I saw My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse in San Francisco last night.  What an experience.  It was insane.  It was LOUD! The loudest show I’ve ever been to.  So loud I felt physically assaulted by the sound waves.  So loud that after jamming my wax ear plugs deeper and deeper into my ear all night I pulled out a little replica of my cochlea.  So loud that the only way to communicate with the friends standing right next to me was via text message.   And even then we had to use an array of hand signals for ‘look at phone’ because our bodies were buzzing so violently from the sound waves we couldn’t feel our phones vibrate.

It was so loud that I went into a panic-induced sweat for the first half of the 20 minute assault of feedback, noise and distortion during the song ‘You Made Me Realise’.  I hesitate to use the word song here.  Perhaps musical composition or social experiment would be more fitting.  It was interesting to look around and see how people dealt with it.  Some clutched their ears in horror, others looked ecstatic and peaceful.  I did notice much of the crowed seemed to have their heads bowed.  I guess these were the ‘shoegazers’.