Birthing is the latest sonic crucifixion from Swans, Michael Gira‘s relentless sound monolith that has been bludgeoning listeners since Ronald Reagan was president. From the first convulsion of sound, Birthing, like any Swans record, isn’t so much music as a reaction against music—a disavowal of melody, pleasure, and your nervous system’s comfort threshold. If forgotten gods had nightmares, then Birthing would be the unfiltered confession, a raw transmission hammered out on time’s fractured skull by some cosmic shaman whose every strike reassembles the very voice it’s trying to speak. What you hear on Birthing—and let’s go ahead and agree to use the word “hear” loosely, since a Swans records entails less listening than being subjected to—is the final form (though “final” feels inaccurate for reasons we’ll get to) of material that began as something faintly resembling songs. Picture this: Gira alone, acoustic in hand, hunched in what one imagines as a kind of grim devotional posture, plucking out skeletal sketches. These fragments then underwent a kind of slow-motion detonation across a year’s worth of shows, mutating nightly under the twin pressures of stage light and reverb. What emerged, what finally made it to the album, feels less recorded than captured, sonic organisms documented mid-molt. Gira doesn’t really “compose” music in the traditional sense of a solitary genius transcribing some distilled inner essence into legible form. What he does is more akin to midwifery or excavation, extracting something already there but buried, dormant, unwilling, or unable to speak in a register that anyone could initially recognize as music per se. At some point, the song emerges, talks back, and asserts itself. The song stops being his and becomes its own.