‘To Here Knows When’: the dreamiest track My Bloody Valentine ever made
Few bands had entered musical mythos so early into their output. While various incarnations of the band had existed across the 1980s, My Bloody Valentine truly began with 1988’s You Made Me Realise EP. Dunking indie-pop garage in a bubbling vat of feedback and sonic abrasion, MBV had already gained a head-spinning reputation for live sets unleashing such unholy levels of racket they bludgeoned Creation Records labelmates The Jesus and Mary Chain in the loudness wars.
Following their acclaimed Isn’t Anything debut and a further smattering of EPs, the legends of MBV’s much-awaited sophomore began to circulate. Frontman Kevin Shields’ fastidious perfectionism, Creation’s financial haemorrhaging to the supposed tune of £250,000, and recording across 19 studios all swirled around 1991’s Loveless and cemented into lore before it had even been released.
Lucky for MBV, their second LP was their best yet. Defining what was called shoegaze between ‘Madchester’s baggy party and Britpop’s nostalgia jamboree around the corner, for a moment MBV were one of UK and Irish music’s biggest names.
Matching the hot flush of Loveless‘ pink hazy cover, MBV unleashed a passionate slice of alternative rock soaked in samplers and sonic bends to twist their work with a happy sense of off-kilter aural skew. Alongside the engulfing dollops of molten psych and textural guitar attack, one song that had appeared on the Tremolo EP earlier that year would stand as one of the dreamiest cuts they’d ever conjure—a sonic bliss that wavers on the cusp of ethereal and nightmarish.
With so many cuts to choose from in MBV’s concise but influential body of work, it’s ‘To Here Knows When’ that captures the universal dream state so starkly. Acting like a plume of sensual feeling yet bereft of meaning or obvious thematic anchorage, ‘To Here Knows When’ glides across a fraught terrain of tape decay and guitar detritus with a trance-like sequencer circling overhead.
Never has so much drama been gleaned from such an amorphous nebula, truly soaring in some strange plane far beyond Earthly understanding or charged by the electrical frissons deep in the psyche. “It’s basically a guitar plugged straight into the SPX 90, the reverse reverb, and then when we printed that, but basically it’s a very soft sort of sound,” Shields told Tape Op in 2001.
Adding: “The guitar sound, the bending thing, is one track, and then I took that off tape and stuck that into a Marshall amp and then got that real growly kind of distorted sound by sending this sound off tape into a Marshall amp, recording that back, and so that became the sound. For the low frequencies — there’s no bass in that song — we used a BBC sound effects record, and one of the things was a disaster in the distance, and it’s just the sound of rumbles…”
‘To Here Knows When’ demonstrates MBV and Shields’ exquisite sculpt of noise that towered over all their supposed shoegaze peers. Graceful with a pang of disquiet, the Tremolo and Loveless cut is the ultimate window of the mind’s colourful chaos taking place in deep slumber.
