We may never know who created the ocean, but I can tell you who does the soundtrack..
Scott Cortez (lovesliescrushing/astrobrite/star/etc.)
My favorite guitarist of all time.
Lovesliescrushing Bio:
For more than two decades or so, Scott Cortez has been wrangling, warping, and coaxing all manner of gossamery textures from his guitars and effects pedals and recording them onto his trusty Tascam 4-track. He began experimenting with loops and sound in high school and made textural ambient guitar music. Expanding on an idea that had first been embraced by mbv and eno, he has made a career out of heavily treated guitar drones and noises. one of the largest misconceptions about lovesliescrushing concerns their music itself, people mistakenly assume that they use keyboards or synthesizers to create their otherworldly sound, the music is created with just voice and guitar. cortez uses a combination of techniques, both lo-fi and digital, to create a unique sonic palette. he is fond of mutating the guitar till it is barely recognizeable, regarding it as a mere tone generator. he also utilizes various methods and materials for preparing the guitar. scott has been known to abuse his guitars with chopsticks, rubberbands, nails, knives, forks, vibrators, paintbrushes, or metal rulers to bow strings, anything to change the timbral quality. lovesliescrushing formed in the spring of 91 and began playing shows in michigan. in the spring of 92 they moved to tucson and finished bloweyelashwish. the cassette version of bloweyelashwish came out in 93 on projekt, but that was a remix from the earlier self released version from the summer of 92. noise bliss, culled from a 4 track. Lovesliescrushing occupies that musical terrain that combines the like of My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel, the Cocteau Twins, eno, MAIN, and zoviet france. Scott Cortez is now playing noise pop guitar for STAR.
Hello, how are you?
(He left this blank, we'll assume he's ok..)
What are you currently listening to?
Some African music, very lovely rhythms.
You recently played a show in Lima, Peru. What is the music scene like there?
Lima was amazing. The scene? Well they take it very seriously, I was treated like a superstar. They do it right there. It is about the music for them, some scenes are just about being seen. Not Lima. It reminds me of Japan. they are really serious about their music too.
Out of all your many projects (Loveliescrushing/Astrobrite/Star/etc.) which album are you most proud of?
Chorus. It is the most 'Lovesliescrushing' album I have ever done, and it took forever to make. Also, Robin Guthrie thought it was amazing so that about does it for me. When your hero listens to your work and says it is cool, then that is what I am most proud of. I mean, he was my hero when I was a teen, so his compliment was extremely flattering.
On “Chorus” you decided to drop some of the guitar sounds and focus mainly on vocals. Yet the signature “aqueous” ambience that makes your writing style so unique remains the same. Can you explain the writing process for this album? How did you come up with the idea?
I think I wanted to distance myself from all the lazy reviews that i had received for the past few decades. reviewers saying we were a goth MBV. That is the dumbest thing I have ever read. Why would I want to listen to that? I love My Bloody Valentine but we have a different writing/style approach, we are super lo-fi as well. I mean Lovesliescrushing/Astrobrite albums were done on 4 track recorders, we never did anything in a studio setting. There are some similar aesthetics, but we are more smeared out, loose, 'aqueous' as you say. I wanted to highlight the process of our songwriting style, the form, so I had to get rid of our main signature element which was processed guitar. I mean entirely drop it. not just part of it. there is no guitar on 'Chorus' at all. it is all voice. I sang the low bassy parts and most of the drones. Melissa took care of the high end. So I wanted to do an LLC sounding album without using typical LLC methods. What remains is our writing style, nothing else can remain.
No guitar crutch to hide behind, no buried vocals when the whole piece is acapella. The limitation of just using voice liberated us, gave us the freedom to find our 'voice', forgive the pun. I had nothing to reference but ourselves.
So now I think people will be hard pressed to make any comparison to MBV. I welcome the comparison to Eno and 'Music For Airports'. Chorus was begun in 2001. The process was gruelling and labor intensive. Have to get the melodies and the song structure and then work on the tonal timbral quality of the voice to make it as alien as it sounds on Chorus. This was done with EQ and compression, not some crazy plug in. First I had Melissa sing a long song. Then I took that song apart vowel by vowel, phoneme by phoneme and put it back together. It was like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle and the collaging it into a new form. This was all done with a cut and paste tool. No Ableton, no keyboard controller, no sequencer, every vocal part is placed there by hand. So I guess, I am proud of the fact that this experiment worked. I proposed the theory but it could have failed. Now chorus is going to be released in America by one of my favorite labels, 12k/LINE.
Will “Girl Echo Suns Veils”, the LLC box set, ever see the light of day?
All the art is finished. I had to do 300 covers by hand for the deluxe version and mail them months ago. So it is up to the label to release now. They are planning on a fall release. They are holding off because it is going to be expensive. I don't blame them, the deluxe version comes in a wooden box. But it will come out this year.
Out of all the Shoegaze/“Nu-Gaze”/Dream Pop bands out there, who is you favorite? Did they influence you a lot?
