Shoegaze and the relationship to noise music is a connection that clarifies a lot about both genres.

Noise music — in the tradition of Merzbow, Borbetomagus, early Wolf Eyes — uses sound that has been pushed past the threshold of conventional musical organization into something that is experiential rather than structural. You're not following melodies or rhythms; you're inhabiting a sonic environment that operates outside the categories of conventional music.

Shoegaze is noise music that has retained structural anchors — melody, rhythm, song form — while incorporating noise aesthetics. The feedback and distortion that would be noise music if taken to their logical extreme are in shoegaze being held in a tension with conventional song structure. The noise element is there but it's integrated into something that has enough conventional music DNA to be accessible.

This is why shoegaze can be so powerful for listeners who wouldn't describe themselves as noise music fans. The noise aesthetics are doing real work but they're not taking you all the way to a place where most listeners won't go.