Loveless by My Bloody Valentine
Intimate, Introverted Noise My Bloody Valentine
From an essay by Torben Sangild
There are, however, other musical gestures in which noise plays an important role. Noise is not always extrovert, outwardly directed, and climax-oriented even though this is by far the most common employment of noise, especially in rock music. Noise can be introvert, mellow, and intimate. A primary example of this is My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless (1991).
When critics described the album, a certain type of metaphor was common: metaphors dealing with engulfment, spatial disorientation, erotic intimacy, softness, blurriness, and drowsiness. A typical example of this is Simon Reynolds�?review of the album in Melody Maker:
***"All of Loveless is suffused with an apocalyptic, pre-orgasmic glow, the sound of an annihilating intimacy. My Bloody Valentine music is a smelting, melding, crucible of love in which every borderline (inside/outside, you/me, lover/beloved) is abolished. Instead of the normal perspective of rock production (bass here, guitar there, voice there, with the listener mastering the field of hearing), My Bloody Valentine are here, there, everywhere. They permeate, irradiate, subsume and consume you. (Reynolds, 1991)."***
Those are big words indeed, but they are nevertheless quite pertinent as an attempt to describe the gesture (and potential response) involved in this music a gesture in which guitar noise is essential. I shall attempt below to specify how this type of metaphor can be understood as descriptive of the gesture in My Bloody Valentine's music.
Description
The ear meets a blurred, diffuse harmonic, slightly difficult to comprehend precisely. The chords slide unstably up and down in pitch, rarely focused clearly in the overall sound of distorted guitars. The sound of guitar strumming is absent. Instead, the guitar sounds loom without the clear markings of a normal (electric) guitar sound. It seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. The (often androgynous) vocals are mixed down in the background of the sound stage, making the words almost undecipherable. In several songs a flute-like sound plays a repeated melodic motif, which can be more dominating than the vocals. The songs do not develop towards a climax (as opposed to the expressionist gesture described above), but repeat patterns over and over. The drums are sometimes so low in the mix that they almost lose their role of creating a beat. They often have sixteenth note fills, but without the usual climatic function of the fill. Many interwoven sounds are present at the same time, not easy to separate spatially in the densely produced sound-box.[7] There is hardly an indication of any space on the acoustic stage.
The-Not-Quite-Really-There-Sound
The music is drowsy and dreamlike. The gesture is not unlike the sense of lying in your bed just before you fall asleep, deeply buried under the duvet.
Loveless is almost as far from expressionism as possible within a rock idiom. Nothing is spoken out loud, nothing calls for attention. By means of compressors the dynamic movements are leveled. There is a sweetness to the discreet, melancholic melodies. The vocal is lazy and mumbling as if it were coming from somebody reluctant to wake up, prone to just sleep on and indulge sensually in soft dreams.
The dreamlike atmosphere is primarily obtained by three means: Firstly, the sliding chords created by the so-called tremolo-arm(actually a vibrato-arm)[8] of the guitar, used differently than in normal rock music, where the guitarist occasionally grabs the arm in order to vibrate a sustained note or chord. My Bloody Valentine uses the arm to slowly let the chords slide and intertwine, creating a blurred, ambiguous harmonic, where the focus constantly glides and the chords are sometimes almost blotted out (as in Loomer, To Here Knows When, and Blown A Wish). The blurred harmonic endows the music with a sense of unreality, disorientation and fuzzy outlines, as in a dream.
The second effect is what they themselves have called the-not-quite-really-there-sound, adding to the dreamy sense of immateriality. It designates the removal of the guitar strumming from the sound, created by keeping the volume pedal down at the moment of striking the chord and then letting the sound grow without the physicality of the strike. It may sound as if it were being played backwards, with the sound emerging gradually rather than suddenly. The same disorientation and immateriality can be found in dreams, where images appear and disappear without a clear sense of causality and without the inertia of physical reality. This aspect is one of the links between My Bloody Valentine and electronica, which often eliminates the indexical traces of the material origins of sounds (Sangild, 2002).
The third means is, of course, guitar noise - an integrated part of My Bloody Valentines sound. It enhances the disorientation; it is part of the dreamy atmosphere. Turbid guitar distortion helps to blur and veil distinctions. Where noise in early My Bloody Valentine is more conventional in its expressive energy, on Loveless (and the previous two EPs) it serves as a part of an introvert out-of-focus-gesture.
Same Noise, Different Gesture
Thus, a different aspect of noise is at work than in the expressionist gesture. Rather than outwardly directed, abrasive, raging energy, turbidity is the prevalent aspect of noise in the introvert gesture. They have the same sonic root, chaotic fuzziness, and in these examples the instrument and overall genre is the same: distorted rock guitar. The outcome depends in part on the musical context.
This does not mean that noise arbitrarily means just anything at all, that it does not contribute specific meanings. Loveless without the noise would have essentially different expressive qualities it would not be able to create its dreamy atmosphere, and the intimate sense of being veiled or embraced by the music would simply be gone. Furthermore, as I have analyzed elsewhere,[9] the semantics of Loveless can be interpreted further in the direction of tenderness, intimacy and transgression of subjectivity, made possible through the employment of noise. Here, suffice it to say that in both the expressionist and the introvert-intimate gestures, noise is a vehicle towards subject boundary transgressions - whether explosive as in Dionysian ecstasy or implosive, suggestive of pre-oedipal narcissism - and that this transgression is a general feature of the aesthetics of noise.
NOCTURNAL FOOTNOTE:
One of three of the best music criticisms I've ever read. I guess the main ingredient for superior music criticism is passion! Both Torben and Melody Maker have it about this album and I can easily see why. By the way the other 2 most memorable reviews were of a Prokofiev album made memorable because the critic made mention of an earlier Cold War critic of this masterful Russian composer who idiotically pronounced that "the piece practically dripped with Soviet undertones" or some such pap. I nearly laughed my neck off! LOL
The other was a review of a Charlie Parker album by master composer and upright bass player Charles Mingus. Mingus was originally trained as a classical musician. He said that upon hearing Charlie Parker's music for the first time he was stunned to hear a music which transcended most jazz and acheived a musical beauty and power matched only by Beethoven's late quartets. I promptly ran to my near and stately Connecticut library and with my ex-wife listened to a music so penetrating and beautiful that I wept.
Loveless is very special.
Nocturne..
sloow burn...
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