kevin shields 2004

What sounds interest you? Not particular instruments or musicians
necessarily, but atmospheres, keys, natural sounds, synthetic
sounds…

I've always had a slight fascination with rhythmic things. In a
non-intellectual way, like when you're rewinding a videotape and you
notice that it's actually a pattern. There's like little patterns in
it. It's sort of going, "duh-da-da, duh-da-da, duh-da-da:' You know
what I mean? You hear patterns in loads of things-everything. When I
got into drum and bass years ago, I kind of hit sort of…well, we
melted. I thought we pretty much destroyed ourselves. We tried to get
an intellectual grasp on it by using computers to program it. We got
really subtle things that you can barely perceive. What I was trying
to do was to marry the kind of…do you know Neil Young's guitar
sound when it's really distorted? It's got a ripple in it. Old
Fender Tweed amps have got this great ability if you turn them up. If
you play like a C-chord or something, or a G, a real basic chord, it
often ripples. There's a rhythm in the distortion. In the same way,
say, if you bend a note and it pulses. That's kind of what I'm
getting at. I still have a slight interest in that. It's not as
strong as it was, but I had a total obsession with that about eight
years ago. It still has a lingering thing. If I hear anything with a
weird rhythm in it, any sound, it kind of triggers me. And when I
played guitar, I did a lot where I was hunting for amps and hunting
for sounds so that every time you played these chords they would have
these ripples. We were trying to marry that with the drum and bass
and that really fast drum-type programming thing, so that the drums
and the guitars were kind of rippling in time. [Sighs] But anyway,
that's all concepts. It didn't actually pan out in the end because
it's too difficult to do that intuitively. It's being a bit like
Stravinsky, or something-pure fucking intellectual conceptuality.


And you don't like that.

I don't. For some reason, it sounds interesting to talk about and
it's initially very impressive to listen to. You listen to it and you
go, "Wow, what the fuck is that?" And then somehow at the end of it,
even after three or four minutes, you don't feel that sort of magic
feeling that you feel when you hear music that's made more
intuitively. So, anyway, that's pretty much what stopped me in my
tracks in the '90s…. You can think as much as you want, but a good
bit of music is just good. And it has a life of its own, regardless
of anyone's opinion.


Are you able now to get to a place where you're making music for
yourself and not thinking about other people's expectations?

I do and I always will and I always have. I do music for my own
pleasure. I went through a really weird phase where I would have a
bunch of cassettes and then when I would listen to them too much, I'd
actually write more music just so I could listen to it. I was
basically creating my own music for myself, like a little feedback
loop that was just for me. I knew it was just for me and I knew no
one would hear it and it was great. It's a pretty terrible thing to
say, but I actually love listening to my own tunes. They're speaking
from a deeper part of me to the more conscious part of myself, so it
works best on me. I'll do that forever. It's what keeps me sane.


Do you ever feel any resentment toward the idea of Loveless being
this untouchable Holy Grail, or even toward people who have helped
elevate it to that status?

No, because people just read into it what they want. My whole take on
it has been this: 50 percent of what people have said about that
record is an illusion, right? And the other 50 percent of what I know
is good about the record, no one's noticed. So, it's neither here nor
there what anyone says. And the fact that people know there's
something good about it-'cause there is something good about it, it's
as simple as that-and that's why I didn't make a record after that,
because I didn't have that presence to do it. What's good about it is
the mood. It's got a single-mindedness that comes out in the way it's
sung and played, not the sounds. The sounds are not as important as
you'd imagine. It's just Marshall amps and Vox amps-that's all I
used-except for maybe an Ampeg amp and a fucking strange graphic
equalizer-looking amp. But that's it. It's like really, really super
basic. It all had to do with the way I played guitar. It's got less
overdubs than that White Stripes record. The point I'm making is that
what was good about it was that it had a very strong feeling that
went through everything. It was like being possessed by something and
you're just a loyal servant. That's a great feeling. It's very strong
and powerful and nobody can fuck you over when you feel like that.

http://metroencoding.net/emperornorton/ref/kevinshields_city-girl_320x180_large-REF.mov

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