#phil puleo

[thebowerypresents]

Swans – Racket – May 16, 2024

Swans rose up out of the Lower East Side more than four decades ago, led by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira. They’ve survived a long breakup and another hiatus, and last year the highly influential experimental outfit put out their 16th studio album, The Beggar, which the Guardian dubbed, “dark and unsettling, purifying and beautiful.”

And with their spring tour just about over, Swans have returned to New York City for their last three shows of the year, the first of which was a rowdy affair in the Meatpacking District last night at Racket. 

(Swans close out their tour at Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight and tomorrow.)

Photos courtesy of Lexi Yob | @filmbyyobby

[spilladabalia]

Cop Shoot Cop - Lo.Com.Denom.

[elsotemo]

The Beggar

[aleprouswitch]

Cop Shoot Cop

[jgthirlwell]

11.26.21 Human Impact kicked off their US tour with a powerful, ass-kicking show at Market Hotel in Brooklyn. Human Impact consist of Chris Spencer (Unsane), Chris Pravdica (Services, Swans), Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop, Baby Zizanie) and Phil Puleo (Cop Shoot Cop, Swans)

[rainingmusic]

Swans - Screen Shot

[omegaplus]

# 3,353

Human Impact: “Contact” (2020)

Human Impact came on the scene in the final month of 2019 and quickly gained lots of press and fanfare based off the combined credentials of Unsane, Cop Shoot Cop, Xiu Xiu, and Swans. Their highly-respectable and praised self-titled debut effort landed only last month but it feels like it’s been around much longer. The coronavirus has not only halted lives at a frightening rate but also the economy and everyone’s way of life in unprecedented and distressing results. Touring and performing livelihoods of musicians have also taken a huge hit for the most part. Though the team of Chris Spencer, Chris Pravdica, Jim Coleman, and Phil Puleo had no immediate plans to tour, they chose to stay active after their debut and planned several orphaned tracks throughout the year. “Contact” was the first in line to be released; written and recorded before the coronavirus outbreak but somehow released only yesterday. As how omnipresent and widespread the -virus has been, “Contact” approaches you face-to-face and there’s no avoiding it; leaving you no choice but to confront it one-on-one. It encapsulates the sentiments and thoughts of practically every living and breathing human being dealing with the pandemic: the global fear of the unknown (“I can tell that this all leads to something that’s mean”), its’ ugly pervasiveness  (”spreading disease through the crowd as they leave”), effects, and the dreaded consequences (”I can tell that this all ends with some fucked up scene”). Spencer’s vocal quality amazingly hasn’t changed since his parting days from Unsane and press harder on the urgency of the situation. Even an accompanying video was made from fan submissions all over bringing to light the many social situations and current ways of life at hand. From indifferent crowds, the homeless fending for themselves, even self-quarantining at home with record collections, proves that everyone is in this together.

Partial proceeds of this single will be donated to the New York City Covid-19 Relief Fund.

[ghostcultmagazine]

ALBUM REVIEW: Human Impact – Human Impact Comprising members of Unsane, Swans and Cop Shoot Cop, New York quartet Human Impact embrace all of those bands' qualities and add a rebellious Noise element which belies the middle age quickly enveloping the protagonists.

[17secondsphotography]

© Kris T. Therrian 17 seconds photography. All rights reserved.

[reckonslepoisson]

Leaving Meaning, Swans (2019)

Leaving Meaning is a difficult record to place in the Swans discography. No, it isn’t quite as full-on, enthralling, intricate and engulfing as either The Seer or To Be Kind. But those are easily two of the decade’s finest rock records. It treads the path of neofolk works like Children of God and The Burning World (two of my least favourite Swans projects), though is far more atmospheric and complex, and often indulges in ambient passages and field recordings like those on Soundtracks for the Blind. It isn’t the sharp reinvention of the band that we saw in their most recent reincarnation, but it’s still clearly another new, distinct phase.

