Part I. Twilight
Shoegaze is a vertical experience.
Not horizontal like rock, not frontal like punk.
Vertical. Rising and descending at the same time.
It is music for twilight.
Not night.
Not day.
Twilight, carrying the hope of a beautiful sunrise.
I was lying on the bed in my room. Over-ear headphones on, the light still burning. The walls were yellow with a shade of orange, and the ceiling was navy blue, like a night sky without stars. Day and night at once. When I closed my eyes, the colours disappeared. Only the sound remained.
The first track that truly stopped me was Slowdive. It was 2010. I did not yet know that adulthood was beginning. I knew only that something inside me had shifted.
The vocal was hidden, as though it had no wish to become the centre. It did not lead. It hovered above guitars that spread wide without sharp edges. Reverb took the outline away from every sound. Nothing was unambiguous.
Two voices, often almost in unison, created the impression of a doubled presence, as if a single melodic line could not contain everything that needed to be said.
And the guitars, the most important part for me, were neither riff nor declaration. They were space. I had already lived through my brief teenage guitar episode, so I heard more than chords. I heard texture. I heard the string trembling beneath someone's fingers, even though those fingers were not mine.
That was when the atlas began. Not a geographical one. An atlas inside me. Islands I had never visited and never would. Places without names, borders or a map.
Shoegaze did not draw outlines. It dissolved them.
The absence of outlines made me feel safe. Not because I could hide, but because nothing was final. Borders were dissolving, so I did not have to make myself fit inside them.
Shoegaze did not let me become somebody else. It let me be myself, only less sharply drawn, less firmly defined. Unreal, perhaps, but never false.
That sense of unreality was not an escape from the world. It was suspension above it. Transcendence not as religion or promise, but as movement upward, inward, into the space that is always turning somewhere above our heads and is rarely allowed to come so close.
When I truly heard Slowdive for the first time, I felt that space descend. It did not change the world. It changed my distance from it.
Comments
0