‘It is only noise we secretly want’, the American composer Morton Feldman once wrote, ‘because the greatest truth lies behind the greatest resistance.’ As a teenager in the early 2000s, I couldn’t get enough of it. My friend had a VHS of 1991: The Year Punk Broke, and we used to study Sonic Youth’s performance of ‘I Love Her All the Time’ where they played their guitars with drumsticks, swinging them around in arcs of feedback. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. In Feldman’s formulation, it’s as if noise is a promise that music contains, only achieved under certain conditions. But ‘noise is music’s dream of us’ he also writes, at his most beautiful and enigmatic. What if you could dispense with everything else and just run towards it?
Yellow Swans played their first UK shows in fifteen years last week. The DIY noise duo – Gabriel Mindel Saloman on electronics and guitar and Pete Swanson on electronics, tapes and vocals – formed in Portland, Oregon, in 2001 and disbanded in 2008. In that time, they released dozens and dozens of recordings on almost as many formats –full-length studio albums, cassette tapes, CD-Rs of live performances, 7” singles, lathe-cut vinyl. It was impossible to keep up. This was a golden age for noise music: a frenzied response to the brutal start of the century.
I think of noise as less a genre than a kind of attitude, a commitment to extremity. But there are distinct scenes and moments, from Japan in the 1980s to New Zealand in the early 1990s. While some of its practitioners could be nihilistic and macho, flirting with the aesthetics of fascism, Yellow Swans were both gleefully impure in their taste and disarmingly sincere. They wore their politics on their record sleeves: Live During War Crimes (2005) – a riff on the Talking Heads song ‘Life During Wartime’ – sits alongside Get the US Out of A (2004), the collaborative MLK Day (2005) and Live in the Police State Capitol (2005). The latter included an insert, reminiscent of the artwork of the legendary anarcho-punk band Crass, with photo-collages and an essay about the Bush administration. Whatever else it was, this was protest music.
Their early material involved lo-fi drum machines, with vocals fighting through swarms of static and blown circuits. It was an approach that peaked on Bring the Neon War Home (2004), a furious, huge-sounding record owing as much to hip-hop – the cold precision of Clipse, the woozy psychedelia of DJ Screw – as it did to hardcore punk. In their later work the spatial arrangements shift into layer upon layer of drone and reverb, ecstatic and delicate. By Descension Yellow Swans (2006) and At All Ends (2007), they had abandoned the drum machine, their compositions becoming more abstract and exploratory. But the urgency seemed doubled. The guitar gains prominence, a yearning sound that keeps breaking apart, notes stretched out to murmurs. ‘A political art, let it be / tenderness’, as Amiri Baraka put it. The anger of the defeated anti-war movement gets exorcized and re-organized, into something between cacophony and lullaby.
This is the territory Yellow Swans have continued to pursue since re-forming in 2023. Upstairs at The Lexington on Pentonville Road, they played to maybe 150 people. Two nights later, 500 people crammed into the railway arch at Corsica Studios in Elephant & Castle. Saloman and Swanson play facing each other, hunched over tables of miscellaneous electronics: contact microphones, mixers, a reel-to-reel tape unit. The music is loud, but not painfully so. There’s an intimacy to it. Their performance follows the same shape both nights. Gabriel was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in November last year, and explains to the audience that he’s happy to be there but short of breath. He lives in Minneapolis, and talks about the state of siege and resistance against ICE. Then he presses play on a recording of a poem – commissioned by pioneers of musique concrète Groupe Recherches Musicales for a performance in Paris – which he says is about ‘cancer, fascism and ghosts’. I remember only snatches, Gabriel’s voice trading phrases with a woman’s, a French speaker. Something about tear gas munitions, ‘a poor air / barely breathing’. ‘A banner that says FUCK CANCER, a banner that says FUCK ICE, a banner that says FUCK THE POLICE’. It is extremely moving. The voice runs through the equipment on the table in circuits, wobbling and crackling, accumulating tape hiss and debris.
This stays with me for days. I’m reminded of a cross between Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) and Raven Chacon’s Silent Choir (2017). In his classic piece of sound art, Lucier – as the composer explains in his directions – plays a recording of his speaking voice ‘back into the room again and again’ until the resonant frequencies ‘reinforce themselves’ to the point where only rhythm remains. It’s a treatise about disappearance and structure. In the Diné composer Chacon’s field recording of silent demonstrators at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest, we hear amplified what he calls ‘the echo of a movement that stood unshakeable’, the air trembling with rage. With Yellow Swans the voice, facing mortality, is both fragile and prophetic, imprinted with ongoing political struggles in the United States.
They follow this with a composition called ‘Peace Eternity’, which I mishear at first as ‘Police Eternity’. Saloman picks out notes from an ascending three-chord riff, while Swanson rattles a contact microphone in his left hand. I can feel my chest start to shake from the bass notes coming from somewhere. Gabe starts waving a microphone, too, and now it’s like a dance. The crescendo is slow, and then the maelstrom takes over. The original guitar notes are now unrecognizable, stretched and bent out of shape. The whole building feels like it’s made of sound. Part of the joy of this music is the sheer disbelief that anyone could be making it. Saloman describes the track as being about what it would mean to survive cancer and survive fascism; sometimes art is as simple and as complex as a wish.
The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu has theorized the ‘sonorous envelope’ or ‘wrapping of sound’ that takes place in infant development. Parents create a sound-world for the child with their speech and song and breathing. The child becomes aware – at least, psychically – of their own body’s ‘resonant cavity’, their own capacity to make sound. Anzieu places particular emphasis on the respiratory process as reciprocal exchange. The music Yellow Swans coax from their instruments has a way of eventually becoming autonomous, self-generating loops of feedback. It’s as if the sound itself is breathing, and you in turn become less certain where your body begins and ends.
Their set is short, thirty minutes at most. When it’s over, Gabriel sits down at the side of the stage and rests while Pete wanders around talking to people, old friends and new. I feel like I’ve witnessed some important testament, the meaning of which will only be decided later. I walk to the tube with my sister – whom I last saw Yellow Swans with twenty years ago – and she says: ‘At first I thought it sounded like helicopters, then birds, then whistles. Like, ICE whistles. And then I just thought it sounded like history.’
Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘Mislaid Plans’, NLR–Sidecar.