My Fuzzy Valentine

On the morning of February 3, a disruption in my personal space-time continuum burst into our reality with such force, I could still feel its disorienting effects this very minute.

My Bloody Valentine also released its first album in 22 years, the much-awaited-then-lost-any-hope-of-ever-hearing-but-was-once-again-greeted-with-great-ancticipation follow-up to their classic Loveless album, but that’s only half the story. I wouldn’t actually listen to their new songs until five hours later that day. That morning’s experience was a phenomenon in and of itself; it deserves its own over-analysis.

So here’s what happened: I went over my twitter timeline that morning (backwards, like I normally do, so I can retain the natural chronology of everything I missed while I was sleeping) and was shocked to find out that the new My Bloody Valentine album finally had an actual release date, which happened to be that very day, February 2, 2013 (February 3 here in the Philippines). I could feel the build-up pulsating through my iPad: first there was the buzz, then the cover art reveal, and then the announcement that it had finally been released on the band’s website, which was followed by widespread panic over the now infamous “error 403”, and finally punctuated by an eerie silence of what I imagined to be everyone finally listening to the album and actually experiencing it rather than tweeting about it, an awestruck paralysis that only a long-time fan would recognize.

That whole sequence of events, manifesting itself to me through a tiny device that belied its actual immensity, was infinitely strange. I don’t even know where to begin to describe how unfathomable that morning was for me. But I’ll try. First, I have to go back 20 years, to a fuzzy radio recording of a couple of already intrinsically fuzzy songs. And one extremely loser-y Saturday night.

* * *

In case this entire blog doesn’t make this obvious enough: I was never really cool at any point in my life. In high school, I spent all of my Saturday nights at home watching the Friday the 13th series on RPN 9 (I found the redhead heroine addictive to stare at) and then listening to NU 107’s Not Radio program before going to sleep. One night in 1993, Not Radio had its Shoegazer Special that featured Curve, Swervedriver, Catherine Wheel, and other bands I can’t remember anymore. A couple of songs stood out that night – one was a searing clash of guitar white noise that drowned the soft female vocals into an unintelligible whisper and somehow coalesced into a thick and fuzzy pop confection, and the other was a languorous, hallucinatory mope song that sounded like The Cure on 50 different drugs, only it didn’t really sound sad but kind of uplifting. Both songs were by a band called My Bloody Valentine and it would take an extra year for me to find out that the former was entitled “To Here Knows When” and another decade to learn that the latter was “Moon Song”.

While I was in my room completely flabbergasted listening to this mind-blowing spectacle, I knew that my big sister – apparently also a loser who spent Saturday nights at home listening to the radio – was in her room, recording selected songs because she doesn’t have enough tapes to record entire episodes of Not Radio, and I remember thinking to myself: “Oh dear God, please tell me she got these.” I checked with her the next day, just to make sure that I didn’t just dream those dreamlike songs, and surely enough she got them.

I had to make sure because, otherwise, those two songs will forever be lost in the ether of adolescence. That’s how precarious indie music was to an ordinary teenager in the early 90s. My first relationship with My Bloody Valentine was through a mix tape that was probably on its fifth overdub, playing a sonic facsimile of a couple of songs that I would play repeatedly for days, weeks, and months. It would take me another year before I finally owned Loveless on CD.

This is why the moments leading up to the release of m b v were so strange to me on so many levels. I had multiple people telling me that it was about to be released and that they were so excited, “error 403” almost trended (or did it?), and that they were narrating everything, down to the progress rate of their download. And these were actual people – not radio DJs or music journalists or news services – people who I know, people who I used to work with, people who I follow because they were writers whose work I enjoy; all of whom I had no previous knowledge of their intense love for My Bloody Valentine.

The last time My Bloody Valentine had an album out, the world was a fucking wasteland. I didn’t have magazines then that had reviews of Loveless. I’m sure they existed, I just didn’t have access to them – financially, geographically, and socially. Outside my brother and my sister, I just didn’t know any other people who listened to My Bloody Valentine. Being into indie music in 1993 in a third-world suburban-industrial district at age 15 was such a lonely affair.

