(Our editor recently gave a quick take on a new EP by the Swedish lunatics Swærmmm, which is the second part of a planned trilogy, and today DGR gives it a longer take, while wishing he could see what the EP will do to you.)
Swærmmm –
While the brain is tempted to take a shortcut and hallucinate its own phrase in the same way many of our current AI overlords are hallucinating medical advice and legal procedures, if memory serves correctly there is an old shopping bag of a saying which states that everyone has about one good book in them.
We’re of course discussing humanity’s wider ability to create in that aspect, as I highly doubt many of us could pen a full book and have it be a combination of cohesive or interesting. But if taken on a holistic level, everyone has at least one good “something” they can unleash out into the world whether it be music, artwork, writing, or any other combination of craft.
On that same aspect it seems that every musician has one project in them that boils down into abject chaos. It is as if the idea of regular musical creativity is not enough anymore, and at a certain point a sort of subconscious gremlin speaks up and utters the musical creative equivalent of “what if we just burn it all to the ground?”.
That urge can manifest in a variety of directions; some torch whole careers with a stupid maneuver, whole bands will implode based off of one or two personalities, some musicians create something that can seem wildly conventional and tailor-made for success only halfway through the song to spend thirty seconds in a hula music inspired reverie that would throw any artist for a loop, and some manifest that into projects which sound like abrasive, barely controlled, constricted, lo-fidelity chaos by taking the conventional and recognizable and mutating it enough that it starts to resemble body-horror shock cinema.
Intentionally challenging us as a way to force people to bounce off the project, acts will walk this musical path as a way to free themselves from being their own worst critics, allowing themselves dalliances in thirty to forty different subgenres just because the fun of “anti-music” can be found in stapling parts together.
This is where we find ourselves with Sweden’s Swærmmm and their new EP “Γ“, a five-song collection of music designed to be abrasive enough that it could sand a planet down to a smooth surface and force listeners to bounce off of it like hail striking plexiglass. Yet in that murk of chaotic mess there is an odd appeal that keeps drawing you back, if nothing else than to see if the band finally get their shit together at any point during the EP’s run time or if the whole machine just falls to pieces before twenty minutes closes out.
Given the general verbosity that I’m prone to when it comes to writeups like this, it probably won’t shock you to know that I read a lot. Not as much as I would like to claim, where one could imagine wall-to-wall shelves full of books all to show how intelligent I am, but I do enjoy the craft of seeing someone put words to work, and with the wide breadth of material out there from all walks of life, it has certainly helped when it comes to a turn of phrase or two so I can quit comparing bands to being fed through the front of various farm equipment.
If held up to the standards of how I listen to music, I would argue that I actually read terribly. After admitting that, I am part of the subset that near-fetishizes the album experience, with artwork and packaging booklet all becoming one overall part of the “music” that I might actually be listening to. The album isn’t the album without all of the events surrounding it, because then you aren’t just getting Eaten Back To Life as music but Eaten Back To Life as an event. Yet with a book I grind through the pages, read the author’s notes at the end for context, and then I’m done, packaging be damned.
But on occasion I do read the press quotes from other authors, largely as a series of guide markers of people to look into next. I mean, if they put in the effort to read the book and have something to say about it then I should meet them halfway and at least see what it was. Which is how I came across one writer’s style being referred to as “Joyfully reckless and why I keep cycling back around to that idea when it comes to Swærmmm and their particular brand of madness — because if not joyfully reckless then it would seem the band are taking a sort of perverse joy in wrecking the idea of music as a whole.
The “experimental” tag is usually a dead giveaway for these sorts of things, as the gathering of musicians here are having a blast taking shades and inspirations of such a wide array of auditory attractions and stapling them together into a barely ambulatory if not semi-recognizable form. There are shades of grindcore here, shades of punk rock, shades of metal, shades of post-genre, shades of a bunch of stuff that have been crafted into a gnarled mess of songs and issued unto the world for the sheer anarchic joy of it all.
Is it mind-boggling and nuts at this time? Yes. The other question then being, are we actually enjoying ourselves while under submission to this brand of unmedicated madness? Now this is much harder to quantify. This is why I think the viral aspect of the music is in play, because of the felt need to spread it among anyone you know just to see if anyone can explain it to you, because fuck if it makes any sense in its current form. If we can matrix voices out of white noise static, then someone ought to be able to be eloquent in describing it other than “it’s a musical mess that is fun for the hostility of it”.
And yet ultimately, like a plane with a failing engine, broken tail, two drunk pilots, and no traffic control tower to guide them in the fog, that is where we land with Swærmmm’s latest and their brand of musical lunacy. Choices made which boggle the mind on all fronts yet musically are just as sharp and heavy as any geometrically inclined or grindcore-leaning collision could possibly hope to come out to be.
Swærmmm exists just as much as a musical playground for oppositional defiance disorder as they are a channel for neck-snapping heaviness by way of unexpected instrumentation or song titles that are a pain in the ass to type out. It is a memetic and nebulous world in which Swærmmm exist, wherein quantifiable “quality” gets a knee slammed into the side of its skull and the reason for sharing becomes more so an excuse of helping spread a sort of unexpected and viral madness – without the use of ergot – just because you’re interested in seeing what the instrumental anarchy does to other people as well.
https://swaermmm.bandcamp.com/album/–3
https://www.facebook.com/swaermmm
https://www.instagram.com/swaermmm/