I was actually skeptical about this film when I saw the trailer and crowdfunding campaign. I had the usual worry of what they would cover in the film and what they would leave out. Some of the talking heads in the trailer were not really of this scene (a bunch of Americans!), so I was ready to yawn and roll eyes. But luckily they were people inspired by UK noise, that although more well-known than the shoegazers themselves, were there as supporting cast rather than the leads. Its quite surreal having massive pop-stars like Robert Smith talking about this much smaller music from a listener's point of view.So its a vague scene for starters. I mean, where do we say "noise" started? Well, I think its OK to draw the line somewhere and just say it was Britain in 1980. Of course we know about the Velvet Underground and earlier - but this really is about "shoegaze" music (in the late 80s - early 90s), which openly revived the kinds of texture The Velvets and others explored in industrial music, but sometimes with new technology.So the lead players are really The Cocteau Twins, Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Three hugely influential pillars of popular rock music that didn't really sell a lot of music. What this film does best is just let the musicians, engineers and studio heads speak for themselves. And what you get is not every piece of the sprawling puzzle (snobs wake-up, its impossible to explain everything about a decade of fuzzy music in one film) but a great overview of how the musicians felt about what they were doing and who influenced them. This is supported by bigger known American artists who sight these groups as influential to them.The film doesn't have the structure and production value of something like a slick authorised Rolling Stones documentary - but thank goodness it doesn't. This was obviously a labor of love and the filmmakers obviously cared about the subject or all the significant artists wouldn't have contributed to it. A Rolling Stones (or any other big group) documentary is an authorised product these days, which means they get to cut out anything embarrassing and basically create a piece of advertising/propaganda to keep the legacy (business) going. Watch a John Lennon documentary and Yoko as the head of the Lennon estate will make sure you never know about John's previous wife.This is definitely worth seeking out and surprisingly good.

BEAUTIFUL NOISE is a documentary about shoegazing, the 1980s/early 1990s genre of pop music that emphasized guitar flange and vocals buried in the mix. Though Eric Green began work on the documentary in 2005, it was only released in 2014 after crowdfunding could help secure rights to the huge amount of music used in it.The documentary mainly consists of presentations of the most prominent bands in this scene: Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Pale Saints, Lush, and Medicine. The first three get the most time dedicated to them, while the rest are covered more briefly. Their stories are told through a mix of archive footage and recent interviews of the band members. To show the wider impact of these musicians, there are also interviews with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, Robert Smith of The Cure, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Adam Franklin of Swervedriver, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russell, Ulrich Schrauss, Rob Dickinson of Catherine Wheel, and Creation label head Alan McGee.The documentary then moves on to short bits on various aspects of the scene in general: experimentation, the predominance of female vocals, the image of shoegazers are shy, uncertain performers, their rocky reception in the press, "the scene that celebrates itself", and finally the collapse of the shoegazing scene due to changing economics or bands' internal squabbles. The document ends with a mention of the "resurgence" of the shoegazing aesthetic in new post-millennium bands like M83 or A Place to Bury Strangers and the reunion of some of the classic bands.The downside of this format is that while it provides a great deal of exclusive live footage and interviews to thrill fans of this music, it offers no straightforward narration that would inform viewers unfamiliar with this movement in musical history. Also, to fit into a 85-minute format, material naturally had to be cut, but it is disappointing how the perennially overlooked band AR Kane is so prominently mentioned at the start of the documentary, but we get only two brief shots of band member Alex Ayuli.

I was ridiculously excited for this documentary, which features some of my all-time favorite bands. I bought the blu-ray (as I didn't know how else to see it) and turned it on feeling giddy as a fervert young chappy. And very soon it became disappointingly clear that this was not the documentary I'd been waiting for.If you are familiar with these bands you will learn nothing new and most of the interviews are cheek-slappingly banal. And even if they weren't, the cinematography is distractingly subpar: bad lighting, often out of focus, low definition. Why in the heavens is there a blu-ray edition if nothing was shot on HD!? Crappy SD footage will not look better on a blu-ray, but it sure costs more to the excited fans/suckers! I essentially felt that I would have derived a richer experience surfing YouTube watching old interviews and live performances of the bands, as I'm sure I could find higher quality and more interesting clips that weren't either far too brief or featured for way too long.And for a documentary about the shoegaze movement, the word "shoegaze" is never uttered, just "this period" and "these bands." I essentially felt more informed than the filmmakers.I feel that the shoegaze movement was one of the most fascinating periods of music history and deeply deserves a fresh, beautiful, illuminating documentary. Sadly, this is not it.

After months of anticipation, BN is finally available for download! As a long-time fan of the early dream pop, and having read all the great comments on Facebook, I had pretty high expectations for this film. Unfortunately, the film is bit of a let-down from my perspective. I had hoped for an in-depth look into the music and history. (I.e. cultural landscape, influences, studio techniques etc.), but instead, the film is comprised mostly of light interviews and a bit of old footage. Considering this thing was 10 years in the making, the filmmaker seems to have done very little research, or made any attempt to build a connection with the artists. I appreciate the ambitions here to cover a big spectrum of the music, but spending 2-5 minutes on each band definitely left me wanting more. He would have been better off focusing on one or two artists, like last year's "Made of Stone", which I enjoyed very much. The other issue I have with this film is the shallow interviewing. It seems that everyone who appears in the film was asked the same questions: When did you first hear about the band, and why do you like them? I would have learnt more if the artists were asked about their favourite food and colour :) This film is worth a viewing for anyone new to the genre, but any hard-core fan like myself will already be well familiar with the band chronology, and the music's dreamy, ethereal quality :/