Six Degrees of Loveless
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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When My Bloody Valentine's Loveless arrived in late 1991, it was shockingly fresh, an overwhelming, densely beautiful record that seemed to bear almost no relation to anything that had come before it. Within months, baby bands started springing up that had clearly been inspired by Loveless to make music along the same lines; MBV's torrential live performances only added to their legend, and so did the recorded silence that followed the album (punctuated only by a few superb remixes that bandleader Kevin Shields has done for bands like Mogwai and Primal Scream, and a cover of Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World"). When the band returned to performing in 2008, they repeated their Loveless-era set, underscoring the idea that their watershed album was a unique artifact. In fact, Loveless was the convergence of a bunch of streams of music: the raw, frothing torrents of late-'80s and early-'90s underground rock, the cult of massive noise that had developed in composition circles, the will to push the guitar into new realms of expressiveness that came from hermetic folkies as much as rock 'n' roll showboaters, the ongoing revolution in electronic dance music (and the way other rock groups were trying to figure out how to integrate its innovations), and the early-'70s German bands who had replaced the familiar forms of pop songs with hypnotic drones and rhythms, among others. Its roots go all the way back to the earliest experiments by musicians and composers who found that studios and recording tape made it possible to come up with sounds no instrument had ever made before. The sound of Loveless is so massive and impressive that it can be hard to notice the songs beneath it, as distinctive as they'd be on their own: the jet-engine tone of Shields' guitar all but obliterates his and Bilinda Butcher's voices at times. The longer you listen to the album, though, the easier it is to notice the component parts of its barrage, and to hear echoes of musical history in them. Here are a few antecedents for MBV's masterpiece some obvious, others not so obvious.
The Audio Dreamers
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Long before Loveless, there were musicians turning radical studio experimentation into pathbreaking sounds. This 1957 Folkways compilation divided into "the compositions" and "the experiments," although it's sometimes hard to guess which is which from a 21st-century perspective compiles short works and excerpts by the likes of Edgard Varse, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Henry Cowell and John Cage, who represented the cutting age of audio art in their time. It's remarkable how close some of these pieces are in tone and effect to the transient sounds that turned up all over Loveless decades later you could add 30 seconds of Ussachevsky's "Reverberation" to the end of "When You Sleep," and nobody would think it sounded out of place. More importantly, these composers redefined what sounds could be heard as music (which is to say everything): the dissonant samples, wavering tones and gnashing textures of My Bloody Valentine would have been unthinkable without their avant-garde forefathers.
The Guitar Wizard
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Loveless pushed the sound of the guitar as far as it had ever gone, but Kevin Shields wouldn't have been able to take it there if not for earlier explorers. Sandy Bull was nominally a folk musician, and began his career playing in that tradition, but quickly pushed past it. He incorporated ideas from Eastern music and jazz improvisation, worked with electric instruments (and other stringed instruments from the banjo to the oud), and experimented with overdubs, ultimately inventing a personal idiom nobody else has come near--and then falling into a recorded silence as confounding as MBV's, from which he didn't emerge for 16 years. The early records anthologized here, though, are the heart of his legacy: guitar playing that's less about tracing the contours of a song than transporting the listener somewhere indescribable. And the tremolo effect that underscores the 20-minute "Electric Blend" is the ripple that became MBV's crashing breakers.
The Droners
The Master of Noise
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Almost from the beginning of Branca's recording career (with no wave bands Theoretical Girls and The Static), he's devoted himself to chasing a particular sound: the biggest guitar noise ever. Since the early '80s, he's been writing symphonies for increasingly huge guitar orchestras--his 13th symphony was played by an ensemble of 100 electric guitarists. His symphonic guitar works play with drones, harmonics, and overwhelming volume, and they're rooted in the sound of rock music, even beyond their hammering drum accompaniment: early Branca ensembles included members of Sonic Youth, Swans and Helmet. The huge, hallucinatory sound of his massed six-string groups evolved in parallel with the scene that produced Loveless. The fourth movement of Symphony #5 is another approach to the massive fluid dynamics of "To Here Knows When," and the fifth movement of his Symphony #6 (subtitled "Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven") is a twin to the legendary 20-minute noise-tornado MBV played at the end of their live performances.
