Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind

18.3.22 - 4 X LP GATEFOLD, POSTER + DOWNLOAD [LSTUMM421]

Originally released in 1996, Mute now reissue Soundtracks for the Blind on vinyl, the final Swans album, prior to their reformation in 2010. A culmination of 15 years of work.....As frontman Michael Gira said in 1997:

I've always been interested in different sounds like that and listened to Brian Eno and different kinds of music that use non-musical sources often, and as I made this record I had a lot of that material: those loops and things I'd made from '81; I had vocal loops that Jarboe had made in 1985 on a little sixteen second digital delay unit which was actually the first sampler... we had these tape narrations we'd been collecting, that she got from her father's desk when he was an FBI agent – surveillance tapes; I interviewed my father because I'm interested in his life, and took a little snippet of his experiences... then we had new things we'd recorded with our 'band' from the last tour; and some stuff we did for a soundtrack for a film. I threw all those into the computer and assembled it that way. So, in some things, there's something from 1981 playing simultaneously with something from '85 playing simultaneously with something from 1996. It's cross-faded and blended and mixed so to speak in the computer, cut-up and sometimes looped and reversed.

Tracklist:
LP 1:

1. Red Velvet Corridor
2. Helpless Child
3. I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull
4. Live Through Me
5. Yum-Yab Killers
6. The Beautiful Days

LP 2:
1. Volcano
2. Mellothumb
3. All Lined Up
4. Surrogate 2
5. How They Suffer
6. Animus

LP 3:
1. Red Velvet Wound
2. The Sound
3. Her Mouth is Filled With Honey
4. Blood Section
5. Hypogirl
6. Minus Something
7. Empathy

LP 4:
1. I Love You This Much
2. YRP
3. Fan's Lament
4. Secret Friends
5. The Final Sacrifice
6. YRP 2
7. Surrogate Drone