Hitting the Brown Note With No Wave Pioneers, Swans

With a reputation as bowel-antagonist extraordinaire, no wave pioneers, Swans, are perhaps the closest humanity has come to executing a successful brown note.

I awaken to find my cochlear shredded by a wood-rasp. My bowel functions at fifty-percent, abandoning me in the purgatory of gurgle and diarrhoea. Sweaty, questioning all I profess to understand, I realise my eardrums have been replaced with pin cushions. Last night, I saw Swans.

The excessive decibel spewing from Swans’ tortured 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 snuggles in symbiosis 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.

The frontman’s mission statement of provocation through sound was obvious from the beginning—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.

A miserable smattering of loners plot optimum viewing position; taking heed, I crumple side stage. Swans hit the arena and a menacing Charles Manson clone commences the savage rape of his tubular bells. Mike Oldfield he is not. This is the intro to No Words/No Thoughts, the opening track to Swans’ unapologetic 2010 release, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky.

A prowling Jeffery Dahmer clone pounces the stage and assaults his hammer dulcimer—a stunning instrument portraying a hypnotic tone with a deep, earthy resonance. Dramatic, yet ornate. The idea of dulcimer and bells isolated without context defies the spirit of brutality in which Swans aim to deliver. But together, urgently cajoled and cranked to volumes beyond decree, the noise takes my breath away.

Gira skulks the stage resembling an uncle not to associate with. His hat is magnificent. He lurches back and forth on his trailing leg, stamping his front foot in opposing time to the dulcimer/bells combination. I scout the room. The usual expression of joy at the beginning of a concert is not apparent, but a disproportionate amount of collapsed jaws is. By the audio booth, a mustachioed gentleman adjusts his earplugs. Pussy.

With a conductorial lurch, Gira commands his men to action. Internally, my impulses suggest I’m being rhythmically sodomised by a hairy dominatrix. Aurally speaking, a slave-ship metronome based around one relentless note is taking place. A stark drone. Meditation as the antithesis of meditation.

The megalithic wall of feedback coaxes a fractal swirl of astonishment and fear in equal measure. I wrinkle involuntarily as the dystopian climate calls for retreat. The volume of blood required to maintain neural-gland efficacy surrenders to my lower intestine.

*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.

Before Gira utters lyric one, the crowd majority recoil to distances beyond the perimeter of the pavilion. The brown note is in play, as squelchy fudges of drone finger the colon to near evacuation. Body and brain are no longer simpatico.

The brown note is a perverse frequency that sadistic musicians enjoy deploying onto 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. 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 stomach worsens into unchartered territory. I grasp the absurdity of the situation, and comfort myself with an analogy: a northbound explorer must ultimately reach Magnetic North—a curve of the earth that alters the compass to south, despite the explorer still pointing in the original direction. Eventually, I’ll come down.

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