Buenas ideas de Kevin Shields, entrevistado en Arthur Magazine hace 22 años...señor, la nostalgia nos mata...
"Kevin Shields
When you hear something and you don’t know where it’s beginning or ending, suddenly your imagination is fifty percent of what’s happening,” Shields explains. “The person listening is playing a huge role in what they’re perceiving, cause they’re allowing that part of their mind to be open.”
So by blurring the edges—or not trying to make them clear, cause people go through an awful lot of effort to make that really clear sound—basically it just made the person listening to the music half the experience. I think what the ‘80s were about was killing that. What we were doing was reintroducing it. I think that mentality was very popular in the ‘60s—Phil Spector’s approach, a lot of the Stones’ records were quite grungy, a lot of the Beatles stuff…all the best popular music of that era, there was a lot of depth to it. It just disappeared into this horrible flat…bass exists here, snare drum is here, bass drum is very clicky there. It was, I suppose, a really right-wing way of making music in a way. It was very, this is right and that is wrong.
We realized something. It was good because we were letting ourselves be more Sonic Youth-y, more of our influences in a way. And somehow out of that came an original quality. And I think it was just the relaxing quality of it.
After getting into the Ramones, my attitude became one of using that guitar as simply a noise generator. I didn’t have any ambition to learn the guitar; I just wanted to generate noise like he did.”
that attitude of generating a noise, and I only really came back to it around the time of the Isn’t Anything period because the way I played the tremolo arm…it only sounds good if you have quite a clear track. If you have a lot of overdubs it actually doesn’t sound good, so you can only do it with one main, good sound, and it has to be really loud to hear properly. So I came back to that stage of cranking sound like this. [Pretends to strum while gripping the tremolo arm]. As opposed to playing guitar I was just cranking the sound. And that’s what happened—that’s the Ramones connection. What I did that was any good in the end came from the mentality that Johnny wasn’t playing guitar. Even though now I’ve learned that he was playing a lot more than I thought.
you also said something in that video where you describe My Bloody Valentine as having this “fluff on the needle” sound where things are a bit dulled rather than bright. You described it as music you had to look into, as opposed to coming out at you.
then rock music went Britpop in England and grunge in America and the mainstream became really awful.
Was it hard to keep your bearings as band during this time?
From ’93 to ‘95 we just really immersed ourselves in this drum-n-bass-y type world. From there the band just fell apart, so that’s where we were at. Just watching mainstream music get really right-wing again. Around 1990 it seemed like music could just do anything and then it seemed to close down dramatically again.
You’ve spoken before about Hypnogogia by Mavromatis. How influential was that book on you and your work?
It was influential in the sense that he was the only guy who made attempts…there are no books about that subject in English other than that one…not only did he write a book about hypnogogia, he literally made all the connections to all other states of mind that are very similar…the theater brainwave state.
Every night I would spend hours and hours in that state, tripping out basically—that was my main concern [during that time]."
otra entrevista (guitar.com):
In an interview with Guitar Magazine back in 1992, Shields remembered, “The reason we got Bilinda in was that she understood the rhythmic side to playing in a band. You’d play something and she’d play in time and with a sense of how it should all fit together. That’s rare. We may not have been technically very good, but I knew we had the right feel. When I started out I couldn’t play either. I never really had any interest in the guitar. I thought if I was going to do anything I might play a little bass just because it looked easy.”
On both Isn’t Anything and Loveless, Butcher was woken
up to record her vocals to make them “more dreamy and sleepy” or
“sensual”. Many bands might record in the morning because they’ve been
cranking amps all night. For Butcher, “It’s 7:30 in the morning; I’ve
usually just fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing… I’m usually
trying to remember what I’ve been dreaming about when I’m singing.” And
sometimes that was improvised itself. Shields’ song demos sometimes
contained vocal sounds and melodies but not actual words, so it was down
to Butcher to meld them into coherence. Of sorts. Song design, from the
ground up.
And the woozy sound-assault meant any tuning oddities of Jazzmasters
and Jags was rarely an issue. “If you set ’em up right, the Jazz and Jag
terms are really reliable,” Shields said. “They feel tight, although we
have a little give in the actual arm so it can be used while you’re
playing really easy. I make sure all the bridges on our guitars are
really rough so they catch the strings as the trem moves.
“That, along with the reverse reverb thing was ours, we defined it. The term’s not an effect, its an emotional thing and using it’s as important as what strings or what chords we play. It’s part of the whole feeling, the essence of the song.”
To add to the idiosyncrasy, Shields invents
his own tunings (DAAAAD, anyone?) specific to songs. So, live, has a
separate Jazzmaster stage-ready for each song. He’s dyslexic as well,
which means he didn’t always make a proper notation of what the original
tuning even was…
otra (guitar.com):
Getting guitar sounds took even longer. I would set up arrays of microphones – like a politician’s press conference – assign them to individual channels and hand over to Kevin. He spent ages huddled over the desk, pushing up faders and listening to each microphone while playing.
