If you have a chance to piece your skull back together after hearing Swans’ The Seer, this older track from their two-and-a-half-hour 90s masterpiece Soundtracks for the Blind (even longer than The Seer) shows them at their most quiet and emotionally suffocating. It was unsettling when I first heard it, but over the years “How They Suffer” has become one of my very favorite songs to ever spring from Michael Gira’s skull. “Suffer” is a stitched together sound collage and sees Swans in one of their most abstract moods; it opens with a drone, shifts to an interview, moves into a gorgeous instrumental bridge, and then closes with a second interview.
The first recording features a man discussing in a very rambling way the issues that he has with his eyes. He stammers and forgets his place, but eventually gets to the point as he matter-of-factly says, “I am what they call… legally blind.” His explanations use medical terms he doesn’t sound like he fully understands, things that he probably knows just from hearing his doctor say it so many times. Yet when he bluntly gets to the point of the issue it resonates with an overwhelming sadness.
The second interview featuring an elderly woman continues in a similar fashion, where she explains her current health situations. She’s trying to eat everyday so that she can get stronger, but says so in a voice that has accepted that it won’t happen. This track’s use of interview recordings is done in such an understated way, and while many parts of Soundtracks get brutally heavy, it’s this whispered quiet moment that always shook me to the core.
