The Depths · All albums

Soundtracks for the Blind

Swans · 1996

• Scores: Noise 4, Unease 5, Complexity 3 (each 1 to 5)
• Genre: Rock, Noise rock, Drone
• Mood: fragmented, mesmerising, unsettling
• Sound: extended songs, drone, spoken passages, tape loops

Soundtracks for the Blind is a two-disc, 26-track collage that Michael Gira built from recordings made between 1981 and 1996. He combined new performances with older loops, found sounds and fragments in Sonic Solutions software, looping, reversing, cross-fading and layering them, sometimes mixing material from 1981, 1985 and 1996 in a single track. It includes wiretap recordings, surveillance tapes left by Jarboe's father, phone-sex operators and children singing, and it avoids verse-chorus form, with drone and dark ambient tracks sitting beside long pieces like the 15-minute "Helpless Child" and the 13-minute "The Sound". At about 141 minutes it is the longest studio release in the Swans catalogue.

Track list

1. Red Velvet Corridor (3:04)
2. I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull (6:39)
3. Helpless Child (15:47)
4. Live Through Me (2:32)
5. Yum-Yab Killers (5:07)
6. The Beautiful Days (7:49)
7. Volcano (5:18)
8. Mellothumb (2:46)
9. All Lined Up (4:48)
10. Surrogate 2 (1:52)
11. How They Suffer (5:52)
12. Animus (10:41)
13. Red Velvet Wound (2:02)
14. The Sound (13:11)
15. Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey (3:19)
16. Blood Section (2:39)
17. Hypogirl (2:44)
18. Minus Something (4:14)
19. Empathy (6:45)
20. I Love You This Much (7:23)
21. YRP (7:47)
22. Fan's Lament (1:28)
23. Secret Friends (3:08)
24. The Final Sacrifice (10:27)
25. YRP 2 (2:09)
26. Surrogate Drone (2:06)