Loveless recreated

An enigmatic Soundcloud user has painstakingly recreated My Bloody Valentine's album "Loveless" in full. (shamelessly yoinked from dunkadunc's post on the main front page)

Loveless, widely considered to be the seminal Shoegaze album, is notorious for its peculiar tone, style and performance. The sound of the album comes as much from how Kevin Shields plays the guitar as it comes from a whole suite of effects applied to the instrument during recording and mixing.

posted by chimaera (5 comments total)

I don't find the vocals very well done or the drums super convincing, but those guitars....!

Most notably on "Blown A Wish" (32:50 in the soundcloud file)... that's some master work. I've played guitar for about 23 years and been recording (semi-pro-ish) for about 18, and though in principle I could say how to maybe getting something vaguely similar to the guitar tones in the album, I'd be very, very hard pressed to come up with a recreation this accurate.
posted by chimaera at 12:04 AM on June 2, 2012

but those guitars

yep.
posted by dubold at 1:51 PM on June 3, 2012

An enigmatic Soundcloud user has painstakingly recreated My Bloody Valentine's album "Loveless" in full.

Forgive me, but I'm genuinely struggling to see the point of this. It's akin to doing a meticulous copy of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings or writing out one of Dickens' novels in longhand or whatever. A copy is not and can never be in any way equivalent to an original, which is the result of all the talent, sweat and inspiration that went into its creation. Why on earth would anyone bother doing a po-faced pastiche of any work of art (not that I'd put Loveless in that category, but that's beside the point here)....what are they trying to prove???
posted by gallus at 8:55 AM on June 4, 2012

Forgive me, but I'm genuinely struggling to see the point of this.

It's an interesting exercise. Nobody who is a fan of Loveless thinks that this copy is "equivalent" to the original; it definitely sounds different, although the guitars are surprisingly close. I don't know if you record much, but most people I know who are into recording often wonder how bands got a certain sound. Occasionally you try to recreate sounds that you hear, and the process of duplication, or failing to duplicate something, can be really informative.

It's akin to doing a meticulous copy of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings

If you showed me a copy of Tournesols that looked pretty close to the original I would be impressed by the ability and technique. A copy wouldn't be "worth" the same as the original; it would be useful practice for the painter and an interesting conversation piece.
posted by dubold at 11:02 AM on June 4, 2012

gallus: “Forgive me, but I'm genuinely struggling to see the point of this. It's akin to doing a meticulous copy of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings or writing out one of Dickens' novels in longhand or whatever. A copy is not and can never be in any way equivalent to an original, which is the result of all the talent, sweat and inspiration that went into its creation. Why on earth would anyone bother doing a po-faced pastiche of any work of art (not that I'd put Loveless in that category, but that's beside the point here)....what are they trying to prove???”

“... Those who have insinuated that Menard dedicated his life to writing a contemporary Quixote calumniate his illustrious memory.

“He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“‘My intent is no more than astonishing,’ he wrote me the 30th of September, 1934, from Bayonne. ‘The final term in a theological or metaphysical demonstration—the objective world, God, causality, the forms of the universe—is no less previous and common than my famed novel. The only difference is that the philosophers publish the intermediary stages of their labor in pleasant volumes and I have resolved to do away with those stages.’ In truth, not one worksheet remains to bear witness to his years of effort.

“The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly accurate command of seventeenth-century Spanish) but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard... ‘My undertaking is not difficult, essentially,’ I read in another part of his letter. ‘I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.’ Shall I confess that I often imagine he did finish it and that I read the Quixote —all of it—as if Menard had conceived it? Some nights past, while leafing through chapter XXVI—never attempted by him—I recognized our friend’s style and something of his voice in this exceptional phrase: ‘the river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo...’”

– Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
posted by koeselitz at 11:59 PM on June 15, 2012