The Night I Decided Not to Measure — Going to a My Bloody Valentine Show: A Night Built on High Sound Pressure —

My Bloody Valentine is a band whose music is generally classified as shoegaze.
Put simply, their sound is defined by an overwhelming wall of noise created by layering multiple guitar textures on top of one another.
At some of their shows, it is even said that sound pressure levels can approach 130 dB (which is probably an exaggeration).
Still, I’ve long had a personal urge to verify—numerically—just how much sound pressure they are actually producing.

That day, I was coming straight from a job site.
In my work bag was a Brüel & Kjær Type 2250—
the sound level meter I normally use in my work.
That said, I left it in a locker before entering the venue.

A brief aside:
the Brüel & Kjær Type 2250 is a sound level meter widely regarded as a benchmark of reliability in the world of acoustic measurement—in short, a highly precise noise measurement instrument.
It’s expensive equipment, not something most people casually carry around,
but for me, it’s one of the essential tools I bring whenever I head to a site.
In other words, I had brought it with me that day, but had already decided not to use it.
(Of course, I’m fully aware that bringing such equipment into a live venue without permission is strictly prohibited.)

As I closed the locker door,
I quietly told myself, “It’s better not to measure today.”

The show was at Tokyo Garden Theater in Japan.
It’s a large venue, and the influence of the PA system is strongly felt.

A little after the scheduled 7:00 p.m. start time, the long-awaited performance began.
I was standing near the center of the arena floor.
The moment the first sound rang out, words like “loud” or “noisy” lost their meaning.
The sound should have been coming from the front, yet before I knew it, I felt as though I was standing inside the sound itself.
My sense of direction and distance quietly dissolved.

In my professional life, I deal with noise every day.
I work with anechoic and semi-anechoic chambers, designing measurement environments and implementing real-world noise control—suppressing reflections and ambient sound to create a sound field that can be “measured correctly.”
Sound must be organized, reproducible, and explainable.

But the sound unfolding in front of me was the complete opposite.
By any reasonable definition, it contained elements of noise.
In my work, noise has always been something I confront as an enemy.
And yet, unmistakably, what I was hearing functioned as music.
That contradiction left me bewildered—and deeply drawn in.

On stage, Kevin Shields stood in his familiar posture, guitar in hand.
At one point, the texture of the sound shifted ever so slightly.
I’ll refrain from naming the song—it would be beside the point.
The volume didn’t drop.
Instead, the tension of the sound loosened just a fraction.
It was clearly a change caused by a piece of equipment misbehaving.

And yet, strangely enough, the music didn’t fall apart—not even in that moment.
If anything, the very fact that it was “playing on the edge of collapse” felt like it was functioning as the band’s music.

I’m a guitarist myself.
I know firsthand how unstable and difficult to control excessively distorted tones can be.
I know why sounds with heavily scooped midrange don’t simply lose their presence.
These are things I understand not through theory, but through my body.

That’s precisely why I could tell this sound wasn’t accidental.
It was built upon a deliberate sense of precariousness.

The stage was bathed in magenta light—my favorite color.
Magenta also happens to be SONORA’s corporate color.
Out of habit, I caught myself thinking,
“If this sound were visualized, it would probably be painted over entirely in warning colors.”
But I soon let that thought go as well.

That night, I wasn’t going to measure anything.
I wasn’t going to evaluate.
I was simply going to experience the sound.

I let myself sink into the noise—not as an acoustics professional, but as a single listener.
And because I had left the measurement equipment in the locker, there were sounds I could hear that I otherwise wouldn’t have.
With that lingering sensation, I left the venue behind.

Next time, I’d like to step back and take a more explanatory approach:
what shoegaze really is,
and why this kind of music manages to hold together acoustically at all.

— To be continued in Part 2 —