Since disbanding the legendary avant-punk Swans in 1997, Michael Gira has founded the experimental label Young God Records, released a highly regarded all-instrumental record (1998's Body Lovers), written short-stories and, perhaps most importantly, founded a new band, Angels of Light. This shifting collective of talented musicians, inspired and led by Gira, released its third album, Everything Is Good Here Please Come Home, in 2003. Brilliantly dense and achingly bare, it offers arresting images, imponderable questions and the sheer physical joy of music. It's the kind of disc that feels important the first time you hear it, that insinuates its way into the furthest reaches of your brain and, in some indefinable way, starts changing things around. It's a disc that will continue to have an impact weeks, maybe months after the last time you hear it.

We recently spoke to Angels' self-described "demented impresario" Michael Gira about his early 1960s musical awakening, the ways he's changed since fronting Swans, the head-splitting difficulty of creating an album like Everything Is Good and the incredible cast of musical collaborators who helped him make it work.

Splendid: You've made a career out of creating, finding and disseminating difficult (but ultimately rewarding) music. Can you talk a little about why it's important (if it is) for people who like music to challenge themselves and listen to things that they may not immediately understand?

Michael Gira: That's a very good question, actually. I don't personally know how to answer it, though. As someone who makes things, I always look for new ways to go about the process and grow bored unless I challenge myself in some way. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a virtue to do so, though.

As a listener, I appreciate it when something sounds original, and transmits a sense of urgent personal commitment, too, but that doesn't mean the music's necessarily better than other music. I'm not precious (I hope) about the music I make or the music I listen to, either. Usually, the music I respond to these days is far away from any arty or self-conscious notions. I get true joy from James Brown, Howlin' Wolf, the Carter Family, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, as well as the Beach Boys and the Beatles and countless other "popular" music-makers. I guess all of them are true originals, but they're definitely not "difficult".

I listened to a recent NPR special about Willie Nelson, for instance, and was just awestruck at the purity of his music, guitar playing and singing, and of course his phenomenal capacities as a songwriter (I have a few things by him, but now I have to go buy everything!) But I long ago resigned myself to accepting that I don't have those natural capacities. What I do is very particular to who I am, with its own set of boundaries and limitations, and I do the best I can and work within them, pushing myself as far as I can. I'm grateful to have an audience that seems to get something rewarding from it, too...

Splendid: Do you think that music serves a larger purpose than entertainment? If so, what is it?

Michael Gira: I don't know. Tibetan ritual music, for instance, is certainly made with intentions other than entertainment, but it's all-enveloping, and leads you instantly to a deep, buried place inside you. It's engrossing, mesmerizing, all-consuming. Those are truly "entertaining" qualities. Then again, the song "Rain" by the Beatles is equally engrossing to me, but in a different way, of course. In the end, I don't know if there's a qualitative difference between these two examples.

Splendid: How did you, personally, get started listening to and playing music? How old were you and what kind of music was it? Do you still like this stuff or have your tastes changed completely?

Michael Gira: Like everyone else, I suppose the music was just there in the media, and I responded to it at an early age. Jesus, it goes so far back. Chubby Checker! The Righteous Brothers! The Ronettes! Ha ha! And then later The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Dylan, but also Love, The Doors, The Seeds, Hendrix, The Mothers of Invention, The Velvet Underground, early Pink Floyd...

I just consumed that stuff as a child of the times, though, with no "critical" understanding. Music then, especially in the mid to late sixties had a real cultural power -- if you were young, it was yours, and it served as a sort of evolving code of rebellion against consumerism, the Viet Nam war, etcetera, and was for hedonism/sex, drugs, and "freedom" -- all pretty naive notions, but preferable in my mind to the completely corporate quality of most popular music these days.... I'm old enough to remember the "Summer of Love", but I also remember that summer seeing four or five Hell's Angels ruthlessly stomp a young hippie into a bloody pulp in my local park. I still remember the sound -- the dull thud -- of their boots against his skull (the first real brutal violence I'd ever seen). What a bummer! Ha ha!

