because it was work that could satisfy my ethical needs and was very flexible in regards to allowing me to tour. The last job I had was working with homeless, mentally ill adults and I want to keep working with that population, or maybe prisoners or veterans.”
When it comes to music, his solo output is now his primary focus. 2011 saw the release of an epic guitar drone suite, I Don’t Rock At All, but it was Man With Potential, released towards the end of the year, that announced the arrival of Swanson as a major solo artist. Along with KPLR’s brace of records and Container’s LP on Spectrum Spools, Man With Potential was part of a quartet of 2011 releases offering unique, outsider takes on techno that prompted many commentators and genre-guardians to question what their beloved Techno actually means. Given some of the more fervent debates and hyperbolic testimonies knocking around, you could be forgiven for thinking these techno-records-by-noise-artists have rocked conventional dance culture to its very foundations. Of course they haven’t, and nor was that ever the artists’ intention, but the proliferation of such projects is undoubtedly interesting. Artists not strictly part of the dance community making something akin to dance music, but grubbier, is hardly a new phenomenon – from Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hot On The Heels Of Love’ to Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Acid project, the precedents are numerous and varied – but of late there does seem to be an inordinate number of figures from the noise/out-rock underground offering deconstructed takes on techno, house and the rest. If “proper” techno music is about function, then the Swanson, KPLR and Container records are about dysfunction – and their refusal to be useful to DJs and consumers feels like a quietly political statement. “I don’t really like the idea of music being produced for a functional purpose,” Swanson says. “I would be shocked if someone actually played Man With A Potential at a club and people were into it.”
“I would be shocked if someone actually played Man With A Potential at a club and people were into it.”
This dysfunctional techno music is, perhaps, a natural result of the cultural conditions it’s been created in. Says Swanson: “People didn’t connect with techno in the US on the same level that they did in Europe; I think that’s a significant cultural divide there. In the US, the whole rave scene is still very marginal and I think a lot of the dance music consumers here in the US just listen at home.”
If an artist or listener is consuming “dance” music primarily on their own, in their own home, it’s perhaps inevitable that they’re going to focus on the psychedelic, mind-altering, introspective properties of the music, rather than worry about funk. Why make music to dance to, when there’s nowhere to dance, and no one to dance with?
Swanson, it should be noted once more, doesn’t see Man With Potential as some kind of abrupt shift into the techno paradigm. He cites two older Yellow Swans records, Bring The Neon War Home and Psychic Session, as being “in dialogue” with techno. “Both of these records prominently feature beats and reference industrial techno and electro,” he asserts, before conceding, “In a way that’s sort of interesting, but not entirely successful.”
“I really don’t see Man With Potential as any kind of departure, it’s simply another step in a career that has always been developing in several directions at once.”
Kiran Sande
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