Reticulating Splines

My Bloody Valentine – Loveless [1991]

There was a clear demarcation point in my maturity as a musician and music listener where I suddenly became very aware of the individual parts that made up a piece of music and how they were put together. I studied how sounds were created and captured, how songs were crafted, and generally how everything on a track ‘worked’. My ears grew from virgin ones into trained (re: tainted) ones, and as such, I started to become very picky about music as my understanding of the mechanics of its creation and construction expanded. Loveless is important to me because of its role in popping my cherry in that regard, so to speak – after being drawn in and entranced by its abstraction, heavily processed instrumentation, and remarkably dense production, I needed to understand how it all worked and, by extension, how the making of all the music I loved worked.

My first foray into the genre of Shoegaze was with the overall more accessible Souvlaki by Slowdive, but it was Loveless that really made me perk up my ears and begin to get interested in what was behind the creation of these radically unique sounds I’d never heard a guitar make or even knew a guitar was possible of making. It communicated many things to me at once without ever explicitly communicating them, much like the vocals throughout the album are largely unintelligible wisps buried deep into the mix and treated as just another instrument – it was romantic and wistful in spirit but also fiercely rebellious in its approach to pop songwriting. It wasn’t clear to me at first, but Loveless is unmistakably a pop record. It’s got melodic hooks, catchy chord progressions, clear-cut verses…many markers of typical pop songs are present here, they’re just so heavily manipulated and abstracted that it’s difficult for untrained ears to differentiate them from pure noise. It’s very alluring in that it’s at once familiar and foreign to first-time listeners, and it demands repeat listens to truly understand. And put it on repeat I did. Loveless occupied more time in my CD player and on my computer’s media player than any other album I owned for a good several months after my discovery of it, and I’d continue listening to it on a regular basis for many years that followed. In addition, it was my gateway drug into even noisier, less accessible bands such as Medicine, Boredoms, and Merzbow, and it exposed me to a lot of post-punk bands that preceded it.

At the turn of the millennium, I was just starting out as a musician, and I was mostly aimless in my attempts at making recordings. I had a cheap microphone I plugged directly into my computer and was using a pirated copy of Cool Edit Pro 2.0 (shout out to Peter Quistgard) to record and mix down tracks. Up until I expanded my musical horizons beyond more straightforward rock and roll music, I was doing covers, playing along to my favorite songs, writing simple chord progressions and melodies, riffing on the pentatonic scale, liberally stepping (and often pounding) on my Boss DS-1 distortion pedal…generally what most other fifteen year old kids in the western world who’d just picked up the guitar were doing. When I was exposed to Shoegaze and Noise, though, I purchased my first multi-effect pedal (a cheap, horribly sterile sounding Zoom 505 [made of “space age” hard plastic!] which nonetheless contained dozens of different effects in one box) and abused the hell out of the modulation and delay/reverb settings on it trying to recreate the abstract guitar sounds of my new guitar idols - namely, My Bloody Valentine’s creative force, Kevin Shields. Suddenly, the vibrato bar on my Strat started getting a whole lot more use, as did the multi-tracking on Cool Edit, and I became fascinated and obsessed with effect pedals and putting my guitar through as much processing as I could. I began trying to create the thickest, wettest, most dense guitar sounds I could coax out of my setup regardless of whether it made any sense or not (and it often did not) and piling on track after track on top of each other. I wasn’t making songs or even what most people would call music by any stretch…I was experimenting. I wouldn’t learn how to meld that with actual musical elements until later (and, to be honest, it’s still something I continue to struggle with), but it was the first point as a musician where I was being truly creative. My track “An Abundance Of Nothing” is a perfect example of what I was doing around that time, and it illustrates just how much of an MBV fanboy I was (note the wet reverb, tremolo, detuning, and wall of fuzz).

Loveless is that perfect balance of abstract and concrete that I continue to aim for in my own music. The development of my own personal musical voice is essentially an amalgamation of my influences, and My Bloody Valentine ranks high in that collective body of music which I draw upon. Kevin Shields took the electric guitar, an instrument that had been played out in pop music long before he came along, and manipulated it in such creative and unique ways that it was enough to spawn a whole new genre title just to attempt to describe what he was doing. While many post-punk bands in the ’70s and ’80s certainly helped pave the path for him, he was truly one of the most innovative guitarists of his time (I daresay the most innovative), and he continues to inspire myself and countless other avant-garde musicians to try to take the instrument into bold new territories.