I like MBV, Lush, Swirlies, FSA. As for Nu-Gaze bands Asobi Seksu, M83, Ulrich Schnauss, Guitar, Jesu, Broadrick, Pyramids. I wasn't influenced by any of the Nu-Gaze bands because I was there when the whole Shoegaze thing was happening back in the late 80's. I was influenced by Eno, Cocteau Twins, MBV, John Cage. mostly John Cage's book 'Silence'. I was a 4AD whore.
Can we ever expect a full US tour for Lovesliescrushing?
Maybe, but it is not a major concern. There will probably be a Scott Cortez ambient guitar tour first.
Are you living your dream?
Been reading about physics, god and turing machines simulating realities, so we might be living in a dream right now. So yes. Although I wish I wasn't so obscure and broke. Hope to change that soon by releasing all the ambient guitar backlog from 87 to the present.
(He left this blank, we'll assume he's ok..)
What are you currently listening to?
Some African music, very lovely rhythms.
You recently played a show in Lima, Peru. What is the music scene like there?
Lima was amazing. The scene? Well they take it very seriously, I was treated like a superstar. They do it right there. It is about the music for them, some scenes are just about being seen. Not Lima. It reminds me of Japan. they are really serious about their music too.
Out of all your many projects (Loveliescrushing/Astrobrite/Star/etc.) which album are you most proud of?
Chorus. It is the most 'Lovesliescrushing' album I have ever done, and it took forever to make. Also, Robin Guthrie thought it was amazing so that about does it for me. When your hero listens to your work and says it is cool, then that is what I am most proud of. I mean, he was my hero when I was a teen, so his compliment was extremely flattering.
On “Chorus” you decided to drop some of the guitar sounds and focus mainly on vocals. Yet the signature “aqueous” ambience that makes your writing style so unique remains the same. Can you explain the writing process for this album? How did you come up with the idea?
I think I wanted to distance myself from all the lazy reviews that i had received for the past few decades. reviewers saying we were a goth MBV. That is the dumbest thing I have ever read. Why would I want to listen to that? I love My Bloody Valentine but we have a different writing/style approach, we are super lo-fi as well. I mean Lovesliescrushing/Astrobrite albums were done on 4 track recorders, we never did anything in a studio setting. There are some similar aesthetics, but we are more smeared out, loose, 'aqueous' as you say. I wanted to highlight the process of our songwriting style, the form, so I had to get rid of our main signature element which was processed guitar. I mean entirely drop it. not just part of it. there is no guitar on 'Chorus' at all. it is all voice. I sang the low bassy parts and most of the drones. Melissa took care of the high end. So I wanted to do an LLC sounding album without using typical LLC methods. What remains is our writing style, nothing else can remain.
No guitar crutch to hide behind, no buried vocals when the whole piece is acapella. The limitation of just using voice liberated us, gave us the freedom to find our 'voice', forgive the pun. I had nothing to reference but ourselves.
So now I think people will be hard pressed to make any comparison to MBV. I welcome the comparison to Eno and 'Music For Airports'. Chorus was begun in 2001. The process was gruelling and labor intensive. Have to get the melodies and the song structure and then work on the tonal timbral quality of the voice to make it as alien as it sounds on Chorus. This was done with EQ and compression, not some crazy plug in. First I had Melissa sing a long song. Then I took that song apart vowel by vowel, phoneme by phoneme and put it back together. It was like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle and the collaging it into a new form. This was all done with a cut and paste tool. No Ableton, no keyboard controller, no sequencer, every vocal part is placed there by hand. So I guess, I am proud of the fact that this experiment worked. I proposed the theory but it could have failed. Now chorus is going to be released in America by one of my favorite labels, 12k/LINE.
Will “Girl Echo Suns Veils”, the LLC box set, ever see the light of day?
All the art is finished. I had to do 300 covers by hand for the deluxe version and mail them months ago. So it is up to the label to release now. They are planning on a fall release. They are holding off because it is going to be expensive. I don't blame them, the deluxe version comes in a wooden box. But it will come out this year.
Out of all the Shoegaze/“Nu-Gaze”/Dream Pop bands out there, who is you favorite? Did they influence you a lot?
I like MBV, Lush, Swirlies, FSA. As for Nu-Gaze bands Asobi Seksu, M83, Ulrich Schnauss, Guitar, Jesu, Broadrick, Pyramids. I wasn't influenced by any of the Nu-Gaze bands because I was there when the whole Shoegaze thing was happening back in the late 80's. I was influenced by Eno, Cocteau Twins, MBV, John Cage. mostly John Cage's book 'Silence'. I was a 4AD whore.
Can we ever expect a full US tour for Lovesliescrushing?
Maybe, but it is not a major concern. There will probably be a Scott Cortez ambient guitar tour first.
Are you living your dream?
Been reading about physics, god and turing machines simulating realities, so we might be living in a dream right now. So yes. Although I wish I wasn't so obscure and broke. Hope to change that soon by releasing all the ambient guitar backlog from 87 to the present.
Thanx Scott!
Look for the limited edition Lovesliescrushing box set later this year...can't wait!!!!!
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