To Here Knows When

Album: Tremolo (1991)
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Songfacts®:

  • This track, which would later appear on My Bloody Valentine's landmark Loveless album, features lyrics about a lovemaking session backed by a vague percussion sound that adds a sense of unease to the whole affair. According to the band's guitarist Kevin Shields, the mysterious noise is a sample from a low-level catastrophe.

    "That's the main thing that throws people," Shields explained to 20/20. "The sound of a disaster sampled and looped all the way through. It doesn't get past a certain frequency, so it has the sound of a bad cassette, and yet further up there's a tambourine on more like a hi-fi frequency, which you wouldn't get with a bad cassette."

    "The idea was to make you feel that the rhythm had gone off one way or another, while it stayed perfectly in time. Like a train noise which is rhythm and rumble at the same time. But this nice little 10- minute idea took six weeks of work on the rhythms, all of which was scrapped in the end and replaced by this rumble. I find it fascinating the noises that people will accept. Have you ever heard the tube at Old Street? It's the most extraordinary screeching sound. All these City people stand around every day, blotting it lout. If you put them in a room with this noise they'd cover their ears, but because it's escalators they accept it."

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