Young God Records
2001
How I Loved You
About This Album
Michael Gira, songwriter, vocalist, and producer, has been a constant on the independent music scene for over 20 years. His music has evolved restlessly and relentlessly over the course of many projects from Swans to Skin to the Body Lovers/Body Haters to spoken word recordings and now to the Angels of Light. Through it all, his vision has been one of extremes, from violence to tenderness, often in the same breath. He has taken the broken, the sick, and the unmentionable and, through a singular vision of the universe as a collection of inseparable entities, often transformed these horrific shadows into works of great beauty and force -- even if that beauty is covered under an excess and aggression so pure they are sometimes frightening. Angels of Light's How I Loved You moves far from that terrain and into a zone of languid reverie, bittersweet longing, and crystalline excess. The mood resembles previous Angels of Light recordings only in that the tone of the songs is largely acoustic with a palette of oblique electronic washes and blurred sonic architectures applied for cavernous, orchestral atmosphere. Its elegance is seductive, and that seduction is necessary because the resplendent beauty Gira creates is adorned with confusion, and a melancholy celebration of all that is ambivalent in the human heart while in the grips of the purest desire: the one that wishes to possess the object of one's affection at any cost.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,5 and 10)

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