As with shoegaze’s crescendoing textures, there’s a sheer force of sensory feeling in Virginia Woolf’s verisimilitude.
My obsession with shoegaze was not immediate. I got through My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow”, with its heavy, driving guitars fine enough, but then the sound on Loveless devolved into disparate, unconnected, almost shimmering bits, no centrality of clear lyrics or three-chord melody propping them up.
It was the same with Slowdive, though, being from the Cocteau Twins’ side of the shoegaze coin – My Bloody Valentine being more directly descended from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s feedback-heavy Psychocandy (1985) – there’s a breezier entry into their discography. I prefer the unreleased demo, “Sleep”, various iterations of which lurk on YouTube, and whose lyrics were a mystery until I dug them up in another video:
“I can see you laughing,
Through dreams of perfect sleep.
Sleep away from me,
You know what’s in my mind.
When you go I’m crying,
Dream, dream away from me.”
“Sleep” is a sedate, dream-like entry, the vocals obscured until a word peeks through here and there, but when listening for the first time, you’re propelled forward still by the droning, the desire to parse some comprehension out of the lyrics. Then the first verse ends, and the guitars explode into a plaintive, dense, and shimmering wall, so that the recessed vocals become an afterthought, and the only reason to keep listening is the want to be awash continually in that untethered feeling.
It’s a feeling that lingers. It’s more than a specific lyric or concrete melodic structure that attaches itself to a moment, a shade of light, an associative, Proustian relationship that can arise unexpectedly.
“…[Shoegaze] was about atmospheres…it was about creating these like cinematic moments…it’s like you can watch a film and it could remind you of really sweet moments and you kind of lock into that as a feeling.” – Neil Halstead, Slowdive
“…so everything’s squashed together. It’s a bit like an infinite horizon, and unlike a horizon where your eyesight stops, with sound, you can imagine it infinitely.” – Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine
Transfiguring the Form
Shoegaze, as a term, has a loose definition, arising from the guitarists having to look down at their pedals to drive the distorted and varied sounds from their guitars. Yet that in itself is a limited definition, as noise can also be derived from feedback or manipulating a tremolo bar. However, what’s overlooked about shoegaze is how it restructures the typical song.
In a more typical song structure, the instrumentation all forms part of the vehicle that delivers lyrics, the “theme” of the song. Think of it as the drums, guitar, bass, etc., forming different parts of a car, with the lyrics being the driver. In shoegaze, however, the lyrics are pushed from the foreground into the middle plane alongside the instrumentation, the distinctness and clarity of vocals, of course, varying to certain degrees. In My Bloody Valentine’s case, the lack of a lyric sheet makes the experience even more all-consuming, as there’s no reaching after a comprehension of meaning through words, and one is forced to lean back and simply listen to the shapes of sounds the words evoke in equal harmony with the instrumentation.
Shoegaze explores a fundamental shift in a song’s structure, where the lyrics or vocals are another instrument; it’s the convergence of craft onto a singular plane. With My Bloody Valentine’s androgynous approach to vocals, another distinction is created within the concept of the love song, where gendered vocal difference is converged onto a singular plane, contrasting strongly against something like a Nancy Sinatra-Lee Hazlewood duet. So, while pedals and having to gaze at them might be one avenue to the shoegaze sound, it’s inherently not the only one.
If there’s an emphasis on different elements of the song being explored, then Gang of Four’s reduction and isolation of instrumentation is an important musical context to consider:
“One of the beauties of guitar/bass/drums is you have a lot of space […] More traditional pop music has this hierarchical, pyramid structure, with lead vocals on top, guitar below it, and then keyboards and backing vocals, all meant to support the lead vocals. One of the things Gang of Four did was put everything side by side.”
Gang of Four’s focus was to continue exploring the reduction of elements that began with punk. While punk was the reduction of the song to a basic three-chord organization, the genre’s practitioners made up for the reduced space with a relentless energy and vitality. Gang of Four’s sound was a further reduction of sound, with the adjacency of the instrumentation introducing an isolated emphasis on each part, creating white space, white space that shoegaze then filled with its wall of textured noise.
While, as with anything, the formal descent is varied, the two immediate proto-shoegaze sounds are from the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, specifically the latter’s Psychocandy album. With the Cocteau Twins, there are the shimmering textures and drowned-out, not always clear vocals of Elizabeth Fraser, whose “swooping, operatic vocals relied less on any recognizable language than on the subjective sounds and textures of verbalized emotions.”
Listening to Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas (1990) is like listening to something familiar but just out of reach, like a feeling of déjà vu. My brother felt this when I first played him the record. “I can feel the words, and my brain is coming up with them even though I can’t hear them.” Indeed, it’s an impressionistic listening experience that involves the listener’s active subjectivity, where the shape of the sound of words, or an impression formed of the words, invokes an active participation by the listener.
With Psychocandy, there is a similar transformation to what John Coltrane did on his 1961 album, My Favorite Things, where a prior form has a new sound or energy injected into it, rather than clunkily superimposed upon it, thus transfiguring the form altogether. Or, in a literary context, this is what Raymond Chandler accomplished as he added psychological and emotional depth to the noir/detective form and transfigured it altogether, shifting the emphasis away from the “mystery” of crime to the mystery and inexplicability of the human condition, combining noir’s cynicism with F. Scott Fitzgerald-like disillusioned romanticism.
