Voirshn

Lovesliescrushing exists between the worlds of shoegazer and ambience, the ascendant former has once again conceded to the latter. This is pure glitch-bliss.

On their 4th album from 2002, Lovesliescrushing ventured further from the traditional rock elements which characterized prior dream pop bands. Guitarist Scott Cortez and vocalist Melissa Arpin distanced themselves from the genre by rejecting conventional song structures in favor of an intensified drifting sound. In Lovesliescrushing the sound forcefully inaugurated by My Bloody Valentine's classic Loveless gradually approached pure ambience. Nevertheless, their typically warm guitars counterveil the minimal or entirely absent percussion and verse/chorus format. Wordless female vocals drift in and out while 'electronic beats' - guitarnoise softened by semi-lo-fi production - occasionally interrupt a wash of guitar; ranging from the lush vibrant tone of the opening track "glixen" to the subdued quasi-detached feel of the closer "vihygen."

Voirshn is a synthesis of processed ambient gloss and lo-fi grit, creating a digital-analog hybrid that Scott terms 'glitch-bliss.' Songs were compiled from a palette of sonorities extrapolated from a collection of voice and guitars, warped into rumbling subsonics, staticblast hiss, hazy chord clusters, extended infinite tone loops, melody spirals, avian-like whistles, glistening overtones, voices cut-up into splintered fragments, thoughtforms suspended over warm tonesheets like a ghost cloud, indistinct and luminous. Still eschewing bass and drums, rhythmic elements are culled from filtered guitar tones mutated into stroboscopic pulsations and digital dust clickings. Once again guitardamage is wrought upon six-strings, manipulated, deconstructed, reassembled to create bloodrush pulses reminiscent of a softly humming embryonic landscape of digitized lullabies.

2021 CD reissue in 4-panel digipak.