At some point a few months back I just started watching whatever cover of “When You Sleep” by My Bloody Valentine the YouTube algorithm served up to me. I don’t remember why I started. I never actively looked for them in the search bar. I just decided to keep clicking on related videos and they kept coming.
It was an interesting exercise: the original is built around an electric wail that cuts through the requisite MBV wall of guitars, the verses have some sunny boy-girl harmonies, it’s textbook shoegaze. Some covers reflect that, especially the studio-recorded versions I found by bands (Beetleflux after a bit of a dream pop fakeout, Mira turns in a stretched out version). Shonen Knife turns it into a 60’s wall-of-sound pop throwback. Many of the covers, though, were instead stripped-down renditions, revealing a wistful little love song under all that racket. A father and daughter doing a little duet on electric guitars. Boys and girls and acoustic guitars. There’s more, of course, writing this I even found covers I hadn’t seen in my first burst. YouTube will always provide more.
One in particular caught my attention not for its overall quality (though it is good) but because it felt like unearthing a relic from a different age.
The artist goes by Gihm. The song itself starts off in an upbeat bluesy/folky manner, with deft fingerpicking, and you might not even catch what song it’s a cover of unless you listen for the hook. About halfway through the arrangement becomes more legibly MBV, a still somewhat folky acoustic take along the lines of others, but more technically accomplished. But check that video quality! Look at the insouciance towards lighting, or even fully showing one’s face. This is the old YouTube; not the oldest YouTube that was grainy uploads of TV commercials and clips because video cameras were still not particularly widespread, but after that, when people with a webcam would just post stuff they thought was neat to share, and there wasn’t much by way of algorithmic curation (remember when the AV Club used to run a feature that was just a chart of top YouTube videos? Even something as basic as that was not visible on the site itself).
You may look at the date on that link and think 2014 wasn’t that long ago, and you’re right, but the video itself is older; this is a reupload, and not by the original creator. Reading that leads one to wonder about a lot of things. The person that reuploaded this liked the first video enough to download it themselves at some point. And looking in the recommended videos you see even more Gihm videos, from a few different uploaders, so it wasn’t just them. And then you read comments like this:
and you realize the man had a following. People speak reverently of these videos, the comments go back years and reference coming across the songs years before that. The video itself only has ~16K views. It all adds up to a strongly but narrowly loved thing, an unexpectedly deep well of affection based around a talented but semi-anonymous musician.
Going through his other covers, I could tell this was someone who was listening to very similar music to me in the 2000’s. Many of the surviving covers are of post-rock songs, things by Explosions in the Sky, Múm, Piano Magic, very much my shit at that time. But also there’s “Tuxedo Hat” by The Octopus Project, a song that I listened to all the time for years, but one that I came across entirely independently of those bands, a triumphant indie rock instrumental rather than a delicate cinematic piece. There’s “For the Damaged Coda” by Blonde Redhead, well before it was featured in Rick and Morty and all of a sudden became by far their most popular song, but probably around the time I was really getting into that album (have you heard “In Particular”? hell of an opener, you’ll listen to everything after). It almost felt eerie to me, but probably just means he and I are basically the same age and had similar music listening habits in college.
These covers show a craft that is absent from many of these sorts of things. The arrangements are, at times, nearly magical. I want to highlight two in particular.
The first is “Water from the Same Source”, by Rachel’s. Rachel’s is a post-rock ensemble of the more classically-inclined bent; strings and piano are the core, with drums and guitar taking a backseat. I played Rachel’s on my college radio show regularly, so once again the selection seems very in my head. The album this song is from was composed to accompany work by the SITI Company dance ensemble; years later I would end up at an afterparty with SITI Company people and briefly meet the Rachel from Rachel’s. The piece is a lovely build from quiet hits on a hi-hat and a single viola eventually blossoming into a full sunburst of multiple stringed instruments in counterpoint with piano. It seems like a tall order to replicate on a single guitar with any fidelity, and yet Gihm pulls it off.
It sounds like the song was written this way. Simply beautiful, I don’t know what else to say.
The other is “bbf3”, by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I have talked at length about this song previously; it is one of my favorites. And GY!BE’s ensemble is even larger than Rachel’s; there are only two string players but there are like 3 guitarists so there is more going on at once. Once more, Gihm still captures something essential to the song.
Near the end of the original everything is hitting at the same time and the drummer is hitting the bass drum every eighth note and when I hear it I can’t help but stomp my foot in time with it and this one guy on an acoustic guitar can still make me stomp my foot in the same way. It’s a magic trick.
At some point Gihm took down his videos and disappeared from the internet. The comments sections of the reuploads contain garbled retellings of what exactly happened next, adding to the videos’ mythical feeling. Tales of a hero from an earlier time, who symbolizes what was lost when the world changed. Like the best heroes, he returned in a time of great need.
In late March 2020, this video was posted. The video quality is much nicer, and the song is an original, but it was him. The relief, the love in the comments is palpable. There was, of course, at lot going on at the time that had people craving comfort. Here, at least, was something, an unexpected moment of grace. Will he return again? Will we recover the lost older videos on some forgotten hard drive? Will his story grow in the retelling? Rather than ponder all of that, perhaps it’s best to just appreciate the music.