Yellow Swans

Since forming in Portland, Oregon in 2001, the noise-improv duo known as Yellow Swans, have also prolifically recorded as Disk Yellow Swans, Deep Yellow Swans, Due Yellow Swans, Destifi Yellow Swans, Dreamed Yellow Swans, Decapitation Yellow Swans, Yeh Yellow Swans, and Draught Yellow Swans, among many other amusing variations. When our e-mail correspondence for this feature commenced last spring, Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman had just wrapped up a seven-month international tour, were gearing up for the Load Records release of Psychic Secession, preparing to move back to Portland from Oakland, getting back into the groove of running their Collective Jyrk label, and arranging a fall schedule that will send them on an extensive North American tinnitus-spreading mission. And you thought your schedule was cluttered.

“I have a remarkable amount of empathy for all those cheesy Top 40 rock bands who write songs about being on the road and how hard it is,” Saloman says. “It’s not hard to imagine why so many musicians break down after months of relentless touring. As fantastic as it is, you can’t imagine the emotional and physical toll it takes. Too much of a good thing, I guess.”

Saloman and Swanson became Yellow Swans after Saloman moved from Oakland to Portland, where Swanson already lived. They had met months earlier at a performance by Boxleitner, a former band of Saloman’s, and each found in the other a kindred spirit. Even communicating with the pair via e-mail, a yin-and-yang dynamic is apparent: Saloman offers considered, lengthy, perfectly punctuated and grammatical responses, while Swanson’s replies arrive in fractured, stream-of-thought flows frequently broken up by ellipses. Attempting to explain their working relationship—and also describe the band’s jury-rigged equipment setup—Saloman invokes Led Zeppelin. “I always tell laypeople that Pete’s the singer, and I’m the lead guitar player and that we have a drum machine,” he says. “He’s Robert Plant, and I’m Jimmy Page. From that point on, it gets more complicated.”

The pair launched Collective Jyrk—better known these days just as Jyrk—as a conduit to release the mountain of live and studio improv, electro-noise workouts Yellow Swans recorded using traditional instruments and homemade sound rigs. Early releases were issued in extremely limited numbers, with packaging as Spartan as a clear plastic slipcase or as elaborate as repurposed, ancient floppy-disc housings, and were often close to unlistenable or undistinguishable from one another: grinding, repetitive, woodshedding castoffs with arbitrary (or nonexistent) titles that faded from memory as soon as they ended.

As the duo graduated to other record labels—Narnack, Dealth Bomb Arc, Chondritic, and SNSE, among others—the Swans incrementally began to streamline and refine its skronk into a high-impact, precision mind-fuck equally capable of inspiring drooling hypnosis or moving listeners to dance. Every noise-flecked, static-soaked move made since plays like another progression towards some unassailable pinnacle-like absolute. Three recent releases—2004’s churning, offhandedly pop Bring the Neon War Home (Narnack), 2005’s astounding Live at War Crimes (Release the Bats), and the tonal quicksand of Psychic Secession—are light-years removed from something as crude as 2002’s Manik Tiks.

As the Swans’ song craft evolves, political frustrations increasingly bleed into the lyrics, track titles, and album names, even if Swanson’s vocals are often delivered with such naked fury that they’re indecipherable, twisted and crushed under the weight and stampede of harsh electronics.

“Living in a country with fraudulent elections, with a completely complacent if not complicit media, and a government run by war criminals, it’s hard to feel good about the state of things,” Saloman says. “I go around in circles as to a physical world solution to the problems that this country is facing, and creating. I do feel confident, though, that there has to be a psychic secession that precedes any real change.”

“We’ve both been pretty obsessed with secessionist movements in the last few years, for pretty obvious reasons,” says Swanson. “The whole concept of a ’psychic secession’ is really appealing to me.”

Part of Yellow Swans’ appeal lies in how its sound incorporates so many components efficiently and alluringly—the sweaty throb of techno beats, droning guitars, firecracker synth and keyboard effects that descriptions don’t do justice to—without falling prey to compositional lethargy or making the experience of cramming all of that golden-brown sonic pressure into your brainstem seem like work. Saloman and Swanson aren’t a traditional band in any sense, and puzzling out how they’re creating any particular sound in a congested sound stream is a losing proposition.

“I have a few primary sound sources—a drum machine, vocals, and an oscillator—and then I have three auxiliary loops that I can throw any specific sound through,” Swanson says. “Usually, I’m putting tons of sounds through each route, so it sounds really massive even through it’s only a few sources.”

“We do a bunch of live mixing and send our sounds out the PA and to each other,” Saloman adds. “It creates these weird feedback systems where each sound sends every other sound in a new direction and where layer after layer builds up into one monolithic mass.”

One reason for Yellow Swans’ richer output of late is a result of enlisting of outside collaborators: Secession, for instance, features a raft of singers, percussionists, producers, and even strings players.

“On Bring the Neon War Home, Psychic Secession, and the Deathbomb Arc 7-inch [as Draught Yellow Swans] we asked people to produce our recorded tracks, two-thirds of which were improvised,” Saloman says. “So we have people adding sounds, dropping sounds out, processing our stuff, and editing tracks together at times. We also have been asking friends to record additional instruments.

“There’s definitely an attitude that if pop bands can do it, so can a noise band. I love records like Love’s Forever Changes and [the Beach Boys’] Pet Sounds, and it’s interesting to me to approach our more format albums with those ideas in mind.”

As the Yellow Swans’ discography has deepened and its profile has grown, Jyrk’s roster has expanded accordingly. Releases by Starving Weirdos, the Skaters, GOD, Bonus, World, Inca Ore, and Axolotl are quickly scarfed up by noise aesthetes, but when Swanson and Saloman are away on tour, the label goes on temporary hiatus. Jyrk and the Yellow Swans are a labor of love, not a viable way to make a living, they confess.

“I have an on-call job I can leave whenever I want,” Swanson says. “The band/label/mastering/other music money is kind of inconsistent and isn’t entirely sustainable. We do all right with it, but we don’t earn enough to really not have to sweat money.”

“We can make a meager subsistence living off of Yellow Swans,” says Saloman. “If we toured a few more months out of the year, we would probably be able to fare better, but that’s not possible now. We’re tried very hard from the very beginning to make Yellow Swans and Collective Jyrk be self-sustaining. Self-sufficiency is a high priority for us, and that includes being able to avoid using debt as a means of surviving and financing our activities.”

In recent years, the international noise scene has become much more visible and intricate, with skree-ballers of all sorts networking, booking mass tours, and forming tiny labels. From the better-known (Prurient, John Wiese, Sightings) to the more obscure (Panther Skull, Hive Mind, Terrestrial Tones), this thin slice of the underground is attracting an increasing number of fans hungry for aural depravity and turmoil. Saloman predicts that extreme music will break through—and take over—sooner or later.

“I believed very strongly at the time that we were beginning to play shows that people’s consciousness was shifting, and that there would develop a wide audience for abstract music,” he says. “Often in interviews from years back, I would say that it would be only a matter of time before bands like Wolf Eyes, Hair Police, Kites, and others would be viewed as the norm, almost another extension of the punk current that began at least with garage bands in the 1960s. Noise may prove to be more paradigm-shattering than that.”

Raymond Cummings
Photo: Suzy Poling