GIRL MUSIC 011: My Bloody Valentine | Loveless | “Soft Like There’s Silk Everywhere”

"It definitely established this idea that a guitar didn't have to sound like a guitar."

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Words: Juno Rylee Schultz (she/her)
Edits: Morgan Shaver (they/them), Nathan Miller (he/him), and Bex Stump (she/her)

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“I’m not trying to make a weird record; this isn’t supposed to be weird — it’s something organic. I can make music that would be properly weird, to the point of incomprehensibleness, but it doesn’t have an emotional attachment. To me, when you have a person who’s morphed into something that’s not quite human, it’s far weirder than something that doesn’t look vaguely recognizable. 

A strange jellyfish from under the ocean looks incredibly beautiful and totally alien, but doesn’t freak people out as much as a human that’s a little bit different looking. And that was the thing about Loveless: its extreme simplicity and normalness mixed with just that feeling — an overall sense of this feeling. It was what it was, and the normalness — the simplicity — were key to that all being recognized.

“We chose organic sounds; that’s why people didn’t immediately go ‘That’s a keyboard,’ even though it is. There are multilayered parts to some songs… with me playing the same thing three or four times. It was the usual rock and roll bending-the-strings type of thing, but I had two amps facing each other, with two different tremolos on them. And I sampled it and put it an octave higher on the sampler.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

Loveless is an album synonymous with shoegaze, a music genre that both defies and embraces melody — blending noise and emotion into a muddied, electronic symphony of melancholy. While countless bands have contributed to the genre, it’s impossible to discuss shoegaze, or any tangentially related strains of indie rock, without invoking the work of My Bloody Valentine.

My Bloody Valentine reportedly tested the finances of the record label Creation Records during the more than two years it took to craft and record Loveless, which placed immeasurable strain  on the patience of everyone in and around the band. But sometimes, that’s just the cost of making art — especially something as timeless and influential as Loveless.

This is the story of Loveless, a pastiche of noise and tone fully capable of overwhelming your emotions and senses. 

It was February 1989, and Alan McGee — manager and owner of Creation Records — had booked time at Blackwing Recording Studios. Alan’s rather foolishly optimistic plan was having My Bloody Valentine’s next album be completed over the course of just five days at the Southwark studio. It didn’t work. However, the band did manage to record some music, including “Moon Song,” which was released on the EP titled Tremelo. 

But it wasn’t what Creation Records wanted.

According to Kevin Shields, in an interview with author Mike McGonigal for 33⅓: My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Alan McGee spent “all of 1989” pressuring Shields and the band to release “(When You Wake) You’re Still in a Dream” — a song from Isn’t Anything, the band’s previous album — as a single.

My Bloody Valentine couldn’t be bothered with anything but pursuing the creation of art — new art — regardless of the cost.

“We said no. We’d already gone beyond that song. Creation Records expected us to do things in a bizarrely short period of time, because that’s how we’d worked before; they’d just lucked out with us in 1988. These guys at Creation were only 28 years old at the time, and taking lots of drugs. They were enthusiastic, but they really had no clue. We were pushing forward, and they wanted us to release old stuff.

The first sessions that were booked for Loveless — we had these few days in which we were expected to come up with a whole new album with an entirely new sound, one that was much more studio-based. The work we did then was never unproductive — it was just moving towards something else.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

By September 1989, Alan McGee had booked more studio time for My Bloody Valentine — this time it was a cheaper studio called Elephant in Wapping. Kevin Shields and the band spent eight weeks underground in the studio’s basement, making progress where they could, despite drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig being so sick at the time he could barely move his arms and feet in any meaningful way. 

Essentially, much of the drumming on Loveless consists of Kevin Shields recreating fragmented samples of Colm’s playing from when he was sick. Impressively, this isn’t as noticeable as it could have been for two major reasons.

First, Kevin Shields meticulously worked to ensure the drumming he performed in Colm’s place was done in his style. Second, the way Loveless was recorded and constructed naturally lends itself more that of a collage, painting, or papier-mâché of soundscapes. 

