Sights & Sounds: My Bloody Valentine featuring Alex Synge and Philip Kennedy

Anniversaries are always good occasions to celebrate, so why not the 23rd and 20th anniversary of a pair of classic albums? Today’s wallpapers are technically Sights & Sounds installments, but done in one amazing post. The albums I’m speaking of are Isn’t Anything and Loveless from the Irish band, My Bloody Valentine.

With the release of these albums they helped to usher in the idea of shoegaze, which was defined by band members staring down at their feet as they used effects pedals to create a blaring cacophony of sound. With the release of Isn’t Anything back in 1988 My Bloody Valentine the band had managed to find the sweet spot of Jesus and Mary Chain, the wail of Sonic Youth and make something quite their own. With the follow up in 1991 of Loveless, they refined that sound to a new level and made one of the most revered album of the last 20 years. You can hear their sound in many bands today, M83 being a great example, and just how important they were to the generations that followed.

Figuring out who to get to make these wallpapers was a cinch, since our very own TFIB author Philip Kennedy is Irish. He, along with his buddy Alex Synge, tackled My Bloody Valentine’s only two albums, and they did a fantastic job. Alex’s design is stunning, it honestly makes me think of something Peter Saville might have come up with for a New Order album, minus the crazy color coding system. Philip’s wallpaper is a perfect representation of Loveless, simply put, it’s a beautiful mess.

The guys also put some of their thoughts down as to why they created their wallpapers, I’d suggest reading them both, especially Alex’s. He went into crazy detail and gives you so much insight into his production.

Here’s what Alex had to say about his wallpaper:

I love the album, and know it well from repeated listens over the years, and maybe this was a factor in making it hard for me to come up with something that I thought could do it some justice with. Initially I was thinking about the name “isn’t anything” – about nothingness, black-holes and vacuums in space – as well how lush and dreamy MBV sound musically. Perhaps a little bit obvious, but I went with it for a while to see what I came up with. I was playing around with photos of space featuring black-holes, photocopying them repeatedly and scanning them. Some of it looked OK, but not especially interesting or unique. I was also a bit worried that a desktop featuring black-holes and distant galaxies, etc. might look a bit close to default desktop on an off-the-shelf computer.

So I went back to the drawing-board, and was reading up on the album; how and when it was recorded, when it was released, etc. Something that has always jumped out to me about MBV’s music is the duality in it; how two sometimes seemingly opposing elements join together. Kevin Shields describes their music as being “pure noise and pure melody”. Even song-titles on the album like “Soft as Snow (but Warm Inside)”, “I Can See It (but I Can’t Feel It)” and “(When You Wake) You’re Still in a Dream” stress this mix of marrying opposites. I love how they talk about their sound; despite how insanely loud the guitars are, how they try to make them sounds like ghosts of themselves by using reverse reverb:

“The thing is, the sound literally isn’t all there,” Shields explained. “It’s actually the opposite of rock’n'roll. It’s taking all the guts out of it, there’s just the remnants, the outline.” Isn’t Anything’s engineer Dave Anderson later claimed that Shields had got him to erase all the actual playing from the record and keep only the reverse reverb after-image of the chord-strum. The technicalities of how MBV got their unique sound are secrets that a legion of bands scrabbled to work out in the years following Isn’t Anything. What matters–then and now–is the effect on the listener, and why it struck such a resonant chord with audiences at that point in pop history. As Butcher explained to me, “It’s like that bit in the middle of “You Made Me Realise”, where it just levitates. You know it’s there, and you know it’s coming, but when it happens, half the time you forget it’s on. Your mind completely wanders, you forget it, then you remember it.” – Spin Magazine

So with the imagery, I wanted to allude to some kind of a duality as well, and to combine two very different worlds. “Isn’t Anything” was released on the 1st November 1988 – this day also marks Mexican “Day of the Dead” (Día de los Muertos) – a two-day festival when friends and family gather to remember loved-ones who have passed away. Even though my knowledge of the festival is very scant, I thought it could be nice to reference it in some way in the work, especially as we’re now aiming to release our wallpapers around that time (close to when “Loveless” was released as well). During the festival, the dead are honoured with sugar skulls and marigolds, among other things. I love skull imagery, but given that you see it everywhere these days, and that there are countless people with much more skill than me who draw and render amazing images of skulls, I thought I’d turn to margigolds:

“Its flower, the cempasúchil is also called the flor de muertos (“flower of the dead”) in Mexico and is used in the Día de los Muertos celebration every November 2nd. The word cempasúchil (also spelled cempazúchil) comes from the Nahuatl term for the flower zempoalxochitl, literally translated as “twenty flower”. In Thai language it is called DaoRuang, literally translated as “star glittering”. Water infused with the fragrant essential oil of the flower was used to wash corpses inHonduras, and the flower is still commonly planted in cemeteries.”

I love that the Thai translation of their name for the flower is “star glittering”. A lovely way to talk about MBV’s music too I suppose. I was thinking back to the initial imagery of space, and tying that back into it. I picked up a beautiful (and amazingly cheap) old French lithograph of a marigold off eBay, along with an old National Geographic space-themed issue from 1983, and set about making a collage. This is the result…

My incredibly-long winded explanation aside; it’s a collage of flowers and stars that I hope in some way captures the spirit and feel of an album I love.

And here’s what Philip said about his wallpaper:

It’s funny because my process of making the wallpaper ended up feeling a little like the making of Loveless itself. The album was considered to be a really difficult album to make and it took the band almost two-years to record it. They ended up working in something like nineteen different studios and almost bankrupted their label in doing so. Fortunately, my process never got that out of hand, but it certainly was a challenge. I drew up so many different ideas for it and each time I’d realize that the album’s cover captured everything I wanted to say about the album already.

What I really like about Loveless is it’s combination of dark and trashy guitar with it’s sweet and poppy vocals; the “pure noise and pure melody”. I think the band visualized that duality perfectly on the cover with their combination of wild and rough photography and that perfectly sweet shade of pink. Hopefully my wallpaper plays a similar tribute to the terrific duality of the band!