Swans frontman Michael Gira can't look back

Experimental rock guitarist Michael Gira is the embodiment of punk's year-zero ethos; he won't listen to anything old, and by old, that even includes his album released last year.

"I can't listen to it," the 60-year old American frontman of Swans, one of the late punk era's most important bands, says of their 2014 release, . "I'm an extreme critic. I can't stand it. I just learn not to dwell and move forward."

For more than three decades, Gira has stuck rigidly to the innovative blueprint he set with Swans' brutal industrial rock debut album, , in 1983. Uncompromising and original, he's never pandered to taste, releasing or producing material that ranges from straightforward songs to slabs of tuneless noise.

Along the way Gira has established himself as one of the great experimenters, almost single-handedly inspiring the creation of a genre of artists unafraid of challenging rock's norms.

Over 13 albums with Swans and seven with Angels of Light during a 13-year hiatus that ended in 2010, Gira's music has evolved from abrasive guitar tracks to experimental soundscapes that can last up to 20 minutes and feature anything from industrial machinery to found sounds and spoken words.

It's all part of Gira's personal mission to keep fresh, keep creating new music. "The music's always shifting, always changing, and I never look at music as ever being fixed or finished any more," he says. "It's more points in time. The most important thing to me is the process involved in making it."