It’s hard to think of someone more foundational to the existence of Yellow Swans than John Wiese. We played a gig together up in Portland only a few months into our existence and I still remember his obvious pleasure at the 4.5x11 b&w photocopy flier I had made for the show - a long strip of black toner with an inverted photo of a military cemetery forming a row of uniform upside down white crosses. John released our first 7” on Helicopter and continued to release music by us and with us up until the very end of the band.

I always got the feeling that John knew something I didn’t, because of course I’m sure he did, but it was also because of his normal bemused affect, as if everything was slightly surprising and funny. That included his own music: mysterious sound objects made by a process that was itself even more mysterious, because while it looked like someone checking email intently, it sounded like a microphone thrown into a dryer with a steel-toed boot and a pocket full of coins, amplified at maximum volume in order to be heard over the ignition of a jet engine. In later years John took to casually sitting in chairs on stage, poking at his laptop like a nomadic coder making memes instead of millions at some Palo Alto cafe, but he was obviously and intensely aware of bodily effects that his music produced and he seemed to play the audience like an instrument, turning the parasympathetic nervous system up to 11 with jump scare horror and music concrete made of cement.

Somewhere in a black and white photo on the back of an Earth Crisis album may or may not be a young Wiese, but its not like that punk kid disappeared once John turned to Max patches and typography (sure, sissy spacek, but if you know which Bastard Noise discs to spin you know what I'm saying). I take it for granted that John understood from the start that we were also punks trying to push some kind of limit, and thanks to him we began to have the wax to prove it. For a good solid number of years I could be sure that any trip to LA (most likely to play the Smell or Il Corral) would involve a substantial vegan breakfast with John (exclusively made up of "brown" food from fake sausage to tofu scramble to toast), or a trip to the Thai spot that Dean from No Age used to work at. We had many “homes” but LA and its weird car crash of scenes and people was one of my favorites. We played many memorable shows with John, there and elsewhere, and it was typically exhilarating. At the same time, improvising with John was always difficult... I genuinely never knew what he was going to do, and then when he did it I rarely knew what he had done.

- GMS