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Still gliding: My Bloody Valentine's Shields talks new albums, Southeast Asian sounds

MBV frontman Kevin Shields speaks to The Jakarta Post about the band's genre-defining legacy, new experimentation and what they've got coming this year and next.

Yudhistira Agato (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Tue, May 18, 2021

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Still gliding: My Bloody Valentine's Shields talks new albums, Southeast Asian sounds Inadvertent inventors: My Bloody Valentine is considered a pioneer of the shoegaze genre. (MBV management/Paul Rider)

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rue to form, after almost three years of zero social media presence, My Bloody Valentine (MBV) suddenly announced on Twitter in March that their back catalog would be available on physical albums and streaming services. The Irish band also announced that it was working on two new albums.

The seminal alternative rock band has always maintained their own pace throughout a career spanning almost 40 years, during which they released only three full-length studio albums with years-long hiatuses in between, albeit plenty of EPs and singles.

Known for pioneering and popularizing the shoegaze genre, a type of rock heavy on guitar distortion that is equally atmospheric as it is loud, MBV released their debut studio album Isn’t Anything in 1988 and followed up in 1991 with sophomore offering Loveless, considered the genre’s defining album. After that, the band disappeared for more than two decades before returning in 2013 with m b v.

The three albums are now available to stream, thanks to British indie label Domino.

Speaking exclusively to The Jakarta Post via Zoom on May 11, 2021, MBV guitarist and producer Kevin Shields said the band took their time to find the right label and felt they had made the right choice in Domino.

“We definitely didn’t want to work with a major record company, since we wanted a lot of control and independence,” said Shields. “We’re getting into a partnership with Domino mainly because they’re one of the few great independent labels that are left in the world.”

He also admitted that the band “didn’t really care about online streaming” before, but over the years, they realized it was otherwise difficult to distribute records or CDs to certain countries.

“So nowadays, it’s important that you’re online. In fact, it’s kind of necessary,” he said.

Noise and experimentation

Having spent the majority of the past seven years in London, Shields now resides in the Irish countryside with his wife.

“I love trees. I love nature. Where we live there’s a lot of trees, which is quite rare in Ireland. There’s also deer and interesting birds,” he said.

But Shields noted that it was not quiet and peaceful all the time. “Sometimes we have really loud jet and airplane noises, so I think I always have that industrial sound influencing me.”

The MBV frontman is known for his inventive playing style of exploring different textures and ambiences on the guitar, using technology and unorthodox techniques. At times, it doesn’t even sound like guitar.

The instrumental title track “Glider” on the 1990 EP showcases exactly that, with eerie violin-like lead and metallic clanks in the background.

“It’s just me making a lot of guitar feedback, recorded it on tape and then sampling it onto an AKAI S950 sampler and then playing it, you know?” Shields said. “It was an experiment, and it was something we did because we could.”

MBV’s brand of experimentation spread far and wide over the years, crossing the bounds of both genre and geography. 2013 saw the release of Yellow Loveless, a tribute album of the band’s classic Loveless that featured all Japanese artists, from sludge metal giant Boris to pop punk legend Shonen Knife. In 2017, Indonesian noise and experimental artists put out Purple Loveless, showcasing cover remixes of Loveless tracks.

Asked about his impression of music from Asia, Shields said he found Southeast Asian music to be stylistically interesting.

“When it goes experimental, it goes more experimental than some of the Western bands. My theory is because a lot of the traditional music is actually quite out there. When I hear old traditional music of that part of the world, it’s quite interesting to hear the tonality. It’s bending a lot,” he observed.

“In the West, there’s a lot of hard-line straight tonality because of classical music and the piano, and it ruins 50 percent of European traditional instruments and wipes them out of history. It’s changed now, but I think psychologically, in the West, people have become very stiff for a very long time. It seems that a lot of music from Southeast Asia is a lot more loose and playful, so when they start doing experimental things, it’s a lot more free form. That’s my main impression.”

Shields went on to explain that MBV’s start in experimentation in 1988 was the band’s way of bending away from that straitlacedness in Western music.

“Just by using the tremolo and the guitar,” he said, “it’s like putting my middle finger [up] at hundreds of years of this attitude that the pitch of things has to be specific.”

My Bloody Valentine band members pose in a promotional photograph (from left): Bilinda Butcher (vocals, guitar), Kevin Shields (vocals, guitar), Debbie Googe (bass), Colm Ó Cíosóig (drums).
My Bloody Valentine band members pose in a promotional photograph (from left): Bilinda Butcher (vocals, guitar), Kevin Shields (vocals, guitar), Debbie Googe (bass), Colm Ó Cíosóig (drums). (MBV management/Paul Rider)

Making their own sounds

In the early days, Shields said, MBV and other bands that ended up being lumped together as “shoegaze” were all carving out their own sounds. As for MBV, they were trying to create a unique sound without the aid of effect pedals.

“I found my own way of using reverse reverb that no one [had] done before. What I was doing was different. For some reason, no one thought of the idea of just having pure reverb and bending the sound you know?” he recalled.

As shoegaze became more popular, MBV found they were at the center of it all, but Shields has a critical take on the term “shoegazing”, which refers to the manner of performing by standing still at the mic and looking down at the floor.

“In 1991, [when] Loveless came out, people even said we killed shoegazing. That's what they were saying about us back then, believe it or not,” he recounted.

“That was the British press. The term was invented by the British press as a way of destroying bands because when they like all the bands, they call it ‘the scene that celebrates itself’. Then when they decided to kill the bands, they called it shoegazing.”

Shields liked a lot of the bands that got lumped under “shoegaze” when they came out, but felt that MBV was doing something completely different. But time and history cemented their place in the genre, whether they liked it or not.

“I don’t care too much, we just did what we did. But for us, we weren’t part of a scene and we weren’t influenced by any of those bands.”

Still experimenting

The band had to change the way they work due to the pandemic. Normally, they’d call in recording engineers to their homes, but now they had to learn how to do everything themselves.

“When we’re recording, I do all the microphones, the sounds and the EQ [equalization] myself,” said Shields, “but I hate doing the technical things like syncing the 24-track analog tape machines up with the computer.”

“But my wife finds that stuff interesting so she learned all of it, and Colm [drummer] has always been pretty good at it as well, but now we can do 100 percent everything ourselves without any outside people.”

Shields said the first of the two new albums would be more traditional and song-based, while the second would be more experimental in terms of songwriting.

“I had these ideas for changing the way I write songs and expanding something in my head that I find physically difficult to do,” he explained. “I couldn’t just sit with an acoustic guitar and represent these ideas, they have to do with a way of recording and playing and stuff that’s a bit different.”

When writing a chord structure and melody, Shields said he usually got flashes of how the idea should be treated and executed.

“That’s how I made Loveless, you know? I get really strong images about how it should be finished, how it should be represented visually and all that. Nowadays, I try to do that less and try to stay more free,” he elaborated.

Due to the currently limited production at vinyl pressing plants around the world, MBV plans to release the new albums in succession next year, with an interval of at least six months. But Shields emphasized that listeners would still get to hear some new tunes by the end of this year.

And while MBV is known for not playing a lot of live shows, totaling just four tours in 10 years, Shields said he was looking forward to playing live again.

“I think now I’m very aware, instead of thinking ‘oh, we’ll do this tour then do that tour’, now this could be the last time because we’re getting older,” said the 57-year-old.

“We’re very lucky that we have our health, so yeah, we 100 percent will be touring once we can.”

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