The first instrument I tried to play was a harmonica. I hitch-hiked across the US a couple of times in the early seventies and used to play it standing at offramps waiting for a ride. What a cliché! Later, when I was in junior college, I remember a friend of mine and I trying to play along with guitars, and me singing, to the Rolling Stones album Sticky fingers. What a mess. It wasn't until punk happened, though, around '76/'77, that I started to think about really putting together a band and singing, which I first did in '78 or so...I actually still love all that old '60s music, but I don't listen to it much...

Splendid: There's something very spiritual about all of your work, but I'm noticing that whereas the Swans records dealt with very extreme concepts -- god and the devil, sin and redemption -- Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home seems more rooted in the here and now, the details of human life. Is that a fair observation? Want to talk about why your approach (or outlook) changed, if it did?

Michael Gira: I don't really set out with an agenda when I write now. Whatever floats through my world at the time gets snatched out of the air and used as a beginning point for a song -- from personal experiences, memories, to books I'm reading, to what's streaming through the mass media.

These days I'm less fanatical and single-minded than I used to be. In the early days I was particularly obsessed with mass media, and especially its shaping of desire, need, and consciousness in general. Also work/money/sex/power/god/religion etcetera -- all abstractions, in the end, that I took into myself and used as an excuse to vent my limitless rage! Ha ha! This is a very simplistic description of course, and doesn't really answer your question.

I would say any spirituality I possess is found in the music itself, in the performance of it and the effect it has on me -- sort of a quasi-magical environment you can sink into for a while, something like that. I don't know if that qualifies as spirituality, though...

Splendid: You've described the process of making this album as follows: "I ended up saturating every available molecule of the recording tape with sound, then hacked, cut, poured sonic fertilizer/salt on the resultant wounds, and it finally metastasized into this raging/weeping BEAST, which in the end succeeded in slowly biting off my head." Was it more difficult than usual or is this just a normal day at the office for Angels of Light?

Michael Gira: Oh, it's always a nightmare, from beginning to end, but it's a self created hell, and I love it. This last album was particularly difficult, though, but it was worth it, in that it lead the music into a place I didn't expect it to go...

Splendid: I've been reading this Simon Frith book (Performing Rites, highly recommended) and it has a whole chapter about film music and how it conveys emotion. You seem to be really good at getting music to represent different emotional states. Have you done any film work? Do you want to?

Michael Gira: It's always been a dream of mine to do film music. I did the music to an independent film called Two Small Bodies by Beth B years ago, but nothing's presented itself since then -- just a different world, and I don't have any connections there. Anyway, I started thinking about the recording process as an opportunity to create a particularized sense of place, as opposed to just depicting a band in a room or something, very early in Swans, around 1985/6, and have for the most part pursued that goal ever since -- in wildly different ways, of course...

Splendid: I was hoping you could talk specifically about some of the songs on your current album. I love the way that "Palisades" switches between a very sparse, acoustic ballad in the verse, and a very dense almost orchestral chorus. Can you talk about how you built that song, why you left some of it relatively bare and why and how you built so many layers of sound in other parts?

Michael Gira: As with many (though not all) of the songs on this record, my acoustic guitar and voice were on tape first, so I was able to look at it clinically and think about how to make a sonic story/drama out of it, which might work with the words to create a little world in which the song would live. It was built up intuitively, though, often growing just by the input of the various musicians, who would come up with their own parts based on an initial direction from me.

I knew that the verses needed to have a sort of nostalgic nursery rhyme quality, and orchestrated it with that in mind. The banjo you hear at the beginning was random, though. I'd asked David Coulter to send me a series of drones, or repetitive figures played on several of the dozens of instruments he plays, and I just randomly searched through the CDR he sent, and pushed play, and the banjo was pretty much in time and in tune, and it worked.

I very much enjoy "accidents" like that. On the other hand, the sort of spacy vibrato sound you hear on the second verse and final chorus is a part Christopher Hahn came up with on his own, without direction. The final chorus was an attempt at getting a skewed sense of a gospel choir, which the melody of the vocal implied to me...So, I guess things are built with a combination of my first imaginings of the atmosphere of the song's place, then the input of others, then serendipitous random nuances, then of course the mixing process, which involves a lot of editing and choices of what sounds to keep or eliminate for specific sections.

