You feel your temples compress.
You can’t ungrit your teeth.
Your eyeballs are almost certainly going to pop out of their sockets.
You seem to have forgotten how to breathe.
You’re listening to nosebleed shoegaze.
***
It was “Muffin 57” that woke me up to nosebleed shoegaze as a subgenre. While All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors are in no way at at the origin, nor are the rest of their tracks definitive of the genre, “Muffin 57” is, to me, one of the most faithful representatives of the sound. If you’re looking to dip your toes into a genre that you hadn’t heard of 30 seconds ago (mostly because I just invented it), “Muffin 57” is a great point d’entrée.
There is no field guide to nosebleed shoegaze, no checklist you can consult to confirm or deny whether a track you encounter in the wild does indeed fall under the genre. How do you articulate the feeling of being trapped in a vacuum chamber? Drowning in an incomprehensibly large water body feels different to asphyxiating in outer space. It’s all very subjective.
“Muffin 57” manages this by juxtaposing lazy, almost filamentous1 vocals filtering through dirty, grainy and very pushy guitars. An undercurrent of 90s analog ‘noise’ means that there is never a moment of silence, just the ever-present threat of more noise – heavy noise, light noise, loud noise, muted noise.
I’m not really sure if All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors set out with the intention of making us feel like we’re drowning, but let’s turn to loveliescrushing and astrobrite for a lesson on how to be deliberate. The OGs of nosebleed shoegaze (both Scott Cortez projects), every track is constructed with the very clear goal of dropping the listener upside down into a vat of slime and watching them struggle to orient themselves in the sheer expanse of sound swallowing them – where are we in this album? did we just begin? are we nearly at the end? how long have I been staring at this wall? what year is it? do any of us really exist?
The secret seems to be an absolutely lack of percussion or any instrumentation that could give the listener even the faintest hint of structure. Listening to bloweyelashwish, space and time become nothing more than social constructs and breathing just an inconvenient obligation. The result is a formless, endless, and strangely oxymoronic sound void that leaves you feeling like you’re hurtling endlessly towards the ocean floor.
If LLC and AB are the frightening vastness of water, Stella Luna is the calm infinity of space. Years ahead of their time with a single 4-track EP to their name, it’s an absolute travesty that 2002 was the first and last time we heard anything from them. They should have been huge.
We could spent hours deconstructing the technicalities of the rig Stella Luna used on Stargazer, but an analysis of the details is an injustice to a work of art that should be primarily be felt. We could spend our time examining the brushstrokes that make up each of Starry Night’s stars (and we do), but isn’t the real beauty in stepping back and drinking in the whole canvas ?
And so, on Stargazer, you really are among the stars (and we don’t care how they were made) – they appear near us, blinding us with their light while never lighting up the airless space around us. They’re the galaxies we leave behind and the nebulas we swim through. We measure our words when we speak, and even when we think, constantly aware of the limited resources in limitless space. And when we do speak, our words are voiceless against the noise of the stars. 2
You’d expect nosebleed shoegaze to have seen a renaissance during shoegaze wave V3 – the era we’re currently in. Yet it appears to have largely been ignored by the new school who are instead pivoting almost universally towards Slowdive or Whirr as primary influences. pinkshinyultrablast’s Happy Songs for Happy Zombies might be the last release we’ll ever have that embodies the spirit of the sound. Despite the homage to astrobrite in their name, it’s an aesthetic they seem to have left behind following the release of their first full length which reveals a lot more ‘structure’ – it’s not a bad thing, it’s just not giving sinus infection vibes. But at the time of its release, Happy Songs… reinterpretation of the nosebleed aesthetic stood out amidst what was already an era of shoegaze opulence.
Has there since been a band or artist brave enough to run amok with the very idea of shoegaze? Stretching, distorting and manipulating sound to see how far we can go before we reach the frontier between music and physical sensation? It may be an acquired taste and one that even I can only take in small doses, but it’s one of the purest incarnations of shoegaze as art I can think of. Bring back the fearless age of experimentation, bring back the mad art-scientists ahead of their time, bring back music as a corporal experience – bring back the nosebleeds.