In the Jesus and Mary Chain’s case, pop’s swinging melody from the 1960s is the foundation into which the Reid brothers inject ear-splitting feedback. It’s not immediately apparent on first listen, but beneath the noise, Jim Reid’s vocals – forcefully recessed by the guitar’s feedback – still carry a bouncy, swinging melody, thus resulting in two seemingly incongruous sounds and forms combining to create something new altogether.
Jim Reid describes the band’s ambition as “…if Nancy Sinatra had Einstürzende Neubauten as a backing band.” This catches the spirit of the group aptly, as the melody, swing, and syllabic balance of the lyrics – not to mention the romantic despondency – is not dissimilar from songs put out by the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las, particularly in songs like “Taste of Cindy” and “You Trip Me Up”, with the Jesus and Mary Chain ratcheting up the feedback but also the misanthropy (“Knock me on my back / I’ll send a heart attack”).
Shoegaze’s Guitar-Based Impressionism
Using My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as two prime examples, the feedback results in a more mature shoegaze sound, a shimmering texture that can be classified as guitar-based impressionism. In a physical sense, Kevin Shields’ “gliding” technique, where the tremolo bar becomes part of the guitar’s strumming, “glides” over and through the guitar’s physicality, and on the other end, introducing effects like reverb through a pedal, explosively expands the guitar’s range of expression. Like Monet’s impressionist paintings, there’s the dissolution of structure, rigid lines, and a melting sensory feeling that provides an emotionally limitless experience.
Observing Monet’s Water Lillies at MoMA creates a different experience each time. It was a different experience for me before the museum’s expansion, when, on a weekday, footfalls could be heard only around corners. I sat, leaned back, and gazed at the swirling green and blue and yellows across canvases, and thought of green of grass with a blue spring sky from adolescence, or in another moment, remembrance of small green petals resting on the dark green of swamp water.
The feelings that come with this remembrance include the ache of nostalgia, the further remembrance of the moment itself, perhaps a day elaborated, and a few further moments relived. It’s a different experience now at the MoMA, having to elbow past the crowd and struggle for space to stand – no empty spaces to sit back and lean – and so there’s a racing anxiety with phone in hand, taking pictures and looking over those in retrospect to derive some sensation, some impression of a feeling evoked.
Impressionism allows an individual’s subjective experience and transitions easily to shoegaze. Similar to Monet’s work, shoegaze isn’t the absence of form, or in music’s case, of melody. Rather, it’s a transfiguration of traditional melody into something more fluid, more associative, and more inexplicable, as there’s still the overall physical form of the medium holding the art together. Shoegaze evokes an emotional and artistic state that’s reminiscent of Keats’ negative capability, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
However, like all works of art, shoegaze requires an equal effort by the viewer/listener. It insists upon a willingness to let go and be absorbed into an undefined emotional state, and to be content with a receiving feeling rather than an answer.
Collapsing Logic to Create Sensation
It’s a fluidity of consciousness and feeling that’s evident in Virginia Woolf’s work, be it her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse or 1931’s The Waves. The section breaks in The Waves that mark the passage of time as it ebbs on a beach are walls of sensory perception akin to the “Wall of Sound”, where a mass of feeling/sensation is presented as an enveloping cloud around the reader/listener. It’s an experience that doesn’t ask much of the reader, as Woolf’s story passes through the consciousness of her six characters, rendering them almost singular despite their varying personalities.
She dips her toes in the pool of each character, if you will, stirring impressions of their selves, and, via the structure of the novel, compressing them into a whole, singular consciousness. In doing so, Woolf detaches the six consciousnesses from any element of a heroic mode, flattening them into a singular voice, a single sensory experience. Here, voice offers the same function as sounds in a song.
In Professor Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, he describes Woolf’s endeavor in To the Lighthouse as “a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions”, a description as equally apt for The Waves.
“…a chance occasion releasing processes of consciousness; a natural and even, if you will, a naturalistic rendering of those processes in their peculiar freedom, which is neither restrained by a purpose nor directed by a specific subject of thought; elaboration of the contrast between ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ time… the exterior events have lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events”
The loss of hegemony in exteriority mirrors lyrics losing their hegemony in shoegaze, as the two planes of consciousness – exterior and interior – become complementary and begin to exist on a singular plane, rather than the latter in service of the former. When the interiority – or instrumentation – begins to co-exist on a singular plane as the exterior – or lyricism – it expands the range of expression.
In Woolf’s case, the expanded range of expression provides the perfect vessel to encapsulate both the illogical structure of consciousness and the immeasurable, subjective quality of time. In shoegaze, the recession of lyrics or forwarding of instrumentation onto a singular plane accomplishes a singular effect, expanding the range of sonic expression, one that is more textured and subjective in feeling.
The dissolution of structure in either form – linearity and the physicality of temporal narration in Woolf’s novels and the structure of the “lyric song” in shoegaze – both accomplish the same: a collapse of logic to introduce sensation. There’s a sheer force of sensory feeling in Woolf’s verisimilitude, in her reckoning with the properties of time in To the Lighthouse. The length of conscious thought doesn’t correspond with the physical movement of the characters in which the thought is occurring.
It is the same with shoegaze, where the crescendoing textures of the guitar expand and fill a space as aptly as a three-part novel or an explicitly pop song with a lyrical theme, where instrumentation exists either wholly in the background or as separate entities. In that dissolution, an expanded consciousness and expanded feeling are possible, both for the artist and for the reader/listener. One must only choose to succumb to the feeling the art evokes.