Splendid: There's an almost ritualistic feel to a couple of the tracks on the new album -- "All Souls' Rising" and "Rose of Los Angeles" in particular. I've read in other interviews that you travel a lot. Did you draw on other cultures' music in writing or arranging these songs? If so, which ones and what do you get from them?

Michael Gira: "All Souls' Rising" was a "band" song, in that it was rehearsed and played live with a band for a long time before it was recorded. It's just an insane groove that grew out of the feel of the song, inherent in the original acoustic guitar part. Dana and Larry's drums and bass pretty much carry the whole thing through. The basic tracks were recorded all at once, together in a room.

The real task on this song for me was really how to steer it away from that, because I wanted the song to be more like a film than a depiction of a band in the room. So that came from the subsequent orchestration, again with similar approach to the above method.

As far as it reflecting the influences of other cultures, that really wasn't my intent. It grew organically and intuitively on its own terms. The lyrics were written after reading Madison Smartt Bell's book All Souls' Rising -- a historical novel about the almost mythically bloody slave revolts in Haiti in the late 18th century. It'd be silly for me to try to pilfer any music or feel from that culture, though. I don't think that's really there. In fact, the words don't really tell any kind of "story" directly related to the book -- they just reflect the atmosphere that was in my head after reading it, without any attempt at being literal. Still, the feel of the song pretty much fits with the words, I hope...

"Rose of Los Angeles" is a song written about watching someone die. Her sons gather around her, and some of the words are from her perspective. This song was played live for a long time, also with the same live band. We recorded that version, but I hated it and erased it because it was too moping and dolorous. So I recorded the acoustic guitar and voice first, much faster than the original, then built it up. I tried to get a sense of a joyous Cajun (or is it Creole?) wake -- but removed it (hopefully) from any direct reference to that... Also, I remember the atmosphere/memory of Dylan's "Everybody Must Get Stoned" song (don't think that's the actual title) floating around in my head as it was built up...

Splendid: "Kosinski" or "Kosinsky" -- it's spelled both ways -- is beautiful, and I really like the violin and guitar part, and obviously it works on the surface as a love song, but for me, the line "I'm not here now" twists the whole thing into a knot. Is the guy just away or dead or is the whole thing a dream or what? Or should I just get a life and stop worrying about it?

Michael Gira: It's really a song about voyeurism, or living in a sort of third-person state, which was a quality Kosinski had, always being outside himself looking down at what was happening, rather than being in-the-moment. It's another "book" song, written after reading his biography. I guess I identify with that quality, sometimes. The character in the song is simply watching, from outside, through a window, a beautiful young girl brush her hair.

Splendid: "Sunset Park" feels more like a pop song than anything else on the album -- it has sort of a trippy late Beatles feel to it. Do you like certain kinds of pop?

Michael Gira: The "pop" I like is of the variety mentioned above, and of course includes The Beatles.

"Pop" music now? It's just horrible, and most just sounds like it was created after a bunch of marketing professionals got together and decided the potential demographics the "song" would reach. In fact, I just recently heard that there's a new computer program you can use that has all the salient characteristics of hit singles from the last 50 years or so programmed into it, and it's used both by "songwriters" (the help them write a "hit") and by marketing types to decide what should be the single from an album. Lovely....

Anyway, that song was originally the ending to a completely different song, which I discarded. Again, it was built up from acoustic guitar first, then drums, bass, etcetera, added later. Dana developed the bass part beautifully, and it does have the rubbery feel of McCartney's bass. The background vocals that bleed through the whole thing are about 20 tracks of me just singing/improvising down in the huge basement of the studio (BC Studios) where it was recorded. The "lead" vocal is me and Devendra Banhart singing the same phrase over and over, superimposed over the groove/drone. I don't really think it's a "pop" song, though!

Splendid: Your web site where you say that the last tour would bear no resemblance to either the current album or any previous Angels of Light tours. How was it different? Different people? Different songs?

Michael Gira: There were no drums or percussion of any kind. I wanted to see if I could make it work without that element. Don't know if I succeeded, but it felt good anyway.

