The disaster that made My Bloody Valentine’s best love song
The 1990s ushered in a new era of guitar music, with Blur and Oasis taking the United Kingdom by storm while Nirvana and Soundgarden brought grunge to the other side of the Atlantic. While Britpop and heavier forms of alternative thrived, a fuzzier form of guitar music was left in the dust. Shoegaze became known as the scene that celebrated itself.
Decades later, there has been a resurged interest in the genre, a longing for dissonance and distortion over clean-cut strums. As budding musicians look to recreate that underground 1990s sound, there is one band they look to as a reference point more than any other: My Bloody Valentine.
The band’s 1991 record Loveless has become one of the most important entries into the genre, if not the most important. Modern shoegazers are constantly trying to emulate Kevin Shields’ fuzzy, layered tones, but distorted guitars weren’t the only thing he utilised to create their dense wall of sound.
On ‘To Here Knows When’, amidst lyrics full of longing and swirling guitars, Shields inserted a looped sound of a low-level disaster. “That’s the main thing that throws people,” he explained during an interview with 20/20, “The sound of a disaster sampled and looped all the way through.”
The sound is so low that it’s indistinguishable from the sounds that surround it, emulating the crackling sound of a cassette. “It doesn’t get past a certain frequency, so it has the sound of a bad cassette,” he explained, “And yet further up, there’s a tambourine on more like a hi-fi frequency, which you wouldn’t get with a bad cassette.”
Shields’ aim with this technique was to create a disconcerting effect without warping timings. “The idea was to make you feel that the rhythm had gone off one way or another while it stayed perfectly in time. Like a train noise, which is rhythm and rumble at the same time. But this nice little ten-minute idea took six weeks of work on the rhythms, all of which was scrapped in the end and replaced by this rumble,” he explained.
Shields was also interested in people’s changing willingness to withstand certain sounds in different contexts, noting how tube-goers will accept the noise that marks their commute but would “cover their ears” if trapped in a room with it. It’s certainly an interesting distinction to make and a form of noise that can often make shoegaze an acquired taste.
But if you’re willing to give in to the discomfort and distortion of the disaster rumbling beneath, it can become one of the most glorious sounds in the world.