Eventually, Kevin would arrive at an amplifier and
microphone balance that didn’t traumatise him and we could record. He
would invariably nail it in one take and I recall that he played with
outstanding accuracy and feel.
No equalisation, compression or effects pedals were used while
recording guitars, however Kevin always dialled up a gated reverse
reverb effect on either a Yamaha SPX90 or Alesis Quadreverb – he didn’t mind which.
Kevin also manipulated the whammy bar continually as he was playing. When the various takes and tones were combined, there was a randomness to the whammy bar effect, with guitar tracks changing pitch together and independently. The result was a massive composite guitar sound that was greater than the sum of its parts.
But a vocal effect Kevin
created had the most profound effect on me. He sang improvised oohs and
aahs throughout one of the songs, and then, without listening to
previous takes, he overdubbed several more tracks of the same.
These vocals shifted arbitrarily between harmony and dissonance. When Kevin processed them with radical equalisation and reverb, he created something akin to whales performing Gregorian chant in a canyon.
It’s among the most innovative and beautiful things I ever witnessed in a recording studio. My impression is that Kevin generally had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve and when he eventually got started, he worked methodically.
Kevin also obsessed over tiny details that
nobody else would notice – maybe some mechanically induced noise or a
weird harmonic overtone. He didn’t imagine these things and they
mattered because they mattered to him.
The Garden Studio went out of business shortly after the MBV sessions. After several months of freelancing, I landed a job at Jam Studios in Tollington Park and the first band that came through the door was My Bloody Valentine. They were still working on Loveless.
Producer
Alan Moulder was on board by then, so I assisted Alan while he assisted
Kevin. MBV weren’t happy at Jam and one Sunday morning the band failed
to show up. It was a familiar pattern and, as usual, they had left all
their gear and master tapes behind. Jam’s management shrewdly refused to
release anything until the bill had been paid – along with a
cancellation fee.
Creation Records settled the bill and offered to fill the remaining
studio time with one of their other bands. That’s how I ended up being
one of the recording engineers on Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, but that’s another story…
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Adenda:
Kevin Shields y el derecho a la vagancia (entrevista en The Quietus):
If for some reason I can’t make a great record, I won’t make a record at all. Because all you get is a little bit of money, which goes really fast anyway. It’s easier to do nothing and live on nothing than it is to do something and live on something when you’re running around compromising.
It’s better to do nothing than to do bad work.
KS: I think so. It’s like, being on the dole is better than being in a shit job, so long as you’ve got an interest in your life. Because if you’re in a shit job you don’t really have that much more money, and then after a few years your will to live begins to dissipate. The idea that it’s good to do stuff just for the sake of doing it, it’s a myth, I think. It’s a lie. It’s a very 80s concept – everything, everything being about productivity. The whole underground was about that too: groups were always saying "do stuff, do stuff, don’t just sit around!"
Well, I don’t believe in that. Even though I know it feels brilliant and I love it. I just… don’t believe in it.
adenda 2
tecnología de las grabaciones y el hi-fi (entrevista The Quietus) :
It sounds like what you do in the studio has more in common with painting.
KS: Yeah, maybe. Because of the time we came out, when CDs were new, it allowed me to go somewhere I couldn’t have gone when it was just vinyl, in terms of sitting down and fine tuning. In a nutshell, with vinyl – which I love – there’s an EQ curve on all record players, on the phono input. It takes the bass and treble up and the mid-range down. If you listen to a record without that, it sounds wrong, it’s all middle. That’s what a vinyl record really sounds like, it’s just mid-range. And you get an exaggerated version of that curve on cheap systems to make them sound more hi-fi, and then there’s people who have their own systems with crazy EQ set-ups and whatever.
So when you’re making a record, it’s a hard thing… different cuts of the record sound different, the kind of vinyl has an effect. I mean, what the needle looks like is a snowplough, because there’s always dust in the air and the grooves have all got shit in them, and the needle just throws all that out the way, ploughing through it. So depending on the vinyl and how heavy it is and how dirty it is, the needle can be dancing and jumping as it goes… so you get all those variations in the sound. But the CD pushed things more in the direction where people actually hear what you got on that digital master. Which encouraged me to go as far as I wanted in terms of fine balance, whereas if I’d been around in the ’60s or ’70s that would just have been pointless.
Like in the ’60s, there was a belief system that no one can hear a difference of 1.5 db. And that lasted until the ’80s, but now it’s understood that people can hear a 4db difference. We all perceive music differently [now] to how people perceived music 30 years ago, because our brains have been trained. We listen in a different way, and digital’s allowed that to happen. That’s the positive side of it – obviously, it’s also added a coldness and a hardness too, which is exaggerated by modern production techniques. But it’s allowed me a lot of freedom.
