Sex Swing – credit Steve Gullick.
Getintothis’ Mark Greenwood gets freaky as Sex Swing’s Jason Stoll gives him the inside scoop on the hard-psyche super group’s upcoming untitled record.
The Sex Swing sound labours in a kind of orgiastic scrap-heap of sweaty, heaving bodies. Drones and repetitive beats build and collapse into a contorted black mass of pain and pleasure. Listening to Sex Swing is like re-reading William Burroughs’ Soft Machine on cheap speed, a cut-up montage of porno-viscera that has the head spinning and the pores oozing an appealing gunk. Sex Swing’s music depicts a dark psycho-sexual place where perverse desiring machines dwell, their urges regenerating endlessly in macabre scenes of mechano/sexual production.
Formed as kind of hard-psyche super group, the band are assembled from the efforts of a number of notable psychelord punks including Mugstar, Dead Neanderthals, Part Chimp and Dethscalator. Getintothis caught up with Jason Stoll who was kind enough to play us some previews from the forthcoming Sex Swing album due for release later this year. The samples of tranced out, repetitive drones squirm with growling bass and dirty sax, promising an album that should have dark Aquarians drooling all over the aural equivalent of an obscene yet efficient mechanical sex weapon.
Stoll explains that the band started jamming in the East End of London: ‘We originally envisaged a kind of Motorhead aesthetic; something heavy and grungy with a bit of a groove behind it. In fact what came out, organically, was much more interesting’. Indeed, the Sex Swing tracks evoke the cluttered cultural bash-ups of an urban free-from jazz, translated through distorted shapes and eerie organ clusters that hover about excessive rhythms, battering and buggering the ears.
‘It’s weird’, says Stoll, ‘I’ve been playing gigs for years and the audience are mainly guys who stand still and listen to every detail of the music, however, about three-quarters of the Sex Swing audience are female and actually want to dance. Though I’m not too comfortable generalising about a gendered response to our music, the Sex Swing shows seem much more libidinal in a strange but welcoming way’.
Stoll appears quite secretive and protective of the project, a mysterious custodian of a very curious and esoteric hypnosis strategy. Our encounter with him, in a darkened room, somewhere in South Liverpool resembles a kind of black market transaction. He insists that any sharing of the band’s demos he’s kindly offered Getintothis could have sinister consequences, though he is willing to point potential listeners to their bandcamp release Night-Time Worker.
The Sex Swing engine is in full momentum with a series of prestigious gigs on the experimental rock circuit, including the Supernormal festival, a forthcoming support slot with GodSpeed You! Black Emperor in Bristol, as well as playing the Incubate festival in Tilburg. The band are currently recording an as yet untitled album with a renowned London label which they expect to release before the end of the year. Start swinging…