Samples of sounds. Samples of samples of sounds. Samples of samples of samples of sounds. A copy of a copy of a copy — all reconstructed and rebuilt in such a way that the album doesn’t sound like it’s made of copied samples from the reverberating sound waves of the original instruments — manipulated and stretched out, like if a ghost was stretched out like flour, yeast, and water turned into dough.

“Most of the songs have samples on them. On ‘Soon,’ there’s a bit that goes ‘ah ah ah,’ where it sounds like Belinda’s voice… that’s just me hitting a key on the sampler. And the first thing in ‘Only Shallow’ — those kind of high sounds — that’s just a sample.

Everything we did is now stock, normal, standard techniques for making music. We were just using the technology to achieve our aims. What we did — and which then became the prominent way of using samplers — was to try and make it sound like you’re not using a sampler.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

Shields and the band drifted between a myriad of cheap studios, each with their own engineer. Kevin was insistent that these engineers should just sit in the lobby, go grab tea, or do anything other than interfere with what he and the band were trying to create with Loveless. 

This resistance came from a few places: partly from the studios themselves, which were often ill-equipped or poorly set up technologically speaking, but also from Kevin’s need for absolute control in the creation of Loveless. 

It wasn’t an egotistical kind of control, according to everyone who was present during the recording process — even if his behavior sometimes left the other band members feeling isolated and “in limbo.” It was simply that Kevin Shields was trying to build something specific and meticulous, while simultaneously working to create things that didn’t sound like anything else before.At many of the studios where the band recorded Loveless, there were engineers who mocked or joked about what My Bloody Valentine was doing. They just didn’t get it. And Kevin didn’t need them to — he knew exactly what he was doing.

“I just wanted to mix my own album completely by myself — just doing it by myself, with an assistant from the studio coming in and operating the mixing desk when he had to. I liked working that way — it was more like a painter.

It’s like, if I want to paint a picture, I don’t really need anybody to help me hold the brush or suggest what colors I should use. And I don’t know much about the history of art, but what I do know is that it’s technology-based — a new kind of blue would come in and be based on certain mixing techniques. So, a really good artist would need assistants to save him time by mixing paints. You need a trusted person who can actually do it.

You can do it all yourself in theory, but in energy — and in emotional energy — you can’t. That’s the reality, and that’s why there are sixteen people on the credits to Loveless, even though Alan Moulder didn’t actually do anything without my okay or my say-so.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

According to Shields, everyone in every studio the band worked in was credited — “even if all they did was fix tea.” Reflecting on the album in 2007, he noted that nearly everyone at those studios believed everything the band was doing was wrong.

“What you have to realize is that these engineers — with the exception of Alan Moulder, and later Anjali Dutt — were all just the people who came with the studio. And they were cheap studios to begin with. Everything we wanted to do was wrong according to them.

This guy Harold Burgon was ranting and raving about his aesthetic of drum sounds, and when it became clear we didn’t care, we all started arguing. He couldn’t handle a band with their own opinions — their own idea of what they should sound like, basically. We had to put up with countless people like that.

At that time, there weren’t many people like me who didn’t need engineers, who knew exactly what they wanted. This Nick Robbins guy, for instance — we recorded nothing while he was there; his sole contribution was tuning two of Colm’s toms!”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

In early 1990, the band went on a short tour to promote their newly released EP, Glider, after which things slowed down for a while creatively.  

“After the tour we sort of took our time going back into the studio. A lot of 1990 was kind of lost. We did this tour and then we started the record again in the spring, and then the summer was weird — I think it was the middle of the Gulf War. That was our great lost period, the summer of 1990.

We probably spent three months working on constant feedback sampling and weird stuff where we were achieving something but, like … with loads and loads of weird stuff with drums and feedback. That would represent probably a three-month period, but we were really working slowly.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

Alan Moulder was one of the engineers who worked well with Shields and the band. It was as if he understood that what the band was doing mattered and had meaning, even if it was unconventional and different. 

“Moulder was credited as an engineer, but he had a far greater role than that. He spiritually and emotionally supported us in a way that’s not quantifiable. His belief in what we were doing helped keep us going, big time.

