It’s funny what you can pick up from Facebook. One recent exchange, for instance, found Spring frontman Joseph Hirabayashi announcing that he was going to take his dad, Jay, to this weekend’s Swans concert. The link, apparently, is that Jay Hirabayashi is both a noisy electric guitarist and the cofounder of Vancouver-based butoh innovators Kokoro Dance, while his son sees Swans as the sonic equivalent of that often anguished Japanese dance form.

It’s an idea that has some appeal to Swans singer Michael Gira, but it’s not one he’s going to take too seriously.

“I would say that Swans is not as good as butoh,” he says in a quick telephone conversation from a Salt Lake City tour stop. “They share some elements, but I think butoh is a very serious, deep art form. I guess we can be as well, but, you know, the songs in Swans are… Not frivolous, but they don’t reach into such a deep place.”

With that, he pauses for a second to reflect.

“Well, some of the music does, I suppose.”

Modest to a fault, Gira doesn’t want to compare what he does—harsh “processional” rock spawned in the cockroach-infested clubs of downtown Manhattan—with butoh, an art form created in response to the Second World War bombing of Japan, and connected to the meditative religious practices of both Shinto and Zen Buddhism. But the connection is there, especially when you consider the lyrics to “Screen Shot”, the first track on Swans’ new double-CD set, To Be Kind. “Mouth, sand, teeth, tongue/Cut, push, reach, inside/Feed, breathe, touch, come,” Gira sings. If that’s not a butoh manifesto, it’s pretty damn close.

“Well, that’s like a Zen prayer, really, that song,” he allows. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but as it happens I’ve been reading a lot of Zen, and meditating, and that song ties right in with the philosophy of consciousness that Zen portrays. Everything has its opposite. Light, no-light; breath, no-breath; now, not-now. And they’re both true simultaneously.”

It’s not that Gira is setting himself up to be any kind of roshi. (“I certainly possess zero wisdom,” he cautions.) But he’s become a kinder, more thoughtful person than the flailing nihilist who fronted Swans during its first incarnation. (The band lasted from 1982 to 1987 before being reactivated a decade later.) “Screen Shot” isn’t the only Zen prayer on To Be Kind, which also adds some deliciously unexpected love songs to Swans’ usual blizzard of electric chain-rattling and molasses-dark distortion. But even numbers like the joyous “Nathalie Neal” aren’t always what they seem.

“She’s not a lover; she’s the wife of a very good friend,” Gira says of his inspiration for that song. “But I just wanted to give her a tribute, so that she would have that, and her children would have that, and her friends would have that. I did a record as Angels of Light that was called The Angels of Light Sing ‘Other People’. That has something like 10 songs, and probably eight of them were songs like that. One of them was called ‘My Friend Thor’, and that was a song for [Swans drummer] Thor Harris. They’re all just singing the praises of the various people who are close to me.

“It’s an interesting way to work, because it opens up a lot of channels,” he adds. “It definitely helps me to write songs, actually, to think, ‘Well, I don’t know if anyone wants to hear about your problems. Write about other people.’ ”

Swans play Venue on Friday (September 5).