Yellow Swans & Mouthus "Live On Conan Island"

by Yellow Swans

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	1.	Duke 13:44
	2.	Asheville 08:47
	3.	Chapel Hill 08:47

about

When you've toured the United States with a band twice there's too many stories, too many emotions, too many inside jokes, to really say anything about it. I often imagine that there was a collective nationwide groan from many of our friends and fans when they found out we were planning to tour with Mouthus a second time. Not that Mouthus didn't win hearts and minds, but they were easily one of the least forgiving live bands I ever experienced. Loud walls of low-mids tore you apart, and their process was maddeningly opaque. We were often accused of creating a total disconnect between action and consequence when we played live, but Mouthus had a fucking drum kit and you still couldn't figure out what flailing limb caused what sound. Nate's drum-brain would kick out bass when he hit his snare and bloops when he hit the kick. Brian's guitar was just a mass of gelatinous murk. I'm still disturbed to this day by the fact that he kept his guitar in standard "Eddy Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddy" tuning. ("Some things shouldn't be fucked with" he said with a smile.)

Most of our touring partners had a moment a few weeks in where they started to understand what we were doing - how bodily actions corresponded to sound, how we were composing, even discerning different "songs". I had the same feeling with Mouthus. It took patience, boredom, repetition, and the kind of invested interest that a peer develops when their friends are doing something that raises the bar and forces them to play better. Mouthus live took work, but it was incredibly worth it.

Throughout our career we often would play a bill starting with us, then another band, and then a collaboration set at the end. Sometimes it was brilliant. Sometimes it was fun for us even if it was less so for the audience. Collaborating at the end of the night while on tour with Mouthus was like forming and touring another band that we just didn't bother to name. It was ferociously deformed rock music, a proper band and utterly unintelligible at the same time; high-art and deeply dumb. (Buried in here somewhere is a Coldplay riff if you don't believe me).

The shows captured on this record are some of my favorite. Not the biggest audiences or highest profile by a stretch, but full of the kind of working band pleasures that hardly pay the bills but make touring actually worth it. Utterly genius openers like Clang Quartet and other great and unsung local jammers; generous hosts, sincere fans, salt of the earth folks; and far flung friends and collaborators that the yearly cycle of tours kept you connected to in ways that don't translate online. Grateful as hell that these blurred nights were captured on wax and live on the Yellow Swans Archive.

- GMS

credits

released January 1, 2007

Drums – Nate Nelson
Electronics, Vocals – Pete Swanson
Guitar, Electronics – Gabriel Mindel Saloman
Guitar, Vocals – Brian Sullivan

Artwork – GMS
Mastered By – Patrick Klem

Recorded while on tour in Fall 2006
Released on No-Fi Records in 2007

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about

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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