Study 144: Shoegaze history & slackers music: Essential guide to 1984-1994 rock

Simon Reynolds's Still In A Dream returns to the shoegaze and slacker era, 1984-1994, a movement built more than almost any other on specific machines: Fender offset guitars, banks of effects pedals, and studio methods so laborious that My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is rumoured to have nearly bankrupted Creation Records. OAC reads that sound as Material Singularity, an aesthetic inseparable from its physical apparatus and from the labor density compressed into it. The contemporary revival, circulating as a reverb preset and a hazy fifteen-second filter, is analysed as the Hollowed Object: the