Antonio Topete
Reasonably, most people don’t like noise. The hissing of a pipe, dripping water as you’re trying to fall asleep, a neighbor overstepping the boundaries of volume as they assemble their third piece of furniture this week. When we hear noise, it feels like a distraction, like stimulus that is so strong you can’t ignore it. But we do everything that we can to avoid the noise. Earplugs or a pair of noise cancelling headphones are essential equipment for most of the people I know, including myself. And with good reason, who wants to hear it? I think the proverbial wisdom goes “f that noise.”
This aversion to noise usually extends into music as well. You’re enjoying a song until you hit the overloaded instrumental bridge, as you cringe and probably mumble “what is this.” That was always my experience, as I would write off some music as being too noisy, too loud, too much. Eventually, I came across the classic shoegaze album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. This time, the noise was still very overpowering, but there was something about it that made it feel ethereal, not chaotic. At first, I didn’t love it, but with each listen the whirring guitars, the muddled vocals, and the trance-like song structures felt less like noise and more like something incredible. And with time, Loveless, and shoegaze as a genre, would redefine my musical journey as one that embraces noise as something to get lost in.
The term ‘Shoegaze’ comes from the tendency of musicians in the genre to stare down at their feet during a performance, looking at a grid of effect pedals used to alter the sounds of their instruments. The reason everything sounds so sloshed in shoegaze is because there are so many effects layered onto the instruments, creating an entirely new sound. Also, instruments are often mixed together to blend in with one another, giving it a noisy, humming, and somewhat disorienting feel. Nonetheless, despite these sonic experiments, shoegaze is dreamy and vast. It is simultaneously music that can hit you like a train, but can feel like floating through space at the same time. This paradoxical nature of shoegaze, of being both abrasive and relaxing, is at its core. Shoegaze is closely related to its cousin genre, ‘Dream Pop’, which also has a dreamy, spacey feel, but focuses more on heavy reverb and a cleaner, polished sound. On the other hand, shoegaze relishes in saturation, overwhelming the listener and pushing them off a cliff into the void.
The truth is that once I became familiar with shoegaze, I realized that the sounds I was hearing, in shoegaze and in all noisy music, isn’t really noise at all. Especially in genres defined by their explosive, experimental sounds, everything you hear is carefully crafted. Layering instruments and effects comes with hours, days, weeks of tweaking, of getting tones and textures just right. And when you listen more and more, you learn to appreciate the tweaks and the time that went into designing these sounds, because they don’t sound quite like anything you’ve heard before. Through shoegaze and its mysticism of sound, I learned to be more sensitive to the quality of sound in all music; picking up on the use of chorus on that guitar solo, thinking about the amount of reverb used on the vocal track. This attunement has made me realize that effects are everywhere, not just in the genres that indulge in them heavily, like shoegaze.
Shoegaze is not just about creating incredible sounds, but also about existing in them. Often, the noisiness of shoegaze is in large part due to the repetition it contains. The feeling of being in a daze, of getting hit with wave after wave of full sound, that’s shoegaze. It’s a challenging part to get used to, but ultimately, sitting in the noise, letting it flow through you, it’s meditative in a way. When I first started getting into shoegaze, I remember joking that it was a lot like putting your face under a faucet and turning the water on at full pressure. In a way, I still agree with that assessment, but now I think it’s more of a positive thing. Yes, it’s startling at first, but if we ignore the fact that you definitely wouldn’t be able to breathe under a full-blast faucet, you could imagine that the water feels pretty good.
I’d like to think that shoegaze is at least partly responsible for teaching me that noise is complicated. Not just the kind of noise in music, but in everything. Things that might seem like an annoyance at first are probably part of a much larger system we don’t see. Once you stop seeing things as noise, those systems begin to reveal themselves, and the noise stops, because as it turns out, everything is just noise. So let it in.
Listening Now 