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You're bathing in a warm stream, soothed by the harmonies of sylvan nymphs, when a wailing ambulance takes a shortcut through the forest and passes six inches from your head. You're floating in the tingly nothingness of deep space and get sucked into a blackhole; Jimi Hendrix is in there too, perfecting feedback. You're in your mother's womb, wearing a Walkman. It's playing the Byrds. Unlikely scenarios, unless you listen to My Bloody Valentine with your eyes closed. In recent years the Irish/British quartet has created a new genre of progressive music, crafting beauty and brutality from a mix of guitars, otherwordly vocals and studio technology. Their music is sensual and disorienting, but most of all stunning; it's impossible to listen to the quadruple-warped effects of their new release, Loveless, without wondering how, exactly, they do that. The partial answer is lots of time and money in the studio. Loveless credits 17 engineers and took more than two years to record. The rest of the answer is Kevin Shields, the band's shy guitarist, vocalist and leader, who discusses music in terms of shapes and layers rather than notes. "A lot of people say they see it colors, too, but I don't," Shields says. "I see it in layers, but they're shaped as opposed to colored." Loveless, then, is full of cones and spheres, from the giddy, slick slopes of "Only Shallow" to the peaks and plateaus of "Soon," a British hit last year. No less than Brian Eno, godfather of the ethereal, told Rolling Stone that "Soon" set "a new standard for pop." A lot of bands are trying to keep up. Since My Bloody Valentine solidified their lineup and signature sound in 1987, a slew of similar groups have followed in their wake, most notably Lush, Ride, Swervedriver, and Pale Saints. The British press has taken to calling their trance-pop style "oceanic rock"; the bands themselves are labeled shoegazers due to their perceived tendency to stand stock-still and look downward while performing. "Well, we have to be lumped in with someone," allows bassist Debbie Googe, who completes the band's lineup with guitarist/vocalist Bilinda Butcher and drummer Colm O'Ciosoig. "I don't take it for much. It's not like I hear Lush and get confused, thinking, 'Is that My Bloody Valentine?'" The warp-like qualities of the band's music have also earned them the label of psychedelic; they played this up at their show last Tuesday at the Blue Note with a montage of abstract filmstrips and colored lights. Although they've worked with Roger Mayer, a man who created effect boxes and distortion pedals for Jimi Hendrix, Shields says they're not trying to re-create the brain expansions of the '60s. Rather, he says, they're redefining them for the present. "A lot of the things they were doing we'll stretch in some way," he says, "although we're not using the same old clichés. But it has a similar overall effect." The two years necessary to craft Loveless, however, proved too much of a drain for Creation, the independent British label for which the band had recorded several EPs and two albums. Although Sire/Warner Bros. acquired American rights to My Bloody Valentine in 1990, the group -- and its pioneering sound -- continued to be identified with Creation. But after Loveless didn't prove to be a cash cow, Creation dropped the band in late 1991. Warner Bros. still supports My Bloody Valentine in this country, but the fact that they're without a label in the U.K. hasn't quite registered with the band yet. "We only found out we'd been dropped by Creation a few weeks before this tour started," says Googe. "We haven't had much of a chance to think about it." Yet the band still packs halls in the U.K. and is starting to in North America, thanks in part to a swell of support from college radio and music magazines. Shields is optimistic they'll keep on, although he's not sure where they'll go from Loveless. "We might do something a bit more earthy and heavy," he says, "or maybe something that's not tied down to anything at all. But we'll never get sick of playing; it'd be like getting bored with walking. It's not like we're all so good at it that we can't trip once in a while." -- Lisa Gidley