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.I don’t know why, but I kept having this impression ofbloody animals and cows all the time—really big, weird faceswith big brown eyes.But not like aliens.”82“By and large most of the lyrics come from, not so much the hypnagogic half-awake half-asleep state, but more the slightlytrancey state that you’re in when you’re writing songs,” he(sort of) explains.“And that does involve being quite tired.Most tunes I write it’s really late at night, or if it’s in the studio it’s after a few weeks of being in the studio not really getting good sleep.And being in a room full of electronicequipment I find quite mind altering as well, somehow.Idon’t know why, but I feel very affected by a lot ofelectricity.And that’s why for me the record making processinvolves a lot of getting away from the studio.Being in therefor a long time it’s kind of like, I’m going off; I’m losingreality,day by day, slightly.Do you know what I mean?”Of course, similar experiments were conducted by suchspiritual-minded aesthetes as the Surrealist-associated Grand Jeu group headed by Rene Daumal in the 30s.Kevin isn’t familiar with them in particular, and claims to only haveglanced through one book on Surrealism, but he obviouslytook away a lot from it.“Surrealism wasn’t coming from asocial perspective, by taking social things and makingjuxtapositions of them,” he says.“It was coming from innerinformation, it was coming from in the inner worlds, thosecombinations of imagery and situations are natural.Theyweren’t superficial; it was deep, and that’s why it has a deepresonance.”I ask Kevin if he’s aware of the Dream Machine experimentsthat Brion Gysin and William S.Burroughs got into in the60s.“Actually, that’s funny,” he says.“I was thinking aboutthat the other day, because we played this gig with PrimalScream in France, at a festival in Rennes.The guy who does83our lights has the tendency to make the strobes really extreme sometimes.I closed my eyes, and whatever frequency it was,I suddenly was totally tripping, and I was going into innerspace, right there on stage, and it was really cool, and then he stopped the light and it was just that particular frequency.Usually it’s just, you know, the strobe effect where you seestuff in front of your eyes when you close them and it’s really interesting.But this time it immediately kicked in toencourage the theta brainwaves.It’s probablyabout time that I found out what those frequencies are and dosomething with that, just for the hell of it”There are kits on the Internet where you can assemble yourown Dream Machine, though if you want to really trip outfrom simply watching the alternation of bright light, take anychance you ever get to see Tony Conrad’s The Flickerprojected in a theatre (assuming you do not have a heartcondition or suffer from seizures).For the post- Loveless tour, the band wanted some sort of visual element that matched themusic, but they’d stopped receiving any funding fromCreation and were broke.Thankfully, Angus Cameron, theguy who shot the cover and videos for the album, had a seriesof short abstract loops that the group were able to pick up onthe cheap.“It was quite haphazard in a way,” says Shields,“the way it came together, but [it worked].The statement forthe tour was primarily the energy, using the force of volumeto make audiences pay attention whether they wanted to ornot And it was the same with the visuals, which force peopleto pay attention, but not really.You know [with the abstractlooping] it was a constant sameness in a way, like a modernversion of the psychedelic thing in a way [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]