I played amplified acoustic guitar and sang, Christopher Hahn played electric guitar and open-tuned lap steel, Patrick Fondiller played bass and mandolin, and Devendra played electric guitar. There were many new songs in the set, as well as some previous Angels songs and some Swans material. It sounded absolutely nothing like the current album. Ha ha!

Splendid: Angels of Light, as I understand it, is sort of an evolving entity, with different people involved at different times. Can you talk about the people you worked with this time around and how they contributed to the album?

Michael Gira: The people I work with are all incredibly talented, and generally I have to feel some sort of kinship with them to invite them in the first place. My position is something like that of a demented, frothing impresario, trying to wrangle them into the world I imagine for the music at hand. But then again, what I imagine is often not clearly defined, in a musical sense -- more an emotional area I want to get at, or even a "visual" place. So I can be very difficult to work with, because my directions are often unclear.

So, that said, each musician brings his own sensibility. Sometimes it fits instantly, other times it takes some frustrating trial and error. But no matter what, the final sound would be impossible to achieve without them.

Larry Mullins is someone I've known for years now. I first met him at a Swans show, when he was Iggy Pop's drummer, and he came backstage and introduced himself. We hit it off right away, and inevitably he played with Swans for a while, then has contributed/played on every Angels album. He's immensely skilled musically, plays all sorts of orchestral percussion, drums, and also plays organ on the last two albums as well. Christoph Hahn played in Swans for a few recordings, as well as toured, towards its end. He's also contributed to every Angels recording. He lives in Berlin, Germany, but his natural inclination is to play traditional country or roots rock style guitar. Weird! In the old days with Swans it was a struggle to veer him away from those influences, but now I find myself utilizing his natural tendencies more and more, though not to the extent he'd like, I'm sure! I draw the line when something sounds too specifically of one genre or another...

Dana Schechter has played with Angels for several years now, too. She often plays piano as well as bass. She has her own band, Bee and Flower. Thor Harris is along the same lines as Larry, an "orchestral" percussionist as well as a drummer. Live, he also played zither, as well as piano and organ, sometimes all at once, along with vibes, kick drum and snare and cymbals -- a one man band. I met him in Austin, Texas, where, similar to Larry, he came backstage and introduced himself. He was Lisa Germano's drummer at the time, someone whose music I've admired. David Coulter has a great record on YGR called INterVENTION. He plays everything from didgeridoo, banjo, ukelele, violin, jew's harp -- and much more, a great multi-instrumentalist. He recently completed a stint at some fancy school in England as a professor of music. He organized and arranged the children's choir on the song "Wedding". The only instruction I gave him was that it should sound like a tape machine slowing down and speeding up! Ha! I think he's going to be involved more extensively on the next Angels record.

Bryin Dall is a completely untrained "guitarist" who by his own admission has no idea how to play the guitar at all in the usual sense. He has a collection of weirdly treated guitars that he hits and probes in various was, then treats with a multitude of weird electronic gizmos. He plays with Genesis P-Orridge in Thee Majesty. David Garland is a DJ at NYC's public radio station, WNYC -- a classically trained musician and composer. He did an interview with me there, and we stayed in touch occasionally. I knew I needed flute -- or fife (particularly for "Rose of Los Angeles"), and out of the blue, as I was recording, he sent me an email saying that by the way he played flute in case I needed one, without having heard I was looking (that's how it goes).

Patrick Fondiller is the bartender at my local pub! I'd spent hours talking to him (ahem), and liked him immensely, and since he plays bass and mandolin (as well as guitar) I naturally asked him to get involved eventually. There you go; there's a ton of other great people/musicians on the recording, but I can't go on here endlessly....

Splendid: Will there be more Angels of Light albums? Are there things you want to try that haven't gotten on any of the previous albums? What sort of absurd and malignant expectations should we, as listeners, be harboring?

Michael Gira: My goal for the next recording is simplicity and clarity, very minimal, with no drums. There will probably be some orchestration though. I'm still gestating on this.

Splendid: How are things going at Young God Records? What have you got in the works now?

Michael Gira: We're recording a new Devendra Banhart album this summer, for release early next year, then after recording that we'll start on new Angels album. Also coming soon is an album by the wonderful UK experimental/electronic musician Scanner.