Having someone like him say, ‘This guy knows what he’s talking about,’ and, ‘Trust him,’ helped us a lot with the record label. He was a true supporter, somebody I could really trust. Whenever he was around, I got way more work done — huge amounts of work in a small space of time. And then we’d go for months with hardly anything getting done.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

By May 1990, Moulder had to fulfill commitments with other bands, so Anjali Dutt worked with Shields to begin laying down additional guitars and vocals for the album. It was a slow-moving process given the unique structure and composition of Loveless — and how it approached music and the audience’s ears in ways unlike anything attempted up to that point.

“You can make a record in certain ways that, no matter what you played it on, it sounds kind of like the same balance, the same basic mix. I didn’t want you to be able to get the vocals really loud if you play it one way, and too quiet another way. The relationship is the same, in the sense that you can’t hear the vocals any clearer no matter which way you play them.

They share too much of the same frequency as the guitar, so you’re giving the rhythm a lot of room to do that. If you have white noise — which is all frequencies at the same time — whatever you play it on, it will be a different tone because what you’re hearing is the tonality of the system. And pink noise is basically white noise with a frequency hump in it, like a bias of frequencies.

And Loveless has more of a relationship to pink noise. The record isn’t pink ‘cause of that — but it’s a weird coincidence.”

“Basically, the art of record making, in the classic sense, is to create something that sounds the same no matter where you hear it. Most people make records so that they sound the same everywhere. But to achieve that, you have to work with a limited frequency range.

I wanted to make records that sound really different. Hearing it on a computer — the tiny little speakers off a computer — or hearing it played in a club, it’s still basically what I wanted, which is that the guitar is fundamentally prominent. And that was very important: to always have the guitars louder than the vocals, no matter what.

It’s largely just the fact that the vocals have a place in the music, in a frequency sense, and they don’t stick out more than some other sounds. Loveless was meant to sound really good if you play it loud on a ghetto blaster and also if you play it loud on a hi-fi. But you hear different things each way.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

It wasn’t widely known until years after the album’s release — from Mike McGonigal’s talks with Kevin Shields for his book — that even though Loveless sounds like a swirling storm of noise, it is, in fact, coming at you from a single space. It’s a mono album, not stereo.

Any sense of movement or differing placement of sounds didn’t come from engineers or microphones, or clever tricks implemented during the mixing process. Instead, the stereo illusion is born from tonal modulation and the interplay of competing, differing, and occasionally harmonizing frequencies.

“When people make records, they have treble and basses for everything — to kind of tame the mid-range and make it sweeter and more hi-fi sounding — using stereo separation, reverb, and ambience to make everything sound big and spacious and wide.

Everything I did is mostly mono: ‘Soon’ is mono, and ‘To Here Knows When’ is mono — there’s no set area of separation. The sense of bigness just comes from the depth of perception. Pet Sounds is mono as well — it’s more the balance of frequencies that creates a sense of depth than stereo separation and ambience; they’re not as important.

For me, everything that seemed to really affect me didn’t affect me because I heard something coming out of one speaker and something else coming out of another speaker. The classic ’80s version of stereo was basically a drum sound that’s really widened by stereo effects and gated, with the guitars panned to extremes, and just vocals and drums in the middle with overdubs. It was a corporate, weak sound.”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

Progress on Loveless was steady and consistent in its forward momentum, but not always in ways where people could easily or reliably measure its progress. Inside the mind of Kevin Shields, however, things were in constant motion.

The band also had to keep switching studios, partly due to what some could describe as Kevin being controlling and overly specific about the details regarding studio issues and quirks. From another perspective, though, that same attitude reflected an artist deeply focused on his process. It’s worth remembering as well that this was a band building the album piece by piece inside the studio, with Loveless quite literally being designed with the studio itself and its sampling.

The studios may as well have been instruments in the band, given how crucial they were to the music’s creation — a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s easy to see, then, why a quirk or issue that might appear trivial to someone else would feel significant to Kevin Shields and the band. 

“It was bizarre how many little technical glitches, computer huffs, and extraneous noises made their way into the process. Partly it was Kevin’s all-seeing quality control that sounded the alarm at problems that a lot of people would miss entirely. Partly it was the amount of time spent that pushed the improbability envelope. Partly it was just plain spooky! It was also down to the high level of creative ambition. It does take time to genuinely experiment without missing the point.”

