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RESEARCH PRODUCT

To See It All / To Hear It All: Michael Gira's Songs of Experience

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Between 2012 and 2016, the American experimental rock band Swans, led by the vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and visionary Michael Gira, released a monumental trilogy of albums comprising The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man. The lyrics on all of them portray Gira’s own search for identity, with the result being a peculiar version of spirituality that is both philosophically religious and ideologically anti-religious. Forced to exist in the hostile, incomprehensible and spiritually-barren reality, the artist finds himself alienated in the state of the end of childhood and loss of innocence. In other words, he locates his identity in this final stage of spirituality and primal religion that could be named post-Christianity. Although in his bleak and emotionally absorbing lyrics Gira draws from various sources, it seems that William Blake’s contrasting concepts of innocence and experience occupy a privileged position here. When the British poet believed in the coexistence of these two phenomena – or constant frictions between them that result in a kind of a revitalizing force – Gira situates himself in the latter sphere that he envisions as raging chaos. However, he does seem to find a way out of this state in the idea of a somehow utopian return to innocence. The article is an attempt to read Gira’s contemporary disillusionment with humanity’s omnipotence through Blake’s similar doubts in a civilization based on the false belief in human potential. In Vala, or The Four Zoas the poet asks: “What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song / Or wisdom for a dance in the street?” The present answer can be that Blake’s ascertainments are still potent and alive in Michael Gira’s post-Christian visions.