You Made Me Realise | Full Band Cover | My Bloody Valentine

Well before I got into bands like Rush and Porcupine Tree, I was knee deep into shoegaze music from the likes of ‪@jesusandmarychainofficial‬ , ‪@slowdiveband‬ , and of course ‪@mbvofficial‬. These bands were the sound of my late high school and early college years. Although You Made Me Realise came right before My Bloody Valentine (Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Debbie Googe, Colm Ó Cíosóig) perfected their signature sound in Loveless, their combination of crushing heaviness with androgynous vocals was very apparent, and the song instantly conjures memories of my late teens every time I listen to it.

A big reason I wanted to cover this tune was that I wanted to hear how it would sound with modern production, as MBV have no official live videos and concert bootlegs are barely listenable. In scrutinizing the song, I identified two challenging elements I needed to pay attention to: the pitch-bending in the guitars, and the noise holocaust in the middle.

For the first element, I initially sought out a guitar with a tremolo bar, but after realizing what a hassle it would be to either acquire one or modify my existing guitars, I decided to do the pitch bending in post production. I listened very closely to the studio version and some concert recordings to identify where Shields would lean into the tremolo bar and replicated that effect with a simple pitch plugin.

The noise holocaust was a learning experience on how to mess with different kinds of distortion and reverse reverb. I wound up creating ten different tracks, mostly guitars and a few synthesizers, ran them through a variety of distortion and reverb effects, and layered them in a manner where each track would ebb and flow. I've never been to an MBV concert and therefore don't know what this part of the song actually sounds like in person (live recordings are way too distorted), so I hope my experimentation at least captures the spirit of the original. I've also kept it to a relatively brief two minutes; about triple the length of the studio version, but shorter than the insane half hour that the live version has been known to go on for.

Another challenge that arose at the end was utilizing ‪@KaiberAI‬ for the video. I wanted to do something visually interesting, and this video is the first time I've made extensive use of their transform feature. The issue I found was that unless your footage is immaculately shot with perfect lighting (which my zero budget productions are clearly not), the AI will produce a variety of unexpected results. I did my best to alleviate these by processing the video through the AI using three different visual styles and layered them together, but ultimately had to accept the current limitations of this kind of AI and chalk it up as a valuable, if imperfect, creative experiment.

Check out the Gothik Serpent discography: https://gothikserpent.bandcamp.com/

Kerwin Tsang - Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Programming, Mixing, Mastering, Video
Tau Bowyer - Drums, Camera
Olivia Jean Kong - Vocals

Additional personnel:
Don Tan - Camera