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Pop Culture
Feb 18, 2013, 09:17AM

Anything Could Happen

A 2012 Quietus interview with My Bloody Valentine leader Kevin Shields vs. a 2013 The Millions interview with fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin.

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S. Balcomb

Kevin Shields: Anything could happen.

Ursula K. Le Guin: You just suggest something.

KS: So people's imaginations are dragged into the equation. 

UKLG: It becomes an obsessive game.

KS: Yeah. But then you burn out.

UKLG: Out of middle-class guilt, out of human guilt for what we do to each other and everybody else. But you know how it is.

KS: Just crappy house music.

UKLG: I don't know. It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair.

KS: That's what happens when you don't sleep much.

UKLG: Well, I never thought of it that way because I’ve only lived under late capitalism. 

KS: Yeah, well, it definitely wasn't about drugs. 

UKLG: I had some problems with that in my teens. 

KS: I felt like I was on holiday. I was just really meticulously scratching the top layer off this scratchplate with a razorblade. Unbelievable.

UKLG: Well, pure happiness is such an endangered thing. 

KS: So if you let go it would practically fall off.

UKLG: Human nature is whatever human nature is.

KS: A darker sound.

UKLG: These people just don't have a chance.

KS: Their production values, their attitudes, everything they were doing. 

UKLG: I always compare it to the Baroque music period, where they’re all borrowing from each other like crazy and they’re all building the same house.

KS: They fight with each other.

UKLG: They draw islands or maps or places with the roads and the cities and the marshes and mountains and so on. 

KS: There were no pitch wheels or anything, just up and down buttons which we sat there pressing frantically.

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