Swans (2013-06-15) Bonnaroo Festival, Tennessee, USA
~ recorded by DrG from *lossy* digital USTREAM live broadcast ~
~ entitled by DrG as "Stop Texting In Yr Skin Tight Britches!" ~

01 To Be Kind
02 Just A Little Boy
03 She Loves Us
04 Oxygen
05 The Seer (part one) / Toussaint Louverture
06 (exit)

ORIGINAL NOTES:

Lineage: Buffered live Bonnaroo video webcast (the stream staggered to a halt during She Loves Us, but I was able to restart it from the beginning of the whole gig) > Audio capture via Audacity > Cut to separate tracks with WaveLab Lite and boosted 5dB > FLAC level 8

Also; first track trimmed with fade-in added to remove copyright song playing for the band's set-up and *loud* quick start. As trimmed, this will fit on a single CD. There is some *computer* background noise and stream-related click or two, but the loudness of the Swans overcomes. 

In the forgotten and ancient honor of actually entitling bootlegs, I'd like to give this recording a name. In the second half of Oxygen, Gira recites; "Stop texting! Stop texting!"

So I rather flippantly thought either "Stop Texting In Yr Skin Tight Britches", or "Bonnaroo In Skin Tight Britches"... the former has more punch IMO. It is also, from what I read, Swans first Bonnaroo Festival gig. The folder pic is from Bonnaroo and I found it with Google... credit is where credit is due.

DO NOT SHARE ON DIMEADOZEN OR OTHER SITES LIKE IT!!!!
It was considered a *lossy* recording by Dimeadozen due to the source, and banned within minutes of uploading. However, I did what I could to capture this broadcast simply to enjoy it, as I hope you will. 

Feel good now.

Review from New York Times Arts Beat:

A Shot of Sublime Dread at Bonnaroo
By BEN RATLIFF

MANCHESTER, Tenn. — Hearing Swans toward the end of Bonnaroo on a day of ominous weather — a hot blue Sunday afternoon suddenly turned stone gray and windy, with the threat of a storm — makes you understand how much this festival needs its intermittent shots of sublime dread.

Can nearly all music be sweet and groovy once you put the Bonnaroo frame around it? Seemingly so: Kendrick Lamar’s in-the-club social-realism, Baroness’s Southern metal, Dirty Projectors’ chopped and stuttering rhythm, Cat Power’s sad and strange ballads, Action Bronson’s syntactically rugged rapping, the banjoist Noam Pikelny’s nerdy post-bluegrass, Bjork and Paul McCartney and Tom Petty. Swans came through with grooves, in a way. But they refused to be groovy, and that felt like healthy dissent.

They were cycles, often of one kind of note and one kind of chord hit hard, long and broadly, building in symphonic chants, timbres of steel guitar, tubular bells, trombones and electric guitars all sharing space, notes and beats repeated with ritual intensity. 

Michael Gira, the Swans singer, guitarist, and songwriter, reanimated that New York band three years ago after a 13-year layoff; he promised that the band’s second life wouldn’t be sentimental, trading on old victories, and he has kept his promise. It was a remarkable set with some new and very long songs — one borrowed some lyrics from the Cramps’ “Garbageman” — in which Mr. Gira gradually moved away from his dry baritone toward a more physical, percussive, punctuating kind of singing. This version of Swans sounded solid from the start in 2010, but it’s growing more special. It often feels like an act of generosity, or at least an outpouring, but it retains its fortresslike quality, its sense of not becoming common emotional property.

The set was loud, intense and methodical, with Mr. Gira’s lyrics as commands or incantations; it drove some people away, just as in the group’s old days. Of course that would happen here, an enormous festival without a common aesthetic. (Seven other bands were playing at the same time on different stages, as well as Bob Saget in the comedy tent, telling genitalia jokes at the speed of light.) But the people I saw rejecting it didn’t do so categorically, in 5 or 10 minutes. They rejected it after 30 or 40, admitting defeat.