And the clearest signifier that Leaving Meaning embraces something fresh isn’t just the more clearly-folky instrumentation but also the near-glacial pace at which so much of it builds and excites. Not that Swans weren’t already known for repetition and gradual, tectonic shift-changes, but here are some of their most subtle, slow and magnificent so far. Moments like the final movement of ‘The Nub’ are exceptional, owing a lot to the sheer number of musicians Michael Gira has employed to piece the record together. As with each of Swans’ projects over the past decade, Leaving Meaning is littered with external contributions. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, Ben Frost and The Necks join previous Swans members Phil Puleo, Norman Westberg, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica throughout the disc, and their virtue can be heard throughout. The extended atmospheres and enchanting vocals make neofolk sound more complex than ever.

Yet, Leaving Meaning clearly isn’t a record of the same stature as the likes of To Be Kind or The Seer. Despite being half an hour shorter, it feels longer. There’s less sprawl, less stylistic variation but less overall concept too. Each track is an individual being, a matter that wouldn’t be an issue unless some tracks really failed to build towards anything worthwhile. Particularly ‘Cathedrals of Heaven’ and ‘Leaving Meaning’ leave me a bit wanting; their lengthiness not as apparently purposeful or worthwhile given their climaxes.

That leaves this new generation of Swans in a rather odd place. Gira and co. are still the genre-leading pioneers they’ve long been, exceptional at forging atmospheres and building austere spirituality into rock songs. Yet Leaving Meaning offers those things with flecks of inconsistency that they haven’t showed in two decades. Though this is still an impressive record , the fact that there are determinable lows makes it slightly disappointing in the wake of the excellent decade of releases they have only just provided.

Pick: ‘The Nub’

[mr-ig]

A farewell to Swans

Later tonight in New York, this particular version of Swans will play together for the last time and then dissolve. Another version of Swans will follow, we are told, but has yet to take a form. Whatever that form, it's impossible to imagine that it won't have to live in the shadow of this extraordinary line-up, that it won't be shaped by its gravity. It's impossible not to see this as an ending rather than a beginning.

It seems like longer, but it's a little more than seven years - 27th October 2010, to be precise - since I had my first encounter with this new Swans line-up, at the Concorde 2 in Brighton. I hadn't been certain about going. I'd drifted away from them in the mid-nineties; I had no appetite at all for a trip down memory lane. I went mainly out of curiosity, my interest piqued by Michael Gira's insistence that this would be something new and distinct. When Gira insists on something, it tends to happen.

That night, you could feel that they were still finding their way. The set was comparatively short, contained a scattering of old material, lacked a really decisive direction. The volume was moderate. Some lines were fluffed, tempers sometimes a little frayed. But in the extended opening of "No Words/No Thoughts" and the elements of what would eventually become "The Seer", I found something elemental, something that I hadn't realised I'd been attempting to live without. In those moments, they raised the tension in the room to the point where you couldn't breathe and then sent it all crashing down again and again and again, pushing themselves to the edge of physical endurance, pushing themselves far beyond the point where any other, any lesser band would stop. In those brutal and ravishing moments, you could feel not diminishing echoes of the band they once were but the rising clamour of the band they would imminently become.

In the intervening years, I've seen them another nine times. That's testament to Gira's relentless work ethic as much as my own enthusiasm. There have been troughs as well as peaks: I recall an especially unsatisfying evening at the Electric in Brixton in 2014, at which the ear-splitting volume seemed to smother any subtlety, almost every key line was fluffed, and the set list appeared in dire need of a re-write. The overall effect was of a band in very steep decline. Less than a week later, they performed exactly the same set list in Brighton with such precise, furious force that you could feel the air trembling. It culminated in the crescendo of "Bring the Sun" which built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built and built, burning and ecstatic and utterly sexual, teetering on the edge, then finally collapsing spent and exhausted, gasping for air. It was f***ing beautiful. A pure celebration of existence.

