When he was still on Radio 1, the broadcaster Steve Wright would invite a character known as Pretentious Music Journalist, played by the impressionist Phil Cornwell, onto his show to critique the latest releases. Rambling and circumlocutory, PMJ would slowly wind towards the punch line, whereupon he would invariably describe the record as a “sonic cathedral”. This was a wry dig at a certain type of self-consciously majestic, grandly atmospheric 1980s indie-rock and the gushing purple prose it elicited from music writers.

More than 20 years later, the phrase “sonic cathedral” has been reclaimed. Born out of a club night started five years ago by Nathaniel Cramp, a music journalist who is affable and enthusiastic but hardly pretentious, Sonic Cathedral is now the name of his record label. Although it nods to the past, it is anything but retro: the imprint’s new compilation, Cathedral Classics Volume One, collects together a dozen young acts, including Maps, M83, School of Seven Bells and Kyte, who offer a contemporary take on the original sound of “shoegazing”. This is another music-press coinage, of early-1990s vintage, ascribed to bands who would stare through a blanket of fringe at the stage during gigs, either because they were, as their critics would have it, too timorous and effete to face a crowd, or because, as the musicians insisted, they were busy concentrating on the FX pedals at their feet.

According to Cramp, “shoegazing” is no longer a term of abuse, and the influence of pioneers such as Slowdive, Ride, Lush and particularly My Bloody Valentine can be heard everywhere: in the narcotic drones of the American “ambient punks” Deerhunter, in the ecclesiastic ambience of Sigur Ros, in MGMT, in the trance-rock of NME’s best new band of 2009, the Big Pink, even in Lily Allen’s last single and the forthcoming album by the Horrors.

“(Allen's) The Fear reminds me of Maps,” says Cramp, “and the Horrors have totally ripped off My Bloody Valentine on their new album — very well, I might add.”

“The influence of shoegazing is remarkably far-reaching,” says Mark Peters of the nouveau gazers — nu-gazers, if you will — Engineers. “The chord changes that The Fear is based around wouldn’t have been possible without Maps or Ulrich Schnauss. Suddenly, there’s a more epic sound to mainstream pop.”

Kevin Shields, the mastermind behind MBV, is widely accepted as shoegazing’s genius, his astonishing wall of sound, use of the studio as instrument and dazzling reinvention of the guitar making him a sort of hydra-headed Spector-Hendrix-Eno figure who used distortion, reverb and delay to invent a disorientating but intoxicating sound for Isn’t Anything (1988) and Loveless (1991).

It was the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation in 2003, which Shields curated, and his decision to re-form MBV for some shows in summer 2008 that put the music back on the agenda. It is now gaining critical mass, with a second collection, compiled by Rob da Bank, just released. It’s a testament to the genre’s new-found respectability that the late-night Radio 1 presenter was able to title his collection Shoegazing 1985-2009. But unlike Cathedral Classics Volume One, da Bank’s compilation traces the music’s history back to the mid-1980s, to the feedback frenzies of the Jesus and Mary Chain and shimmering melodies of Cocteau Twins, through the early-1990s glory days of Chapterhouse and Pale Saints, right up to the present and the computer-enhanced soundscapes of Boards of Canada and Schnauss.

Da Bank explains that he chose 1985, when he was a 12-year-old schoolboy, as his starting point because that was when the Mary Chain issued their fourth single, Just Like Honey, making it arguably the Heartbreak Hotel of the piece, with Cocteau Twins’ 1983 album, Head over Heels, the other possible contender. “I realised from playing a lot of the nu-gazers on my show that there was a story to tell,” he says of his compilation. “I dug around and began to understand where shoegazing came from — from the Mary Chain over here and Dinosaur Jr in America. It’s not the definitive history of the music; it’s more like a mixtape, which I made for my own selfish ends. I chose the bands whose vinyl 12-inches I used to play in my bedroom. Cocteau Twins are there because they’re probably my favourite group of all time. Their sound is so mysterious. It’s got that shimmering, intangible quality.”

Robin Guthrie, then one half of Cocteau Twins along with the vocalist Liz Fraser, is reluctant to reveal too much about his unique sound. “It was just me cutting my teeth in the studio,” he says. “When we made Head over Heels, I was a bolshy teenager trying to re-create the music in my head. I just thought, ‘I can do that!’ ”

Guthrie believes his limitations as a musician forced him to focus on the sound as a whole. “Had I been a better guitarist I might not have looked at the overall sound picture,” he says. “Most producers look at the kick-drum, the bass and the high-hats. I just wanted a tsunami of sound.”

He acknowledges the rise of the solo nu-gazer — musicians such as Schnauss, Maps, M83 and Banjo or Freakout are replacing banks of equipment with laptops — but warns that ease of access and divine inspiration are two different things. “I could buy a guitar pedal for 80 quid today and sound like me! But it’s not the equipment or the number of knobs, it’s how you tweak those knobs. It’s not a cerebral exercise; it’s about feeling and emotion.”

And you still have to deliver good songs. As much as texture and ambience, nugazing is about pop. “I’m interested in taking those textures and putting them in a pop song,” says Benjamin Curtis of School of Seven Bells, who recently packed out London’s Cargo. “I’m never going to make a more beautiful soundscape than To Here Knows When, but what I can do is use those sounds in the context of a pop song.”

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