The songs in Loveless were the anthems of that loneliness. I would’ve said “soundtrack”, but that’s what The Sundays were for. Loveless didn’t merely comfort or romanticize that loneliness – it decorated it with the prettiest, sweetest noise I will ever hear in my life. Kevin Shields’ guitars shredded the sameness, the boredom, the claustrophobic uneventfulness of my teenage years. It made the loud music of grunge at the time sound unfulfilling in comparison, for finally here was noise that was dense enough and spatial enough to fill my discontent with more than rage, but with a wordless sonic substance. And it was a secret. As far as I knew, My Bloody Valentine lived in my room.

Last Sunday, a new technology that allowed different people from different parts of the world – some of whom even share my third-world background – to simultaneously express my same excitement over My Bloody Valentine’s nearly-lost album demolished any remaining remnants of that secret. It never really was one. And it was a really strange feeling. It was sadness, euphoria, disappointment, comfort, snobbish dismay, happiness for My Bloody Valentine for having achieved pantheon-level cult status, and most of all, excitement. It was exciting that all of these things were inspiring all of these emotions, it was an excitement that flowed on top of the main one, which was just the elation of finally hearing new material from a band that forever changed my perception of sound. It was just layer upon layer of feelings that they almost felt like a multi-tracked fuzz. But nothing can be muddled and beautiful the way My Bloody Valentine’s music is and always was. It’s the kind of mess I prefer, because it’s the kind of mess that never confuses me. It only makes things clearer.

* * *

In the movie Cinema Paradiso, a young Toto grew up sneaking inside a theater to watch movies that were censored by the local priest. Whenever an actress was about to kiss an actor, or was about to reveal some skin, or shed some clothes, the scene would instantly jump, causing people inside the theater to boo. Decades later, Toto – now an old, successful filmmaker – comes back to his hometown after the death of Alfredo, the town projectionist who also served as his father figure growing up. He has left Toto with one memento: a film reel, old, unmarked, and pregnant with promise. In one of the most moving final sequences in film history, we see Alfredo viewing the reel in utter speechless amazement that he cannot help but smile like a little kid and break down into tears – it is a montage of all the kissing scenes and nude scenes that Alfredo was ordered to cut, now spliced together and finally revealed.

I’ve always loved that scene and imagined what it must feel like to be Toto in that very moment; not only to see vestiges of your cherished past, but to see the parts of it that you missed, the parts you’ve long given up on ever seeing at all. I may never find out what that feels like for as long as I live but listening to m b v for the first time last Sunday is definitely the closest I’ve come so far.

This album is our generation’s SMiLE, a lost classic that we all thought was lost forever in the inscrutable mind of an obsessive genius. But where Brian Wilson’s masterpiece could only be recreated from his memory that has become as flawed and damaged as his voice, m b v comes in its fully realized form, the way Kevin Shields intended it to sound.

And so I listened to it, and suddenly it was 1993 again, and I don’t mean a recreation or a flashback, but a brand new extension that branches out into its own alternate universe with every anachronistic vocal styling and shoegazer shimmer. Only this isn’t shoegazer music anymore; My Bloody Valentine has long ceased to become that anyway, and this isn’t M83 anymore or Radio Dept. or The Pains of Being Pure at Heart or any music that “recalls” or yearns for a certain era, but is the era itself, reincarnated, uprooted through a wormhole and transplanted into our new reality, and there is no hint of nostalgia whatsoever, only the blissful unawareness of time. And this happens until now – every time I play the album, the sheer density of My Bloody Valentine’s music surrounds me with a wall that shelters me from the disorienting cacophony of the internet and social media. This is the sound of obliviousness towards the ways in which the world has changed. And it is so fucking beautiful.

The walls of sound that My Bloody Valentine continues to produce will always shape the four corners of my room, which I’ve never really left, and which I will never ever outgrow.