My Canon: Going Places by Yellow Swans

So much of it is the title and the album art.

In April 2008, Yellow Swans announced they would break up, in June 2008 they played their final show and in March 2010 they released their final album. Some conclusions become consequential with time, when it becomes clear that thing we all thought was a continuation was actually an end. Fewer conclusions are designed to be conclusions. Yellow Swans decided it was time to stop and then spent the next year-and-a-half recording and then editing down something like a hundred hours of drones. They knew Going Places was the end.

Yellow Swans was and is Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman (they reformed and have been playing shows here and there for the past two years (but haven't played a show in Philadelphia since coming back (but a man can hope))). Like many bands in their circle, they released more music than I can ever listen to, regardless of how much I enjoy the art. There are the albums put out by "big" labels like Load, the CD-Rs you had to get at a show, the cassettes dubbed in some generous soul's bedroom. Their Bandcamp page has 38 releases, which sounds like a lot until you realize Discogs has charted 73 releases. I've taken a not-insignificant portion of my life philosophy from Silver Jews and they didn't even have 73 songs.

The size of the catalog doesn't alter the weight of its finale, especially given how different these records could be, and Going Places, as I said, is an ambient drone record. Does the music feel like the transition of an important flight because of the album art or does the album art reflect being in flight because the music dictated it should? It doesn't matter. Going Places is the entire package. Everything is as important as everything else.

[A side-note that your feelings about Going Places as an ambient record may vary from my own. It's certainly less aggressive than some of Yellow Swans' earlier work and it eschews the high-pitched squeals that make so much noise a pain to listen to, but I also recognize that I've listened to a lot of this stuff and what I find comforting may sound like sheer hellish miasma to you. Maybe twelve years ago I was in an office I shared with a coworker during a particularly soul-crushing internship. She was playing minimal techno and asked what I liked to work to. Explaining I was happy with whatever she wanted to play, I said the stuff that helped me focus best was Merzbow-style noise because it constantly shifted and changed, meaning my brain and its OCD couldn't latch onto any lyrics or melodies and start focusing on those. I didn't mention Merzbow or OCD, though. She wanted to hear some of it, I played about five seconds of Merzbow's Pulse Demon and she looked at me like I had just played hardcore pornography in our workplace.]

There's a cautious optimism to the title that struck me before I'd ever heard the record. That's how the music feels, too, like the members of Yellow Swans are feeling out what their next steps will be. Given this music was whittled down from improvisations, it makes sense. Nothing here is definite (even, it turned out, this being the end of the band). It's two people who collaborate on a reflexive and psychic level, trying things out and then refining that work. It could have been called "Here Goes," if that wasn't a vastly inferior title, okay forget it, it couldn't have been called that, bad idea.

"Going Places" is the perfect name for an ending that isn't an ending. Yellow Swans stopped, but its members kept making music. "Going Places" means I'm not going to be here any longer. It doesn't mean I'm not coming back. It doesn't mean I'm not going to be anywhere.

Yellow Swans have plenty of album and song titles that allude to endings, anyway. Psychic Secession, At All Ends, "Endlessly Making An End Of Things," even something like "I Woke Up." Without lyrics, the noise's meaning is more open to your input– not that I'd assume to definitively know what any piece of art is about anyway– but I've been listening to these records for almost two decades and they've never feel like closing doors. They aren't full of depression and doom, they usually don't build to epic conclusions, they aren't the work of black metal-adjacent babies pretending the world is pure hell. The art is too transcendent for that. Going Places is a journey, but it isn't the last journey.

And maybe this is me injecting my Western, atheistic ideas about death as sorrowful into things, maybe death involves transcending more than it does stopping, but I've lost just enough people that I don't view death as moving on to anywhere. I fear it. I can hear apprehension in Going Places, but the album is too serene for fear. There's a track called "Opt Out," but there's also one called "New Life." Going Places is two people clearing up loose ends, preparing for life apart, but the music you're hearing was made in tight collaboration. It's notable that they broke the band up so they could remain friends, choosing to stop the touring grind before it made them hate each other.

There's no way for me to talk about wordless art without sounding like a middle school poet. You see reviews of ambient albums and the writers are like "As I listened to this record, I felt I was finally alive," and you think they're baboons reaching for profundity. It's hard to express the feelings you get from things that are themselves expressing feelings without words. There is so much less of a guidepost here than there is for a Leonard Cohen song. I know how I relate to Nina Nastasia work because I have a firm grasp on what she's putting out into the world, but when Yellow Swans use vocals, they're indecipherable and abstract. As far as I'm aware (and, again, there are close to a hundred Yellow Swans releases, so I could be wrong) there's never been a Yellow Swans lyric. It is hard to cogently analyze heavily-manipulated guitar and electronics. Which is fine.

What matters to me is I love it.