Skip to content

Album · 1996

Soundtracks for the Blind

by Swans

Soundtracks for the Blind is a 1996 post-rock album by Swans. It runs 26 tracks across 142 minutes on Young God Records. Riffiter listeners rate it 4.3/5 from 8 ratings.

Post-Rock · Experimental Rock · Experimental

Best albums of 1996→

Your rating

—
Write a review →
4.3 /5
8 ratings
86 /100
9 critics
26
Tracks
142 min
Runtime
140 bpm
Tempo
A minor
Key

Ratings

8 ratings · avg 4.3

0.5★5★

Recent activity

Reviews

1 review

  • 4.5
    tapehiss

    two and a half hours that feels like being slowly buried, and somehow it's beautiful. not a starting point, but if you're in, it's the deep end.

    Reply

3 people have played it start to finish

Critics

9 publications

  • Metro Times5/5
  • Alternative Press5/5
  • The Daily Evergreen9.1/10
  • AllMusic4.5/5
  • Ox-Fanzine4.5/5
  • Sputnikmusic4.5/5
  • Chronicles of Chaos8/10
  • Ondarock7.5/10
  • The Encyclopedia of Popular Music3/5

Scores collected from the English Wikipedia ratings box (CC BY-SA). Ratings belong to the publications; follow a link to read the review.

Soundtracks for the Blind album cover

Soundtracks for the Blind album cover

Your rating for the cover

—

Tracklist

26 tracks · 142 min

Every song on one board, your ratings already placed. S to D, then save it as a list.

Ranked head-to-head

1 vs 1

Stars say how much you like Soundtracks for the Blind. They never settle which song on it you would defend. Pick between two at a time and the order builds itself.

Nobody has finished a run on this record yet. Rank Soundtracks for the Blind's songs yourself →

More like this

Albums like Soundtracks for the Blind →

About

Soundtracks for the Blind is the tenth studio album by American post rock band Swans, and the last released until 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It was released as a double CD in 1996, through Young God Records. Soundtracks for the Blind was intended, as suggested by the title, to function as a sort of "soundtrack for a non-existent film", and is Swans' most varied studio effort. On the composition of Soundtracks for the Blind, frontman Michael Gira said in 1997: I've always been interested in different sounds like that and listened to Brian Eno and different kinds of music that use non-musical sources often, and as I made this record I had a lot of that material: those loops and things I'd made from '81; I had vocal loops that Jarboe had made in 1985 on a little sixteen second digital delay unit which was actually the first sampler... we had these tape narrations we'd been collecting, that she got from her father's desk when he was an FBI agent – surveillance tapes; I interviewed my father because I'm interested in his life, and took a little snippet of his experiences...

Read more

then we had new things we'd recorded with our 'band' from the last tour; and some stuff we did for a soundtrack for a film. I threw all those into the computer and assembled it that way. So, in some things, there's something from 1981 playing simultaneously with something from '85 playing simultaneously with something from 1996. It's cross-faded and blended and mixed so to speak in the computer, cut-up and sometimes looped and reversed.

From Last.fm, text available under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In brief

Is Soundtracks for the Blind good?
Riffiter listeners rate Soundtracks for the Blind 4.3/5 from 8 ratings.
When was Soundtracks for the Blind released?
Soundtracks for the Blind was released in 1996 on Young God Records.
How many tracks are on Soundtracks for the Blind?
Soundtracks for the Blind has 26 tracks, with a runtime of 142 minutes.
What genre is Soundtracks for the Blind?
Soundtracks for the Blind is catalogued under Post-Rock, Experimental Rock, Experimental.
What BPM is Soundtracks for the Blind?
Soundtracks for the Blind runs at a median tempo of 140 BPM across its tracks, most often in A minor, measured from audio analysis.
What albums are similar to Soundtracks for the Blind?
Listeners of Soundtracks for the Blind also rate In Rainbows by Radiohead, The Bends by Radiohead, Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth.

Soundtracks for the Blind at a glance

Label
Young God Records
Produced by
Jarboe, Michael Gira

Facts from Wikidata (CC0).

Featured in