— Guy Fixsen, studio engineer who worked on Loveless, 2007

The record label also kept checking in on Shields and the band periodically, seeking updates on the album they had wanted completed in five days… several months ago. 

In retrospect, it’s much easier to understand why Loveless took so long to finish. At the time, though — when many albums were recorded in a week, or a few weeks at most — Shields was essentially pioneering new technology while also heralding in a new musical genre. Not only did it make little sense to anyone who didn’t care enough to understand it, it was nearly impossible to grasp what My Bloody Valentine was building with Loveless even if you wanted to.

It was a collage of new, organic, uncanny, melodic, and ghostly noise. The pieces were still being assembled. The songs the band were constructing weren’t exactly something that could be strummed out on an acoustic guitar around a campfire. 

Creation Records blamed much of its financial difficulties on My Bloody Valentine at the time, and even when looking back at the events later on. Others, including Shields and the band, contend that My Bloody Valentine could have signed with a major label if they had wanted to, and that bands and artists should be allowed to spend a label’s money to make art for that label.

From a certain perspective, that is the entire point of the record label. 

There really is no definitive answer, or truly neutral way to see the situation, especially without the accounting books in front of us. What we have instead are the perspectives of the “record label” and “artist.” That said, it’s hard not to agree with how Shields articulated the situation when speaking with McGonigal in 2007.

“We had turned down big record deals with majors. We could have had proper lifestyles, but in order to stay independent and fully in control we were broke. So our attitude was that while Creation can’t give us anything but studio time, we’re going to use that time to get our act together and make a good record. We didn’t feel guilty. We were like, ‘It will be all right in the end and it’s just the way it is.’

The only thing that ever does annoy me when people talk about us spending Creation’s money is that when we started Loveless, we had started a licensing deal with Warner Brothers, which was going to give much-needed cash to the project. By the time we finished Loveless, with the EPs and the first Creation album, we probably sold a couple hundred thousand records. Creation Records never showed us any accounts. It’s important for people to understand that when we worked out how much we’d spent, we realized it was almost all of our own money. They never showed us any accounts, and then they got bought out by Sony.

Over the years, it just became this myth that Creation spent half a million dollars or pounds, never recouped the money, nearly went bankrupt, and had to sell to Sony — and it was only Oasis who saved them. And the message being put across is that art isn’t worth it if it’s not financially viable, no matter how good it is. Part of the critical value of the thing is its financial worth in the corporate world.

It’s weird. That change happened particularly in the ’90s; it was solidified by then. Instead of the record company being the bad guys, it’s the band. The creative people are the bad guys, taking a poor corporate company’s money — oh, how terrible. And it’s fucked, you know what I mean?”

— Kevin Shields, 2007

Loveless was released on November 4, 1991, after work and mixing was completed in the nineteenth studio the band had collaborated with in the over thirty months spent constructing its intricate musical tapestries. 

Critics were largely left confused, misunderstanding the album and thinking it should have sounded more electronic, with many failing to understand or recognize the new style of music — and the new genre — being unveiled.

Still, in the end, Creation Records — which began with a loan of just one thousand British pounds — went on to sell to Sony after building a catalog of artists, which included My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Guided by Voices, among many others.

With Loveless, Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine were able to create a pastiche of emotionally overwhelming, thought-provoking sounds while homeless, squatting, and even sleeping on studio floors. Yet out of these circumstances came long-lasting art that not only fueled their future endeavors, but also provided eternal inspiration to other artists searching for a beacon to guide them toward new, experimental, and unconventional forms of expression.

“It was just a real freshness, a real attitude of not compromising. We weren’t trying to be original, per se. We were happily influenced on that record by Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. We were happily showing all the things we loved.

Loveless also represented a transcendence thing… just basically connecting to other worlds, as well as, at the same time, still very in the ground with something strong. So it was this balance thing. It definitely established this idea that a guitar didn’t have to sound like a guitar.”

— Kevin Shields, 2018

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Sources: ‘My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless’ by Mike McGonigal,  33 1/3 Series: Mike McGonigal on My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”, and ‘Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine | Obsession | Jazzmaster 60th Anniversary, Part 1 and 2,’ Fender