Am taking transcription and analysis, known coquettishly as T&A, this semester. After fumbling around with 1) score paper and 2) waveform analysis, we have 'moved on' to and older way of transcribing. Writing. I was asked to 'write a transcription of a song I know well.'

Yikes. In writing what I have below, I realize that I need to think again about my views on writing about sound as such. It's something that I do every day and don't think about as a system, or rather, I have a 'stock answer' for how I do it. That is scary, and probably bad. My ideas have changed a lot about 'the music itself' and how to go about capturing it if it needs to be pinned somehow. What is your favorite piece of writing about sound, or about how to write about sound? I would very much love comments about it so I can go get a fresh batch of inspiration.

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Four synthetic snare hits, no randomizer. Silence. An explosion, sweetly of intro in eight bars. Fender guitar into Marshall Shred Master, Boss EQ, Boss EQ, Boss Tremolo, Boss Tremolo, Digitech Whammy, Digitech sampler, Dunlop Rovovibe, preamp into MIDI control, out to preamp stereo Marshall stacks. All lights on, all stomps stomped – chaos. Swoons down from over the one to the two, vaguely could you put one pitch you’d say D down to A just between three and four, but the distortion and the delay flay guitar sound around the beat, making fuzz and taffy of whatever motion one man’s hand made to make this sound.

He takes this big phrase and doubles it, with the second chance all these coils and frays go through one more chain, a whammy bar, which makes the bend, the hook, the beginning. Tremolo comes over all, its own instrument, living a life extended past the guitar. Matched beneath, turn down the stereo, is a synthesizer sound, treble strings as late reverberations of the swaying guitar. The bass is simple, mid-range G, F to B flat C maybe finger picked though the rhythm within the note contour is largely lost, the bottom hovering hooky in the middle of the phrase, repeated eight times – a simple phrase, repeated. This line is a bed, so simply for the drama unfolding on it. Drums, machine made, weirdly up in the mix – its alien plodding ‘kick drum snare’ after lead in, only changed to repeat the fill two times more. One time more, before…before. Verse.

My Bloody Valentine, opening track of Loveless, “Only Shallow,” released in November 1991. Albums of the year include Nirvana’s Nevermind, U2’s “Achtung Baby,” Primal Scream’s “Screamadelica,” Pearl Jam’s “Ten,” Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines,’ Guns n’ Roses “Use Your Illusion II,” REM’s “Out of Time,” Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes,” and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik.” 1991. The year punk broke. The birth of the alternative nation, history will read.

An alternate history doesn’t begin, but breaks, in these forty-seven seconds. Guitar as texture, noise as melody, melody as badge of courage, pop song as art vessel, drum machine willfully inhabiting rock sphere, studio as band and later, in the song, vocal as instrument, feminine gender still mysterious, but powerful.

This is not Kurt Cobain’s eyeliner, dress and Pro-Choice rally – it is beyond sartorial, a different bubble of underground values made musical, beginning yes with the Velvet Underground but moving across the ocean, dolled up, reconnected to the blues but sometimes torn away again. The band’s leader, Kevin Shields – whose 500,000 dollar recording cost, perfectionism and reclusion got him what he always wanted, the genius tag – is not originally from Scotland, but Queens, New York. And from that rag pile to the myth, no trace of the individual, like the hundreds of overdubs that make Loveless a shimmering, hard to pin down thing. He matters because you cannot see him but you know that by his touch, this thing has been made great.

The album art is crucial – oversaturated, pink like flesh and girlie things, but made brighter – the shadow and glare form a smear of guitar, a man’s instrument, obscured – neutral without the neutered. Here is a glimpse of one man’s utopian vision of heart matters in a time on the cusp – the 1990s, a time for hardcore boys like Cobain and metal men like Soundgarden to be big, but for effete songsmiths like Billy Corgan and indeed, for so many women-fronted rock bands, to carve out another sonic space. Loveless offers itself between the gender lines, a boy in pink, a guitar without a solo.

My Bloody Valentine was part of movement with so many pedals that they called it ‘shoegazer.’ It was always called that because its many boys were so awkward. That is why the album, this album, is so important to its history. No people inhabit it, really, though people contributed to it. But here, building up is erasing, erasing is hiding, hiding is safety. This is the sound of one man’s safe place made public. The snare hits let you know you are knocking on his door.

No other band of the time could manage to shut out the world so successfully while managing, in under a minute, to set some part of it afire.