Pitchfork: What was the process for this new all-analog Loveless remaster?

Kevin Shields: It’s been something I’ve wanted to do forever. Loveless was recorded on analog tape, and we mixed to analog tape, but we did all of the post-production, all of the editing, and all of that stuff that makes it Loveless—the way it all flows—in the digital domain. Loveless is made up of all the essential songs and bits that link them together, and we discovered that it all existed essentially on tape. So the challenge was to figure out a way of putting it back together again, including the songs that were manipulated digitally, but in the analog domain.

Traditionally with analog tapes, if you want to edit something together, you’ve got to basically find the spot by rocking the tape back and forth and splicing it and sticking the two pieces of tape together. But the crossfades that we had on Loveless were technically impossible to do in the analog domain because a lot of them were very short, yet way too long to actually recreate with normal editing techniques.

So, to get the things fading between themselves in that seamless way that they did in the digital domain, we had to figure out new ways of doing edits. We couldn’t use an edit block, which is this metal thing with various angles on it, because the edit block positions weren’t anywhere near what we needed to achieve. So we were actually building our own edit blocks. We had an engineer called Andy Savours who basically spent a year of his life working out these mathematical formulas and measurements on how to do this. Eventually, things started to work.

We came up with these really crazy edits that looked like they were going to fall apart—when we played them in the mastering places, the guys there were looking at them just thinking, How is this tape even sticking together? Literally. Physically. What are the physical limits of what you can do with a tape? When it comes to taking master tapes and doing crazy edits on that, I think we’ve done things that nobody’s done.

Obviously a lot of work went into this project, but at the end of the day what is the result? Do you feel like people will think this is the best sounding version of Loveless that they’ve heard?

Some people, for sure. Absolutely. Compared to most people, I’m a real analog head. You can achieve greatness in the analog domain, but “perfection”—that’s not part of the language. You’re dealing with a lot of factors: the sound of the tape machine mixed in with the sound of the desk mixed in with the sound of the actual cutting machine. I feel more like someone dealing with wild animals. You get satisfaction, but not perfection.

When I created the original CD version of Loveless, I thought there was something “correct” about it that I could never make better, and that digital was quite true to the shape of the music. It took me quite a few years to start to see through that and realize the value of analog. That happened to me in the ’90s, when I started to do a lot of remixes from digital files. I was feeling like I was going deaf, so I started asking people to put things on two-inch tape for remixes because I found that it was easier to work on. It just sounded better.

We did m b v as analog as possible, but only a very small amount of mastering studios can actually transfer tape without going through a digital process. The tape machine that plays it needs to have a preview head, which feeds the computer and the cutting machine and tells it how far the grooves should be away from each other so it can get maximum level on the disc. So essentially, even if you bring tape to a mastering studio, most records will still have to go through a digital stage.