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Free Detained Yellow Swans

by Yellow Swans

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1.
NE pt. 2 02:12
2.
N pt. 4 03:41
3.
NE pt. 1 01:43
4.
N pt. 3 09:24
5.
SE pt. 1 09:39
6.
N pt. 1 07:05

about

Gabriel:
This was one of our earliest releases, recorded less than a year after I’d shown up to Portland, but after we’d already established a rhythm of recording almost everything we did and releasing material that we thought was worth listening to in small batches of homemade CDRs. These were “progress reports” of sorts. What made this set of recordings different from others we’d put out thus far was that this was all improvisations, which means you can hear us figuring out our sound, our way of playing together, figuring out our project, in real-time. Needless to say it's pretty raw, but you can hear the beginnings of a way of making music that in some ways isn’t that far off from the long-form jams that make up Being There. Our set-up at this point was almost minimal - a drum machine, a vocoder plugged into itself, a 4MS noise swatch, a vocal mic, a guitar, and delay pedals - but most of that gear stuck around for the next six years, even into our respective solo work post-YS. There are a handful of earlier releases than this, but if anyone wants to figure out where we started as a project, this is worth a listen.

The tracks are titled after the geographic locations of three different places we recorded in Portland over a few months. It's possible that “NE” was at our home of Michigan Street, not far from the Jackie O’ Motherfucker house and the original Mississippi Records. “N” may well have been the Death Disco that was a sometime home of Glass Candy, and a secret vegan sunday brunch where you could sober up on coffee and home fries in the same place and with the same folks you’d been sweating with the night before. “SE” could have been the IWW run Red & Black Cafe. Portland was divided into 5 “quadrants” and around the time we got started there had been a migration of punk/anarchist cultures from SE, to NE to N. South East remained at the time a hot spot for Earth First!ers and a few holdhouts from when punk was orbiting Reed College and 17 Nautical Miles, but by the time I’d moved into North East off of Alberta, the culture of underground shows and political radicalism was moving west into North Portland.

It has to be mentioned that this had huge consequences for Portland’s traditional black neighborhoods as artists and radical folks often end up being harbingers of gentrification. The fact is that what actually gentrified these neighborhoods was 1) brutal policing and the mandatory minimums that basically kidnapped a generation of young people, incarcerating them and gutting the vitality of their communities, and 2) the collusion of City government, real-estate developers and landlords who allowed these neighborhoods to fall into disrepair, cut services, increased policing, and then bought up huge swaths of commercial and residential property. The dropout culture and DIY folks who took advantage of the affordable housing and emptied storefronts have a role to play in this, but folks like me were also desperately looking for affordable housing, to find a place to create community, start collective projects and just survive outside of the homogenous, overpriced, white suburban culture that kept encroaching elsewhere.

When people watch footage of Portlanders endlessly protesting night after night, it's important to know that this comes after years of radical communities living in and fighting for a town that has always been known for harboring anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-police politics. Portland - and I include its radical community - has had and continues to have a lot of problems and blindspots, especially around race and white supremacy. Still, the anarchic freedom of living, creating, fighting and working with others that was possible in Portland during our time there directly fed into our music as a praxis and a motivation. We were dancing, eating, drinking, and performing with folks who had been arrested at the WTO in Seattle, had been in brawls with skinheads, had faced down local riot police in the streets - and in their living rooms. They also opened worker owned collectives, published zines, grew food, threw-up graffiti, had secret restaurants in their house, and built a whole music scene out of basements. The world got a lot bigger for our band overtime, but the primary map of our formation looks like Portland.

credits

released April 1, 2002

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Yellow Swans Portland, Oregon

From their 2001 founding to the duo’s final shows (and subsequent hiatus) in 2008, Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Pete Swanson aka Yellow Swans carved an influential path through America’s experimental music underground, at the axis of noise, psychedelia, industrial, drone, and hardcore. Their music is restless, ragged, and forever in flux, untethered and unresolved. ... more

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