Hitting The Brown Note With No Wave Pioneers Swans

v. vein press

28 Jan

Written By Benny Munday

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ZZ Benway @v_vein_dispatch

With a reputation as bowel-antagonists, Swans have registered the closest frequency to executing the elusive brown note, maybe.

I awaken to find my cochlear shredded, bowel functioning at fifty-percent. Sweaty, questioning all I profess to understand, my eardrums take on a pin-cushion motif. Last night, I saw Swans.

The excess decibel churning from the Swans rig is so intense, that in the band’s fledgling years, police were forced to shut down several of their shows. This form of authoritarianism fit in perfectly with lead singer Michael Gira’s mantra — confrontation through sound.

Gira’s stage antics make mindless violence appear pleasurable. His reputation for demanding no air-conditioning during a Swans set is legendary; doing so provides that “Indian sweat-lodge feel”. The physical assault of any crowd member Gira deemed to be enjoying the show was once an issue, as the brutologist detested head-banging. He’s older now.

In hindsight, the frontman’s mission statement of provocation through sound seems obvious — the name Swans was chosen because swans are, “Majestic, beautiful looking creatures with really ugly temperaments”. His frank assessment of his music is, “Soul uplifting, body destroying.” In light of such proclamation, I swanned to Melbourne’s Forum Theatre one balmy evening, keen to see a band I’d admired since a cygnet.

A miserable smattering of middle-aged loners grease The Forum walls and I do the same. This feels more like a protective measure than a play for prime viewing position. One of the loners looks like Charles Manson. I move.

Thor Harris hits the stage, assaulting his hammer dulcimer with hate, then love, then hate again. This is the intro to No Words/No Thoughts, the opening track to the 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Gira skulks across the stage resembling an uncle not to associate with. His hat it magnificent. Lurching back and forth on his trailing leg he stamps his foot in opposing time to the hammer dulcimer. I scout the room. Collapsed jaws replace the usual expression of joy at the beginning of a concert. Loud.

With a conductorial lurch Gira signals his men to action. My sphincter clenches in time to the slave-ship rhythm based around one relentless note. This stark intro, meditation as the antithesis to meditation. The volume of blood required to maintain neural-gland efficacy surrenders to my lower intestine.

Before Gira utters lyric one, the crowd majority recoil to distances beyond the perimeter of the dance floor. There’s no use. The brown note is in play, as a heavy drone fingers the colon to near evacuation, the body and brain no longer simpatico.

*I should clarify, whilst the voluntary status of bowel movement during said concert teetered precariously, I confirm without hesitation that full brown-note deployment remained a negatory, and thus, within a narrow scientific realm at least, remains a hypothetical theorem.

The brown note is a perverse frequency that sadistic musicians enjoy deploying unto unsuspecting audiences. Ideal density levels required to cause a physiological reaction are so low (between 5 and 9 Hz) that most humans are oblivious to any sound at all. This is called infrasonic frequency and is often accompanied by a layering of tangible sonics.

Both musicians and dictatorships throughout history have experimented with subsonic frequency and, depending on your gullibility, have enjoyed marked success. John Deacon (Queen), Holger Czukay (Can), and Glenn Branca (Glenn Branca Orchestra), are seminal purveyors of sphincter tickling, while Germany’s NAZI party and Romania’s Ceaușescu regime are known to have tinkered with the brown note as a means of effective crowd control.

Many frequency experts are of the belief that the brown note cannot exist. This includes one Jurgen Altmann, a German sonic weapons expert, who claims there is no reliable evidence of defecation, nausea, or vomiting caused by infrasound.

As the century-old Forum Theatre quakes, the condition of my sphincter worsens. I disturb myself with an analogy: an explorer who reaches magnetic north must ultimately head south while still heading in the same direction. It’ll all head south eventually.

This is Swans. An obscene frequency, perceiving an illusory pain that delves beyond sound to the point of uncomfortable bliss. Perhaps Jurgen Altmann should put down his oscilloscope and spend some time with the experts.