They could do that. Not always, but sometimes. And sometimes is better than never, which is what everyone else trades in. Those moments when it felt as if you were sharing the room with an exploding sun, when your body might disintegrate into atoms. Those moments when they'd start to bring the strands of an idea together from a spell of separated dissonance, when they'd suddenly catch a phrase or a movement and you'd think, "That. Right there. Just play that. Play it until it hurts me. Play it until it erases everything else. Play it until it buries us all." And they would, and then some. Those moments when I'd close my eyes and meditate in the middle of the crowd, concentrating on breathing in and breathing out, lost completely in the here and now. They could do that, and I've rarely felt more alive.

A few more things I'll remember always. A version of what possibly became "Screen Shot" which levitated and shimmered in a way that can only be described as gorgeous, redefining what this band was capable of, how lightly it might tread. The way that "A Little God In My Hands" became this unstoppable groove, brassed-up funk hammering down and down, another breathtaking redefinition. The conclusion of a spectacular show at London's Koko, Gira bellowing revolutionary slogans and miming throat-slitting while his band did its utmost to strip the paint from the walls. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gira leaning away from the microphone and out into the audience at the end of "Cloud of Unknowing" and singing gently to us as if clutching us to his chest, a lullaby, a redemption.

And best of all, that final London show at the Roundhouse. When they'd played there before, it had seemed a little too big for them, perhaps too much of a stretch to muster the required intensity in such a vast space. But somehow, at the second attempt, the sense of occasion lifted them to new heights, and perhaps the relative absence of work-in-progress did no harm too. They play for the customary two-and-a-half hours with such grace and power that it seems impossible to believe that it's the last time; it feels as if every second is made to count, not a single note wasted. They've never been better. They're about to end it all, and they've never been better.  

And there it is. While everyone else was playing old albums in their entirety to the people who'd bought them in the first place, turning rock'n'roll into a museum with a particularly cynical gift shop, here was the alternative. Now thirty-five years old, Swans have not merely added to their substantial history and influence but have done their utmost to eclipse it, to render it irrelevant. In one key sense, they've succeeded: it used to be compulsory to begin every Swans review with tales of volume-induced vomiting and locked doors; they've escaped the pull of those apocryphal tales. They have existed in the moment; the moment has been their sole justification; they depart in the same spirit.

And finally, after all this time, Gira has had the audience he's long deserved, one coming in search of the new and the undiscovered, one willing to listen and to experience. At the Roundhouse, only a couple of people push past on their way to or from the bar over the course of nearly two and a half hours. This, the last time we'll be in a space with the most extraordinary live band we've ever witnessed...it's far too precious for alcohol to blur, far too vital for distraction. We want to be overwhelmed one last time, to drown ourselves in the vastness of Swans' engulfing tide. We're not here to take pictures of it on our phones.

One last bow, then. Christoph Hahn. Thor Harris. Paul Wallfisch. Phil Puleo. Christopher Pravdica. Norman Westberg. He's been Jayne Mansfield. And the curtain falls. And the space empties. And we wonder what can possibly fill it.

[spilladabalia]

Cop Shoot Cop - If Tomorrow Ever Comes

[buzztvportugal-blog]

Swans vão ao Porto apresentar nova banda e novo disco.

Swans vão ao Porto apresentar nova banda e novo disco.

Os míticos Swans vão regressar a Portugal em 2020 para um concerto único no Hard Club, Porto a 10 de Maio, com nova formação e novo disco na bagagem.

