Dream Pop

"You could say, shrewdly, that Loveless combines two main modalities of the ’90s by being the greatest rock album that is made almost entirely of samples—drum loops, guitar feedback, vocals, all sent through an Akai S1000, which could then be triggered from a keyboard—creating a singular melding of dream-pop and acid-house and hip-hop that defined a new genre called shoegaze. You could say its underlying philosophy remains as relevant as ever: that sleepiness is a largely underrated state of being, that our unconscious impulses are far more truthful than our conscious behavior, that the best music should feel like it could go on forever. You could say that its chief architect, Kevin Shields, is influenced by no one more than fellow Irishman Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher who coined the Romantic ideals of beauty and sublime, and who wrote that the richest emotional response from art comes from the “terrible uncertainty” it can elicit."

"Burn this whole madhouse down."

"Loveless isn’t just an essential alternative rock album, it’s also one of the best albums of the 90s. It’s like an overwhelming out-of-body experience – transcendent beauty with a capital ‘trance’ – and its reinvention of sound, texture and mood in rock music sounds as radical now as it did in 1991. My Bloody Valentine spent two years in the studio perfecting [their] formula: a dizzying blend of roaring guitars and sensual vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Loveless is a classic that’s spawned many imitators but has no peer."

"I'll break your heart to keep you far from where all danger starts"

"All on my own Here I stand. Am I humble, am I ghost? I’m on a limb to climb To something lawless I hope Am I humble, am I ghost? I found a way To look towards this day But it all hooked up This could only go one way I’m not alive, I’m not alive enough."

"Love is to die, love is to not die, Love is to dance, love is to dance. Love is to die, Why don't you not die? Why don't you dance? Why don't you dance and dance?"

"Our hearts just won’t die It’s the trip, keeps us alive"

"They’re following some dance of light Tearing into the night Watching you fall asleep The sweetest dove in a dream"

"“Fade Into You,” the dreamiest single of the ’90s, broke Mazzy Star through to the charts with its aching beauty. But anybody expecting their full-length to sustain that sense of fragile romance must have been shocked by the disquieting dread that hangs thick over So That Tonight I Might See, a dream-pop album with a gothic core."

"I want to hold the hand inside I want to take the breath that's true I look to you and I see nothing I look to you to see the truth you live your in shadows fade into you into your darkness"

"Suzanne's voice could lull a King's Army into blissful dreamscapes, thereby calming war torn battlefields'"

"Make no mistake, Love Spirals Downwards stand alone as a landmark to ethereal and madrigal greatness."

"Out of all the chosen representatives of this genre, Love Spirals Downwards is the most acceptable to general audiences. Dare we call it 'pop ethereal'?"

"Love Spirals Downward[s] shares a psychedelic code with the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and a musical code with groups like the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance."

"There was a certain vibe at Projekt Festival… I don’t think people realized we were the artists! When we walked out on stage I had this really trippy shirt on, and people laughed at me up at the front!"

"The last time I went to a gothic club in L.A. was in 1989…I believe that the whole gothic club scene here has grown lifeless; there’s no new creative influx… I remember myself and others leaving that whole scene for good in 1989 and headed for the then-new "Acid House" clubs such as the "Alice In Wonderland" themed Alice’s House which had the life and energy that had been missing for so long in the goth scene.*"

"Sky's the same as it always was, Nothing we do. So hard to keep anything, When you're expected to. This is the time when water stops, History dies with you. Like rings of trees in sideways forest, Forgetting."

"Projekt has been successful at marketing itself to goths. We're not gothic, nor are any of the bands that influence us. Whoever thinks that we or Slowdive or the Cocteau Twins are goth must have a funny idea of what goth is."

"I'm about as Gothic as Snoop Doggy Dog. I've never categorized myself nor my art as Gothic. I really don't understand where people get the idea that we are Gothic."

"Your lips are conquerors, Your lips are filled with lies. Lost, lost in what seems, That’s how it should be. Who, who is to see, We write in water, Now."

"I begin again, As the world outside ends. Dense, even in the still light, To owe you my life. I tell you, Make castles when you want to, And fill them with sights. Stir about the stars, During nights below these tides."

"We weren't trying to be a band, so we were shocked and surprised when there was any response at all. We mailed out the tape to three companies: 4AD, Creation, and Projekt - who we didn't know about, we heard of it through a friend of a friend. Sam wrote us back a letter of interest. He didn't say he would sign us or anything, but he wanted to hear more stuff."

"Why did we even send it out? I guess I was recording another band here and they were making a tape to send out places, so we figured, 'Hey, we can do that!'"

"It's been an important pursuit of mine, but I never had any intention of pursuing music as a sort of career, on a 'professional' level. I just always made music for myself. It made me happy. I'd been doing that for years, until Suzanne came into the picture."

"We started singing together in January of 1991."

"We were boyfriend/girlfriend for maybe a year or two before I had her sing on my music. I knew her two years and I never knew she sang that well!"

"A lot of those songs for Idylls I had never intended to be released ever, they were just demos — not all of them, maybe half the songs were just demos — that got turned into real songs. On this new album [Ardor] since we were signed, obviously I knew they were going to be released. As far as a concept, um… no, not really. I had more — on this album — of a sound concept, but it kinda hit me when I was almost done with the album. Maybe the way I mixed the songs kinda tied them all together.*"

"I'll come up with some chord sequences that I like on acoustic guitar and build from there. After that, it's all very intuitive. An idea comes in the studio and it's recorded right then."

