Paula Mejia
Contributor

Swans Provide New Album Details

Swans have revealed further details surrounding their upcoming double album The Seer. On August 28th, the album will be released on Michael Gira's own label Young God.

According to the band's press release, the 11-track new album features an array of contributions, including from Mercury Rev's Grasshopper, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, Akron/Family, Ben Front, Low's Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk, as well as former Swans member Jarboe (contributing backing vocals and a "voice collage"). 

In a statement, Gira commented, "The Seer took 30 years to make. It's the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I've ever made, been involved in or imagined. But it's unfinished, like the songs themselves. It's one frame in a reel. The frames blur, blend and will eventually fade. The songs began on an acoustic guitar, then were fleshed out with (invaluable) help from my friends, then were further tortured and seduced in the studio, and now they await further cannibalism and force-feeding as we prepare to perform some of them live, at which point they'll mutate further, endlessly, or perhaps be discarded for a while."

What's more, the description of the instrumentation utilized on the upcoming release is not only intriguing, but unbelievably impressive. Gira commented that The Seer features “acoustic guitar, electric guitar, harmonica, casio, sounds, lap steel guitars, hammer dulcimer, orchestral bells, ‘handmade violin thing’, vibraphone, piano, clarinet, bass guitar, voice, ‘incredible handshake’, organ, casio, synthesizer, voice, ‘bird idea…’, acoustic and electric mandolins, fire sounds (acoustic and synthetic), bagpipes, horns, steel cello, accordion, violin, various songs, and cello contra-bassoon.” Whoa.

You can check out the tracklist for The Seer below, as well as a teaser trailer for a DVD that's included along with the special edition of The Seer.

The Seer Tracklist:

01. Lunacy

02. Mother of the World

03. The Wolf

04. The Seer

05. The Seer Returns

06. 93 Ave. B Blues

07. The Daughter Brings the Water

08. Song for a Warrior

09. Avatar

10. A Piece of the Sky

11. The Apostate