A banda de Michael Gira, fundador do grupo em 1982, voltará com uma nova formação composta por ira actuará com Ben Frost, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Christopher Pravdica e Phil Puleo e com novo disco. “Leaving Meaning” ainda não tem data de…

[scenepointblank]

Human Impact, comprised of singer/guitarist Chris Spencer (Unsane), keyboardist Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop), bassist Chris Pravdica (Swans, Xiu Xiu) and drummer Phil Puleo (Cop Shoot Cop, Swans), has released a new COVID-19 themed song titled "Contact." All proceeds from the new single will benefit NYC COVID-19 Emergency Relief. The song was written shortly before the outbreak as a response to a feeling of vulnerability to its spread, the song now takes on new meaning, the band says. Human Impact just released its self-titled debut album last month on Ipecac Recordings. Watch "Contact" after the bump.   via Scene Point Blank music news feed

[opsikpro]

Ex-UNSANE Vocalist Launches New Band HUMAN IMPACT

Ex-UNSANE Vocalist Launches New Band HUMAN IMPACT

[ad_1]

Unsane recently called it quits after founding guitarist and vocalist Chris Spencer decided to leave the band. In the same interview where Spencer announced the end of Unsane, he also announced a new band called Human Impact. The band features Spencer Jim Coleman (ex-Cop Shoot Cop), Chris Pravdica (ex-Swans), and Phil Puleo (ex-Cop Shoot Cop, ex-Swans), and you can hear the…

[ghostcultmagazine]

Ghost Cult caught up with Chris and Jim from Human Impact! Comrpiosed of New York underground music legends vocalist and guitarist Chris Spencer [Unsane], bassist Chris Pravdica [Swans, Xiu Xiu], keyboardist Jim Coleman [Cop Shoot Cop], and drummer Phil Puleo [Cop Shoot Cop, Swans] — and earned acclaim for their 2020 self-titled debut, Human Impact [Ipecac Records] and their recent 2021 release EP1. The band just kicked off a headline tour, and chatted about their origins, how the group git together, the old-school scene in New York City, working with Ipecac Records and Greg Werkman, and plans for their next album release. Interview by Ghost Cult Keefy (https://ift.tt/2LlAx1W). Video editing by Omar Cordy of OJC Photography (https://www.instagram.com/ojcpics​​​​). Theme music by Salted Wounds (https://ift.tt/31seIpV). Buy Human Impact music: https://ift.tt/3rpkXZJ Gear we use: (These are affiliate links and Ghost Cult makes a small profit from a sale) Set up A: Sony A7 III - https://amzn.to/3tQm422 Tamron 17-28 - https://amzn.to/3ePrlTd Tamron 28-75 - https://amzn.to/3fqCjgY Desview Mavo-P5 Monitor- https://amzn.to/33LlTub Manfrotto Befree Travel Tripod - https://amzn.to/3hxbL0e Set up B: Canon 80D - https://amzn.to/3ye8WqV Sigma MC-11 - https://amzn.to/3brZdU2 Sigma 18-35 - https://amzn.to/3tLlEd7 Tokina 11-16 - https://amzn.to/3bty9Uk Feelworld T7 Monitor - https://amzn.to/2Re9hta Audio: Sound Devices MixPre-3 - https://amzn.to/3tKkJd2 Gearlux XLR Mic Cable - 3 Pack - https://amzn.to/3w3zN6Y Deity D3 Microphone - https://amzn.to/3tRa6W2 Fifine Usb Mic - https://amzn.to/3w8JHEG Lighting: YONGNUO YN600L - https://amzn.to/2QkNrn5 YONGNUO YN300 Air - https://amzn.to/2QjN5gu Dfuse Softbox - https://amzn.to/3uQq4AN Aputure MC - https://amzn.to/3oirFgx NanLite PavoTube II 6C - http://bit.ly/NanLitePavoTubeII Lightstands - https://amzn.to/3uSBl3x 5 in 1 Reflector - https://amzn.to/33KHdjo And our iconic Rope Light https://amzn.to/3ycdmyz For the full list of Ghost Cult gear: http://bit.ly/OJCPicsKit This video contains a shoutout to Altareth (https://ift.tt/3Eflyki) Get yours by visiting our pinned post on Twitter! https://twitter.com/GhostCultMag/status/1142861626590355456 by Ghost Cult Magazine