"It's usually a building process, it's just different what I start building from. Sometimes it will be a drum sound, and I'll build on that, or it will be a keyboard or acoustic guitar part. It gets turned into a pretty full blown instrumental after awhile, and then the vocals usually come in last - near the end - and I'll fix up the drums and mix it down sometime later."

"We've got our own home recording studio. In fact, the way we write, we have to do it at home. We don't make up 10 or 11 songs and say, 'Okay! Time to go to the studio and record all the songs!' I'll have some rough sounds or ideas and I'll record them down on tape or into the sampler, and from there I'll start getting more ideas. It will build from what I previously recorded. That would be a very costly, practically impossible, thing to do in the studio. We would be racking up the kind of budget like Sgt. Pepper's or something!"

"It seems like it could be a contradiction, but it’s not. Our band name, in a way, reflects our way of making lyrics and our whole attitude towards music. What sounds best is what works."

"Trom rey am Lea lam Fiore fio Freya say Dolce spira Scherza mira Va go"

"We were listening to the radio one night --late-- to a new age show and the woman was saying, “Love, it spirals, upwards, upwards!” It stuck in Suzanne’s head because it was really late… 3 or 4 in the morning. We were parked in front of her house. It tripped us out a lot. So we said, “OK, that’s the band name, Love Spirals Upwards.” Then we decided to change it to "downwards.""

"It's hard to think of a band name; we had to think of one rather quickly to send our demo tape out. We should have just sent it as Ryan and Suzanne! Anyway, our choice of band name didn't follow from our wanting to associate ourselves with the drug."

"I'd cross the ocean just to be there by your side. I've felt the water as it's river flows to dry. The night sky warms me, tell me should I close my eyes? Those lights that blind me, say you, "Just you step inside." Right by your side. Right by your side."

"Will you fade now, should I let you? Met with indifference, I remain. So much depends now on this distance, These things escape. Well now I'm too dizzy, I am out of myself. Can you feel it? Too much within yourself. I grow dizzy."

"We don’t really tour per se. It’s usually been a few one-off shows or a string of small shows put together. I’ve never been, like, packed in a van on the road for a month. It sounds kind of, I don’t know, not fun? I like the music part. I like seeing things. But… traveling too much can get kind of wearying. I might starting hating everyone, all my friends I’m traveling with. It’s always been more of a studio project than jamming live, so you know, less reason to wanna go out and jam live, since we don’t really do it here at home, anyway."

"It's really weird to have these songs - some on Idylls have been out for years - and going back and playing them now. The only time they existed is us recording them -- we never rehearsed the songs once in our lives. I'm not kidding."

"More of a spiritual experience. Some kind of musical listening experience that guides you in a higher direction. Not higher like taking drugs, but lifting them up a little bit, engaging their spiritual dimension."

"I’ve just never felt that art must have meaning: it just is. It’s sort of a funny fallacy that most people seem to insist upon everything in the world as having meaning. What is the meaning of a sunset? What’s wrong with just simply experiencing it? Likewise, our art exists without demanding that it has some higher or more important existence apart from the experience of it. Its meaning is irrelevant."

"Oh I don't know what Suzanne is singing about. She just uses words that sound good. There's no storytelling or anything like that you are supposed to get.... Asking her to write a real story or poetry would be almost a foreign concept."

"I believe that many people think that we are weird mysterious people, perhaps because our music is a bit weird and mysterious. Many interviewers seem a little surprised when they meet us. I think that they were expecting us to be different than how we really are in person, which is really down to earth and real. We are definitely not pretentious."

"Our main quality is that we never pretend to be someone we’re not. We’re not interested in technical perfection or impressing anyone—we care about emotion."

"A friend recently transcribed what she thought were the lyrics of our new songs, and they were different from ours. But the interesting thing is that her lyrics were just different from ours, not better or worse. The way she had imparted her meaning to the lyrics was really intriguing. That’s why I think it’s so exciting to use lyrics like ours: there’s not a single meaning that everyone is expected to understand. I bet there are as many different meanings for our songs as there are people that they listen to them."

"In junior high and early high school I had maybe three or four years of guitar training, but I didn't really learn anything after the first year or so. I don't know why I kept going."

"We're not a big musicianship kind of band. It's important, but we're not Yes or something like that. We play what we gotta play to make the music sound right. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's a little difficult. The most important thing is that we play it right."

"I go between making this pure acoustic music and then going into this analog synthesizer, drum machine sound, tweaking knobs and stuff — just to keep things fun! If I did the same thing for a while, I’d get burnt out!"

"I'm a firm believer of always trying different things, trying to push myself, not falling back into what I did before - even if it was successful. I get bored, and I feel as if I've cheated myself, too, if don't push myself to do something new."

"All of my other albums I really cringe at listening to. Actually, it's kinda sad; Flux is the first one now where it's like, 'I finally did it right!'"

"I really don't think we sound like them, to be completely honest. I'm not in denial or self-deception, it's my honest belief that if you listen to our music, we don't sound like the Cocteau Twins."