How Kevin Shields used his guitars to get high
My Bloody Valentine has become widely known for pioneering new sonic techniques that led to droning shoegaze and bending guitars. The distortion on Loveless, in particular, induces a trance-like, dissociative state, a torrent of noise it’s difficult not to lose yourself in. During a 2014 BBC documentary titled The Joy of the Guitar Riff, Kevin Shields discusses the sonic techniques he used in their work and how they created that feeling of euphoria.
Noting Shields’ experimentation with the guitar, redefining the idea of the riff, the doc pans over Shields’ huge collection of guitar pedals. When asked how many he’s accumulated over the years, Shields replies, “I don’t know – a good few hundred”. Unlike the clean riffs of classic rock, Shields’ experimentation with so many different pedals aims to create “various types of distortion… It shouldn’t work but it really does”.
Shields also demonstrates his use of the whammy bar, a guitar add-on he used to create the “juxtapositions of tone” and signature bends on the band’s seminal album Loveless. The technique, dubbed ‘glide guitar’, was developed by Shields, and he often emphasised it by using a Jazzmaster and a wall of distorted reverb.
Shields states that he was never interested in making standard rock guitar sounds: “The sound that we were going for in our heads was so loud… everything’s squashed together. It’s a bit like an infinite horizon – it just goes on and on,” he said. “And unlike a horizon where your eyesight stops, with sound you can imagine it infinitely.”
It was this loud, distorted sound that allowed Shields and his My Bloody Valentine bandmates to gain a high from their guitar playing, noting that it caused a trance state: “That whole volume extreme thing, at a certain point your brainwave changes to more around 7 hertz, and that basically creates a trance state,” he recalls. “The first time we did it, we just did it for an hour and at the end of the hour we were just laughing hysterically. We were like little kids. We were just high and so we wanted people to experience that.”
Trance-like distortion and bending guitars have become synonymous with Shields’ technique, and that infinite sonic euphoria Shields strived for has characterised My Bloody Valentine’s music ever since.
Watch the clip of Kevin Shields discussing his guitar technique below.
