qualities sometimes described as 'dreamy' and 'ethereal' by listeners who haven't played the Loveless CD at sufficiently high volume. But such words fail to convey how deeply embodied--how physically attentive, you might say--this music actually is. The sound may be vague, murky, "miasmatic" (Rachel Felder); but the murk is precisely rendered, a concrete, material presence. It surrounds you, envelops you, enfolds itself around you.
[...]
The usual hierarchy of rhythm (at the bottom, the steady foundation), harmony (in the middle, providing the armature) and melody (on the top, with leading lines and hooks) gets broken down, and reshuffled into new combinations. Often it's impossible to determine which of the musicians is producing any given sound, or even which sounds are being played live, and which have been pre-synthesized. In short, all the usual cues are missing; you are brought into forced contact with the gritty texture, the raw materiality of the music,
[...]
There's no longer a clear distinction between inside and outside, or between subject and object. The music has become an extension of your flesh; or better, your flesh is now an extension of the music. Your ears, your eyes, your mouth, your crotch, and your skin are absorbed into this irregularly pulsing, anexact, indefinitely extendible space, this postmodern mega-mall. The great ephemeral skin, Lyotard calls it: a labyrinth, or a hall of mirrors, continually breaking and reforming. It's really strange: the more 'alienating' the situation gets (to use that old-fashioned term), the more intimate it feels. Jameson calls it the "hallucinatory intensity" of "schizophrenic disjunction." Or better, think of it as an overwhelming feeling of proximity, crushing and caressing you at once.
